Joshe

These patterns are not simply "egotistical". They're structural and they have real consequences. Also, you can't view these statements in isolation. You have to put them all together. It's not about any one statement. If you want to know what makes someone tick, ask yourself the question: What could this statement be doing for the self that is making it? When you apply that question to year's worth of statements and the same pattern keeps showing up, that's a strong signal. For example: "I am the only creature on this planet who is AWAKE". How could that stabilize the self? If you're the only one awake, everyone else is asleep. It elevates oneself above ALL others. This is the theme. "Which is why I'm here and you're there." How does this stabilize the self? Positions above and the other below. This is the architecture in it's most naked form. "You have no idea the intellect you are dealing with". How could that stabilize the self? Asserts intellectual dominance. Positions them above and the other below. "I am very casual in my communications. But this creates a false sense that you will outsmart me. If I was a professor at Harvard you would relate to me with a lot more seriousness. But you are dealing with a greater intelligence than that here. Be careful underestimating it." Leo said this after seeing where a user humanized him by saying he's human and fallible just like the rest of us. The Idealized Self swung into action and let them know deference should be their default attitude around him because they are most certainly not his equal and it's not even close. To prove that, he let them know that even the most prestigious intellects in the country can't touch his, and if they can't, who do you think you are? Of course the Pride System can't just parade around like this without convincing itself AND you that the point is not about being superior, rather it's for YOUR benefit. He's only looking out for you, not asserting his superiority. Concern is the trojan horse. And when that doesn't work, what you perceive to be arrogance or superiority is your own projection or lack of understanding, which is effective because we can't know with certainty who and how Leo is. Nonetheless, the same superiority pattern keeps coming.

Have you ever wondered why you have to keep saying it so much and why so many people keep arriving at the same read year after year? If I were you and if superiority truly meant nothing to me, I'd be really curious and want to get to the bottom of why people kept getting the wrong impression of me so I could set the record straight for myself moreso than others. I'd be interested in that explanation.

The traits themselves aren't the issue. You can have all those traits without being organized around superiority. But I suppose for some, uprooting superiority might take all those traits with it because they formed out of superiority in the first place. And like you said, you can't just change your personality. So it just is what it is.

Yeah, I also saw how you could use them to construct or reinforce any metaphysical belief you want. Recognized it my first time as well and was aware it would be an error to consistently plug Leo's metaphysics into the experience, because it was obvious I would just be constructing the whole thing until the construction was perfect and I believed it to be absolute truth. But I think psychedelics are usually only brainwashing tools for people who are motivated to interpret or derive meaning from the experiences. If you don't go looking for meaning, they're just very interesting experiences. But if you constantly try to find love, infinity, god, or whatever, you'll eventually find it, and they will be your own unconscious constructions.

up there = safe up there = right up there = valuable up there = untouchable To understand Leo's ego(and even our own), check out Karen Horney's "aggressive/expansive" personality in "Neurosis and Human Growth". It's basically how the self comes to organize around superiority. The Expansive resolves inner insecurity by becoming exceptional, superior, and invulnerable. They exhibit: • grandiosity • need to be exceptional • contempt for ordinary humanity • intolerance for weakness • drive toward greatness • belief in one’s unique gifts These coalesce to form what she calls the "Idealized Self", which becomes the organizing principle of the ego. The person constructs a grand image of who they are and the "Search for Glory" begins. From there, a protective mechanism called the "Pride System" forms, which is a collection of strategies used to reinforce and maintain the Idealized Self. The main strategy of the Pride System is contempt for inferiority and mediocrity. Contempt for inferiority/mediocrity starts off as an internal defensive mechanism to protect the Idealized Self, but quickly gets externalized onto people who are seen to be embodying the traits the Idealized Self rejects (weakness, confusion, mediocrity, inferiority, unintelligence). Without corrective measures, the Expansive will eventually find a way to place virtually all humans beneath them, because they will continuously run into humans that threaten their Idealized Self. Horney says they justify their contempt by framing it as "high standards". Which is very interesting because I just came across what seems to be a textbook example of that on Leo's blog. He recently shared a tragic story about a very lost and troubled young woman and his instinct was to use her as an example of human depravity and to equate her and most of humanity's behavior to that of an animal within the first 3 sentences. Then spent the rest of the post explaining that he only sees it this way because he has "high standards". The Pride System needs narratives that feel principled, not self-serving, so it comes up with things like: I reject mediocrity and demand excellence I'm principled, not arrogant I'm not contemptuous, I just see clearly and call things what they are The Expansive isn't conscious of any of this and they don't view themselves as egoic. They truly see themselves as principled, rigorous, strong, and as having the courage to look reality in the face and accept it. And there's definitely truth in that, but the problem is they see only what they want to see regarding themselves, which is that they are above and everyone else is below. Another aspect of the expansive type is that relationships with them are not collaborative/mutual, but hierarchical. To be vulnerable and a mere human engaging with another human on the same level implies "we are fundamentally the same kind of being", which threatens the Idealized Self. Just my theory.

