When your mind is able to entertain few possibilities, you’re going to have high confidence. When you understand a lot of things, you’ll have low confidence. Unfortunately, humans are attracted to confidence. As a teenager I thought there was something to young earth creationism, simply because Kent Hovind presented his theories with such confidence.
Rumsfeld famously said that there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. The unknown unknowns, are the things you don’t know that you don’t know about. But the one category he skipped over, are the unknown knowns: The things that you know, but don’t consciously realize that you know, or don’t comprehend why you know them. This is essentially what we refer to as our intuition.
I think in general, we should rely more on our intuition. We intuitively tend to understand what sort of person we’re dealing with, based off body language, voice and physical appearance. You also tend to understand intuitively whether someone is attracted to you, but your conscious mind sees no evidence and thus generally refuses to believe your intuition.
The reason leftists tend to be nicer than right wingers is because they’re more in touch with their intuition. Imagine you’re the fat girl in a group of hot girls. You know you’re fat, they know you’re fat, everyone else knows your raison d’être is to make them look hotter. Under such conditions all these superficial niceties about how you’re “beautiful” start to make more sense.
Hanania wrote a decent article, about how anti-woke is essentially autism. And autism, is largely just an inability to let intuition guide your life: Either you miss the knowledge that comes spontaneously to you without arguments, or you can tap into it, but you can’t get yourself to just trust it, your conscious mind inevitably overrides it.
Culture wars issues are just one minor example where you just need to tap into your intuition more. If you’re ‘sperging about how women call Lizzo beautiful even though she’s fat and they get offended if you tell them they look like Lizzo even though they call her beautiful, it means you’ve drifted too far from human intuition. Everyone else just kind of accepts that women generally don’t say things that are true when they open their mouths, but it’s considered rude to point this out.
There’s a kind of general sense of intuitive understanding of the world that most of humanity just automatically taps into. It actually seems to govern most of their actions in life. This is also why a lot of stuff goes hand in hand. You’re just not going to get a middle-aged Polish construction worker who is vegan or bisexual or has they/them pronouns or any of that stuff. People’s intuitive nature just kind of ends up serving as a code programmed into their brains. It allows them to achieve some incredible things, particularly in the arts, but it interferes in rational thinking.
I think a better way to articulate what I’m trying to convey here may be that most of humanity just doesn’t have the degree of consciousness necessary to allow them to arrive through rational means at conclusions that run counter to their intuition. Reason just generally ends up serving as a tool for them, that vaguely adjusts what they’re intuitively inclined to do. They can’t stray far from the path that comes naturally to them.
You just don’t have a lot of people out there, who are going to say: “Well, as Bush withdrew from Kyoto, I guess I’m not going to have children, as they’ll die in an inferno.” Rather, the girl with green hair in a studio in some big city who already didn’t want to have children finds a convenient reason to justify her choice. And some guy who married his high school sweetheart and now works as a plumber in some small town is just never going to acknowledge that we have a problem, even as CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere eventually reach levels that interfere in our cognitive faculties.
Reason, is the cherry on the cake. It’s decoration. If reason genuinely guides your behavior in life, you’re a very strange person and you’re bound to run into all sorts of difficulties. Please keep in mind, this is true in all domains of life.
When it comes to diet or supplements, you can just tap into your intuition. Your intuition will tell you whether something is right for you. Americans in particular seem to have a very strange relationship to food, they entirely lost touch with their intuitive understanding of food. As a result they end up with bizarre diets like the Keto diet.
For cannabis, the same thing is true. You can look up these charts of “oh this strain has that percentage alpha-pinene”. Well, it doesn’t tell you much. In fact, there are volatile organic compounds barely studied, beyond terpenes, that seem to play a major role. Just use your nose. It tells you what sort of effects it’s going to have on your mind. If it smells like a conifer forest on a damp cold day in autumn, it’s the right strain for me during this time of the year.
Most of the things you do on instinct tend to go better than the ones your conscious mind has to participate in. If you have to think about walking or riding a bicycle, you screw it up. The conscious mind is a bit like having an Elon Musk, a kind of guy who just plunders the company for its money and forces stupid ideas onto the company that don’t work.
Instead of forcing yourself to do things that don’t come naturally to you, I think it’s better to expand the range of things that come naturally to you. This is easiest when you’re a child, but the brain is malleable even as we grow older.
I think the rise of the conscious mind is something that emerged pretty recently, in response to warfare. In warfare, men armed with shields can make tight formations that go against your instincts, but work very well. But in most domains of life, especially in social interaction, the conscious mind just doesn’t really have much of a benefit, relying on your intuition seems to work much better.
