Joshe

Of course many identities built around intellectual superiority (Elon Musk) would find this threatening. Losing half the time to mere mortals isn't something the ego can sustain. Instead, just say you tried it, reached a very high level, but opted out because it was just too simple and basic for a true intellectual.

You delay the whole learning/advancement process if you constantly switch up your openings. The point of playing the same opening over and over is so that you can arrive at the middle game with a decent position. When you can finally do that you will be competing against other opponents who can do the same. This is where the game actually takes place and is where you learn about position and tactics. You have graduated to middle school. It's foundational. If you look at the players who stay stuck at 1000 for years, it's because they refuse to adhere to the basic principles. They never stick with a single opening and just move however they want to. My dad does this. Been stuck at 1000 for two decades. He can't pass 1000 because he continues to ignore the basic principles. He's been playing for so long, he could probably be at 1400 in a few months if only he'd submit and follow the rules of advancement. Side note: the nature of online chess is that you will lose roughly half your games by design, no matter how good you are. This applies to all chess players.

The tricky part is sticking with a process long enough for it to produce results. I'm no expert but if I decided I wanted to really get good at chess, I'd exhaust the ideas from this video. It's basically spaced repetition for tactical motifs. This isn't typical chess Youtube stuff. This is probably the highest quality chess learning video I ever came across.

Chess is not simple at all. It has simple rules and a simple structure, but that's not the same as a simple game. Go has even simpler rules than chess and it's one of the deepest games created. I understand how the structural contraints of the game can make it feel boring, but this is a preference thing and is distinct from the game's actual complexity. You and Elon could simply just say "I prefer more open domains of creativity without as much constraint". But for some reason, there's a need to call that which is complex, simple. And I totally get it - chess can get old because of its structure, but that doesn't make it simple. To watch Elon Musk call it simple - alongside him saying he never lost a chess game - reveals exactly why he needed to diminish the game in the first place by conflating its constraints with simplicity. He needed to manage the identity of being intellectually superior. Which is funny because chess skill has very little to do with general intelligence in the first place. The game only threatens your ego if you've decided it's a valid metric for your intelligence. Also, it might be the case that you haven't played enough to understand the amount of creativity on offer within those 64 squares and 32 pieces. Depth reveals itself the deeper you go. You can't see it from the surface. 200 games isn't enough to see it.

Reminds me of that time Elon Musk said chess was too simple for him. 😂 What would make someone say such a ridiculous thing? Identity management. Musk opts out of the game because he thinks it's a reflection of his intelligence, and since he realized he was getting beat by 13 year olds, well, he just couldn't have that. Which ironically says a lot about his intelligence. Leo, chess.com makes it just as easy to play real people rather than bots. Why not play real people instead of bots? Your rating would be more accurate and the gameplay would offer more variety. All you gotta do is click the other button.

Fair enough. But when people speak of chess, they mean classical chess. So if someone says "I'm 2000 ELO" without clarifying it's not classical chess, that's a bit deceptive in my view.

Nobody reaches 2000 ELO in the span of 200 chess games. You can shore up this self-deception by going on chess.com and playing real people in real chess, not Fischer random. The first person you lose to, take note of their ELO. That's roughly where you're at. Based on your puzzle responses in the chess thread, I'd guess you're around 1350. I've played thousands of chess games and have capped out at 1550 ELO because good cognition can only take you so far. You have to study theory and drill tactics and do serious game reviews to make it to 2000.

I suppose it's possible the majority of people have not truly considered the implications. I'm always interested in the question: "What were you wrong about in the last few years that you felt certain about?". And if people don't have an answer, they're likely reinforcing their models, not updating them. But at the same time, confidently standing by what you believe to be true is good practice for the conscious person to gain wisdom. Proceeding with confidence is how we find out if our conclusions are wrong, and it's better than proceeding with doubt and reluctance. You can't get the 30-year-old's hindsight without the 25-year-old's committed positions. Mistakes are the necessary infrastructure to wisdom. Be wrong 10,000 times and actually register that you were wrong and eventually you will have been wrong so many times that the patterns of "how" you were wrong will become obvious. But this requires staking out positions and checking them for coherence. But some minds could care less to address incoherence while others feel compelled to. Most people don't care when they're wrong or when there's something in the system that doesn't fit - they just move on. But if they were to understand their error, they would increase in wisdom and understanding, which compounds over time. But I don't think everyone has sufficient drive or access to this. I don't think wisdom can proliferate because in order for that to happen, you need a specific type of psychic makeup that just isn't prevalent in the population. Wisdom is an emergent byproduct of contemplation and correction - two activities most people are not very interested in. Uncertainty feels bad. Being wrong feels bad. The human nervous system is optimized to avoid both, so it's optimized against the very process that produces wisdom.