It depends on the conspiracy and what it offers. Most ordinary people get sucked in by intellectual intrigue. Things like curiosity, playing detective/cracking a puzzle, shiny object. Also, pre-existing motivations like distrust in institutions. Things start to turn weird when they admit they believe the theory and then get pushback. That's the point when identity enters the chat and often becomes "I can see what others can't", "people are asleep/sheep" and when motivated reasoning becomes dominant. And this arouses the rational person's identity defenses, who then feel compelled to flaunt their epistemic superiority, which humiliates the pre-rational and causes them to double down. It's often both who are using epistemic superiority to stabilize identity. "I can see what others can't" Rational people unwittingly play a large role in the epistemic breakdown.

"Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" is a good one. Success is simple but not easy to reach. You can easily map out paths that lead to success. The hard part is being able to sustain trajectory while navigating an ever changing, unpredictable reality that demands action and persistent context switching across multiple logistical domains, and being able to absorb all the shock from that while avoiding drift. Goal → action → interruption → new demand → context switch → loss of momentum → restart → drift The best strategy is to design systems and environments that stabilize trajectory and minimize derailment, while excluding everything that isn’t essential. This is the thing to get handled. One foot in front of the other with the main thing remaining the main thing. That's it.

If all distinctions are imaginary, then so is a rock.

Cognition occurs within awareness. What you experience when you're not thinking is awareness with nothing flowing through it. The less cognition, the more noticeable awareness is. Awareness starts to feel infinite at low levels of cognitive activity, just like a dark room. Cognition is how we interface with the presumed infinity. But cognition has constraints. We can't compute 2x8 and 8x3 at the same time. To interpret "reality is infinite" and "reality is love" at the same time requires cognition. You can only focus on one or the other. Or train cognition such that both compress into a single gestalt. But this is modifying interpretation through cognition, not expanding awareness.

It's supply and demand. Spiritual narratives stabilize the self, solving many serious problems at once. They make people feel: special purposeful enlightened morally superior connected to ultimate truth part of a cosmic story And more Belief's main function is stabilization. Most people, including intelligent ones, are very willing to adopt sets of beliefs if they're packaged coherently and can stabilize the self. Stabilizing the self is what's most important. Most seekers aren't really after truth. That's just post-hoc rationalization 99% of the time. The supplier must tend to the fact that the demand largely consists of unconscious stabilization needs and not a need for truth. This seems a hard thing to balance for an integrous teacher. Serving stabilization is antithetical to many of the truths an integrous teacher would want to teach. But if you don't serve ample stabilization, your audience will look elsewhere.

Significant expansion is a pipe dream because human awareness has limited bandwidth. People mistake the practice of channeling awareness for expanding. You can practice a specific conceptual or perceptual skill so much that you gain compression artifacts substituting for a lot of granularity that you can experience as a gestalt, and those can feel profound, but that isn't "expanding" awareness. It's just focusing/channeling awareness on a specific thing. One could do nothing but train their mind to perceive reality as pure consciousness to the point they live from that recognition, and they could ponder the logical implications and work to integrate those, and this would still not produce "expanded" awareness. Trained awareness, yes, expanded, no. Conceptual spirituality (interpretation + metaphysical narrative) is held together by unconscious, accumulated logic and premises that, over time, coalesce into a metacognitive gestalt. The experience of the gestalt is often mistaken for "expanded" awareness or transcendence or awakening. If a practice is largely building and compressing an interpretive framework, then "more practice" doesn't strip away filters to reveal what already is. It's just replacing one set of filters for another. "The only way to verify my claims is to build the same compressed gestalt I have, at which point you'll agree with me."

So far I see 5 types who regularly hate on AI. 1. Inexperienced users not interested in the tool 2. Conspiratorial thinkers 3. People who were already heavily focused on technological harm pre-AI 4. Conservatives 5. Intellectual egos (AI threatens the visible gap between expert and non-expert cognition) #5 is interesting. There are legit intelligent people out there who are fundamentally biased against AI just because it makes access to high quality information and thinking more generally available. They cloak their disdain in virtue (concern), but the truth is, AI is a massive threat to intellectual hierarchies and many identities built on intellectual superiority feel threatened by it. Just something to keep in mind when you watch a smart person bash the shit out of AI. If they advocate to slow down or use it less instead of education/AI literacy, their concern is most likely not epistemics. It's about the moat.

Progress has been made. Gotta start somewhere.

By not being passive. By interrogating and being critical of the output. It's a reasoning instrument, not an authority. The most powerful use of AI is interactive interrogation. The very fact that everyone is asking "How do we know if we can trust it?" means the idea of epistemic responsibility has gone mainstream. Humans will adapt, just like how they stopped trusting the first answer they saw on Google. AI will eventually normalize interrogating answers. If that happens, it would be one of the biggest shifts in the epistemic environment humans have ever experienced.

But that's not all it will do. In almost every conversation I have with AI, it corrects or checks me on something. It very often lets you know when you haven't reasoned well or have missed something. The average person coming in contact with that several times a week is a huge deal for epistemic responsibility. IMO, ER will skyrocket with each new generation because they'll grow up in an environment where it's a common topic and a necessary skill. They'll be taught early how to verify answers, how to prompt effectively, detect hallucinations. Learning how to not be duped by AI is essentially learning epistemic responsibility.