A large-scale geo-engineering project to mitigate global warming is moving forward.
They plan to dump millions of tons of iron into the Pacific Ocean next year.
The idea is that it will cause phytoplankton to flourish, which will then consume tons of CO2.
However…
>’Most likely [iron fertilization] will affect something that we don’t really understand yet,’ deep-sea expert Lisa Levin, who was not involved in the ExOIS program told Scientific American.
Scientists worry that OIF could create ‘dead zones’ that allow algal blooms to grow and consume all the oxygen in the water, killing all other living things.<
Couldn’t post the link.
Low status white males need their beef so this is why we need to chop down the Amazon to grow soybeans to feed cattle and dump millions of tons of iron into the ocean to offset the the environmental cost. Normally we have trees but I guess those just aren’t profitable enough. I’m sure all the earth we pillage to get that iron won’t hurt the environment either!
Interesting post, it reminded me a lot of one of your old articles titled “Neurotypical people don’t say what they mean” which you wrote several years ago.
> When it comes to diet or supplements, you can just tap into your intuition. Your intuition will tell you whether something is right for you.
I seem to recall reading about an old experiment done sometime in the early 20th century where babies with rickets were given access to cod liver oil and they voluntarily consumed the oil, as if they knew instinctively/innately that they had to consume it. Then, once the rickets resolved, they lost interest in the cod liver oil.
LSWM, I had a whole-ass effortpoast ready to go, addressing multiple commenters and multiple concepts.
But you said this:
> I seem to recall reading about an old experiment done sometime in the early 20th century where babies with rickets were given access to cod liver oil and they voluntarily consumed the oil, as if they knew instinctively/innately that they had to consume it. Then, once the rickets resolved, they lost interest in the cod liver oil.
That pretty much sums up and buttons everything up.
See also ‘Ultra-Processed People’ 2023 by Dr C van Tulleken. Lots in there on interesting nutritional research 100 years ago, including evidence that people may know what foods/nutrients they’re short of and need to eat.
“I think the rise of the conscious mind is something that emerged pretty recently”
have you read “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?” it got sort of samey so i didn’t finish it, but the basic idea is that the gods of the pre-moderns were “real” in that the voices/presences/visions had their origin in the one hemisphere and was picked up by the other as an external stimulus because they weren’t integrated into a coherent whole. he argues that consciousness as we know it is a learned behavior that emerged with the rise of language that integrates the two hemispheres.
No one actually knows how ancient people thought, we you can’t even REALLY know how other people think today, let alone other people who lived thousands of years ago. However, this hypothesis does have some possibilities to it. If you’d like to experience what it’s like to be like that, I’d recommend the Templist trials. You’ll find yourself very religious and a little superstitious, but you’ll also be more understanding, intuitive, and willful.
Personally after I felt like I was “born again” I don’t hear voices, I just imagine the gods as characters who I honor; and this has had tangible benefits to my life. Might be a placebo, who knows?
You wrote that you recently started taking niacin. Well, niacin has anti-psychotic properties:
https://www.amazon.com/Niacin-Story-Wonderful-Healing-Properties/dp/1591202752
Yeah I’ve been eating nutritional yeast which has plenty of niacin, it gives a good cheesy flavor, good in soup and on toast. Spirituality can’t help you if you’re not taking care of yourself of-course, though spirituality can inspire you and make you more willful.
There is a universal creator. Humans theorized it was too busy orchestrating the universe so they created their own god(s). These gods were the dead kings, heroes, and inventors of their nations. The speculated those dead people would continue to work for them and their nation in the spirit realm. They “would” protect/warn them of diseases, night raids, natural diseases etc. Things they couldn’t see or foresee could be by these spirits.
McGilchrist in his book “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” explains a lot of this.
For any autists in the chat looking to tap into that infinite wellspring of intuition locked inside I highly recommend reading Keith Johnstones powerful book Impro.
OT:
https://twitter.com/jesushschvice/status/1835779991541596631?s=46
(I’m in Hell right now, watching this. . I might’ve had the opportunity to cozy up to this type at the time. But I’m not neurotypical so I just watched from the sidelines, grasping impotently from afar)
I’m just like Rad, fr fr
Tall and fairly attractive.
But hobbled and tortured by my mind
Being Schizoid is like being trapped under ice
https://youtu.be/455-CIgc7co?si=GftnCGbg7TFu0lr-
Time to die
Don’t give up mate.
It is most definitely not time to die.
Holy crap dude, she’s a brain dead groupie femoid.
Whatever hell you *think* you’re in is a far better place that you’d be in hanging out with her, I fucking guarantee it.