I wouldn't view it that way. It's not a hierarchy. The best we all (young and old) can do with this is hold onto things loosely and keep in mind that our future selves will likely disagree with many of our current certainties. That said, we have to act on the best information we have. In other words, we have to take risks and act with conviction, but we need to make sure we have the courage to be wrong and not mistake our current convictions with certainty. This sounds like basic stuff, but it's not, because we literally can't see how we are bullshitting ourselves while we are bullshitting ourselves. 5 years ago I was certain I knew why I was pursuing my life purpose. Later, I found out my certainties were justifications for my ego. But they felt completely true. I couldn't know it wasn't true at the time. This feeling certain and the inability to know is what needs to be accounted for as we proceed - being open to the possibility that even our deepest held convictions may one day be seen as the ego doing what it does best: hiding in plain sight.

Time is a prerequisite for some of the deepest knowledge. When I was 18, I saw how I was a fool at 15. When I was 25, I saw how I was fool at 20. When I was 35, I saw how I was a fool at 30. And so it goes. It takes time (decades) to understand and integrate this fully. Once the pattern is crystal clear, one becomes more careful with what they claim to know about the self/subjective experience. Most everything that I’ve ever told myself was important was revealed to be a working of ego and falsehood, including my spiritual search and my life purpose. The very things I staked my life on - for decades - turned out to be built from ego. No matter how intelligent, earnest, and thorough a student is, one thing they can’t see or know is how their beliefs will hold up over time. A mature teacher understands this and is humbled by it. It allows them to see the delusions, not because they’re more intelligent, but because they’ve had more time and experience, which, unlike knowledge, cannot be given to the student. The only way for the student is to live through decades and hopefully they will see. Building metaphysical sand castles is an interesting and pleasurable hobby, but when you look at the why and machinery behind the building over a span of 2 decades, the hobby eventually exhausts itself after one sees all the stories they’ve told themselves were true in order to justify their building. But this isn’t a given - it will only be seen if one is open to it. Now, at 40, this is where I’m currently at. I’m not sure what’s next but I’ve finally learned the lesson and I’m not building sandcastles anymore. Lol, this sounds like something you’d say at an AA meeting. Actualizers Anonymous. Self-deception prefers to hide inside our strongest convictions. There are blind spots that cannot be accessed through introspection alone. There are dimensions of self-deception that only decades can expose. For me, the need to construct and inhabit elaborate meaning structures wound down after enough cycles of watching them collapse, which took a lot of time.

Sometimes the feedback is correct but the tact isn't. I've asked myself: why care what a person across the internet thinks or gets wrong? 100% it's mostly entertainment + ego. In the grand scheme, it makes no fuck. But I'll forget about the grand scheme sometime within the next few days. Integration is continuous but slow.

You encounter perspectives, you integrate them, and your understanding becomes more nuanced. Do you call that "conscious expansion"? Are people who make a hobby out of exploring and integrating perspectives more conscious than those who don't? What actually "increases consciousness"? Intense awareness/focus on specific perspectives? Intense awareness on consciousness itself?

AI bot crawling could slow it down too. If you don't want that, you could add a rule in your robots.txt file to prevent it.

Check out these channels to get a sense for what would go into production of cooking videos without narration: https://www.youtube.com/@cookingeveryday https://www.youtube.com/@cookrate-meatdelish2320 https://www.youtube.com/@michaelandthekitchen.subsc2619 There are tons of successful channels like this. If I were you, I'd find as many as I could and study their production and marketing techniques. I recall seeing one that would was selling their own custom designed cookware at the end of the video, and it was pretty cool. That's just one way you could make money. I definitely wouldn't be trying to sell other people's products though, because you won't make a lot of money that route without a ton of viewers. You'll have a very hard time getting eyeballs if all you do is a blog and sharing images. You'd need to strategically grind out high quality videos. I would mostly focus on Youtube and social media and I'd link to the full recipe on your blog, which gives you the opportunity to capture email addresses. If I were going to do this, I'd get several cameras and mics strategically set up around my cooking area and start experimenting with that early on. Ideally, I'd want my kitchen to be a like a studio that I didn't have to disassemble after every video. You might want to figure out which angles are best for stuff like cracking eggs, whisking, how you add spices, etc. Basically, flesh out the style and common patterns early so you're not always analyzing every little detail. It's a big project, but it would be interesting.