I knew it was gonna be this video
She is still alive, right? So why don’t you ask her for a date now? You’re both older, so what.
Most likely she now works in HR for a vampire investment bank.
Bro just let it go. There is nothing here for you. Go in nature with the animals, humans are a lost cause.
> Go in nature with the animals, humans are a lost cause.
I think I found a Rad theme song:
——-
One, two, three, four, five against one
Five, five, against one
Said one, two, three, four, five against one
Five, five, five, five, five against one
Torture from you to me
Abducted from the street
I’d rather be
I’d rather be with
I’d rather be with an animal
Why would you wanna hurt me? Oh
Oh, so frightened of your pain
I’d rather be
I’d rather be with
I’d rather be with an animal
I’d rather be
I’d rather be
I’d rather be with an animal
I’d rather be
I’d rather be with
I’d rather be with an animal
I’d rather be
I’d rather be
I’d rather be with an animal
Said one, two, three, four, five against one
Five, five, five, five, five against one
One, two, three, four, five against one
Five, five, five, five, five against one
https://youtu.be/47zf8kGobfk?si=-eIzQiVmyhNdnQwx
I can remember the scent of patchouli, Nag Champa and hackeysacks when this song was released.
How I wish Rad was with me at that time, as a frightened and anxious freshman, trying to make sense of all the frat bros and my surfer bro dorm roommate, who never quite understood my love of Marillion (though he tried).
Life is both cruel and funny depending on how you look at it.
Aw fuck that is gay as shit
I’m not gay.
But I would cup Rad’s balls in my hand in the way they say chimpanzees attempt to calm each other by fondling each others balls to reduce anxiety.
Ah shit that is gay too!
If you’re autistic you don’t have intuitions. They aren’t there. Telling an autist to act on intuition is like telling him to grow a set of antlers. I have tried to act on intuition many times, and when I waited for an intuition nothing arrived. A few times I decided to act on what I thought might be my intuition; it was kind of a guess that maybe that was what intuition was. The results were really bad, in fact terrible. No-one would have reasoned to them in a hundred years. If I didn’t consciously act on reason I’d be long since dead.
Relax and don’t think, avoid being selfaware. This is how I try to tackle my social phobia. And I admit it is not easy in a sober state. If I think, I get tense and sometimes experience a blackout. I’ve tried the strategy of braving defeat but the discomfort doesn’t go away.
Over the years I have come to accept that I simply have a defective hardware. I sometimes get jealous of how easily and smoothly others can behave in social contexts. But in the end you just have to accept your lot in life and try to do something with what you have.
Be kind to yourself, no more self-torture, try to avoid what you know you can’t handle and assent to what appeals to you, just like you wrote.
You seem to forget that reason builds up with sociability.
If your parents had never spoken to you, you would have been a human with very low faculties.
Even in linguistics, contexts plays a huge role.
That’s why it is so difficult for AI to copy human speach.
+++
THE PROBLEM with the West is that they try to POSSESS knowledge. That’s why they have an obsession with consciousness, but of course you only have fragments of knowledge, at any given time.
When you stop trying to possess knowledge and other people, that’s when you become an OPEN system who keeps learning and relating.
+++
In the above sense, Rationalism is not Logic.
I remember reading about a Dutch man who, in the 1900s, tried to domesticate a female polar bear cub but eventually gave up and had to euthanize her. Reminds me of people like us.
>I think a better way to articulate what I’m trying to convey here may be that most of humanity just doesn’t have the degree of consciousness necessary to allow them to arrive through rational means at conclusions that run counter to their intuition. Reason just generally ends up serving as a tool for them, that vaguely adjusts what they’re intuitively inclined to do. They can’t stray far from the path that comes naturally to them.
“The sovereign eventually passes judgment on the state of exception,” a friend of mine said. Basically, you can argue brute facts day in and day out, it eventually just comes down to a judgment call based on all the unfalsifiable aspects of our inner framework. Paraphrasing his explanation a bit.
>Most of the things you do on instinct tend to go better than the ones your conscious mind has to participate in. If you have to think about walking or riding a bicycle, you screw it up
When playing a difficult videogame, I’ve noticed that I almost always do a much better job at a level or challenge the first time I attempt it than the next several. I suppose there’s something to having an off the cuff approach versus the more conscious (cerebral?) one that I go into it with later when I’m more aware of what I’m in for.
Rationally, I am a complete retard, but my intuition tells me otherwise. So which is it?
Retarded or not?
Unknown knowns are the knowns your institution knows or you know but you do not (yet) know how they fit into your/their/its semantic web. And what it means.
That is much more frightening. It is what you or a whole group can make change its minds. But you do not (maybe yet) know.
lovely picture.