Joshe

This started from a conversation in the blog mega-thread where Leo claimed non-conformity is one in a million and requires decades of epistemic mastery. I challenged that, and Leo did his usual thing of telling me I'm just not capable of understanding. There was a time when I would have taken Leo at his word. Because I thought he was integrous. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt far longer than most would have. Going on 12 years now, with the last 2 years eroding. I've been biting my tongue for a while, with a large part of me waiting to be proven wrong. Waiting for a legit redeeming answer as to why the guy who I put so much stock in years ago wasn't as fucked up as he now seems to be. But I can no longer ignore what continues to persist. Since no answer has materialized and my observations have basically been confirmed, I'm hesitant to even provide feedback because I doubt he'd have the integrity to give a fuck, and he'd just use it to thwart people like me in the future. But as a caring human who would like to believe something other than what reality keeps confirming, I'll give him that benefit of the doubt. Even though I know it's a mistake: Some things you can't hide. Sure, you can hide from 99%. But you can't hide from the people who can see. And even for the ones with high discernment in this community, most of them still apparently cannot see your games. Either they can't see or they haven't found the courage to call you out. They can detect your games here and there, but they can't bring themselves to see your full game. Which is forgivable because even you don't know exactly the full game you're playing. Nonetheless, you unconsciously and consciously exploit their caring and forgiving nature to elevate yourself at their expense (I sat on this for a long ass time. There is no longer any doubt. I know it for a fact, which is why I'm finally speaking out). All your talk of integrity turns to ash when the discerning one confirms with certainty that what you call integrity is 1:1 what the standard ego adores. This pattern emerges time after time, year after year, in higher and higher resolution, without fucking fail, until it is confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt. For people who don't ignore reality, nothing Leo says in the interim can nullify this pattern, because there is no way to fake integrity. Leo, you built a community where integrity is supposed to be the highest standard. And you think your transparent ego games will go unnoticed? When I trace back why you think that would work, every possible branch should embarrass you. I don't know if it's more insulting to you or the the community. Wtf man? How can you understand the ego when you haven't spent years analyzing it? You have been so wrapped up in your own upward trajectory that you never stopped to analyze your own fucking ego. You spent years analyzing everyone's ego but your own. Your understanding of your own cognition is that of a 25 year old Christian conformist. How about you give us a 4 hour video on how your own ego operates? Why are you so afraid to go there? Stop thinking about developmental models. Stop relying on Wilber, Ralson, or whoever, and go inward on your own, and look at what's there! That's the only way to see what the fuck everyone has been trying to tell you for the past decade. --- End of feedback Sorry man, this shit has to be said by somebody. To say the least, I'm disappointed. In all fairness, we're all just human. We all need correction. And we can all redeem ourselves. But you have to first see how you have fucked up, and how you continually fuck up. And you Leo, have fucked up massively by letting your ego run amuck. It will not be easy for you to redeem yourself. I can almost guarantee you that if you don't fix this ego problem, and soon, you will be unheard of in the next 10 years. All your lackeys (they know who they are (and will feel compelled to attack me)) will disappear and you'll be speaking to 10 random 20 year olds telling them how foolish they are. And there will be a few old regulars watching anonymously thinking, "jesus, wtf happened?". Burn it down.

😂 Come on man! Don't do this. lol. You can't keep redefining what it means to be a conformist. First it was one in a million. Then only you and Ralston. Then Autonomous mind. Now even Autonomous isn't enough. You don't have to elevate non-conformity to be some unreachable thing that only 5 humans can reach. Come up with another word if necessary, but don't warp perception to suit yourself. Just admit it man. You are cool and unique, but you're not 1 in a million. And you don't have to be for people to love you. You're cool as hell without the inflation. And even if you are 1 in a million, don't let it go to your head such that you start warping reality for everyone else. Don't be a spiritual Trump. 😂

I'm not proposing a model, lol. I'm living proof of it. I've spent decades trying to understand this stuff about myself, with ~70% of that effort being independent observation, not borrowed frameworks. But you're right to not just accept it. I wouldn't either.

I'm talking about plain non-conformity, not Autonomous mind. If by non-conformity you meant Autonomous mind, I don't have any input on that. Your post said non-conformity requires decades of epistemic mastery and is one in a million. Which is what I'm challenging.

There is a small percentage of people for whom this is largely not true. See above or below. It doesn't take conscious effort like that. For some, there is little to no signal to conform in the first place. Rather than spending energy on not conforming, this type more often has to spend energy figuring out how to conform. Non-conformity comes natural in both mind and external social reality. I saw conformity everywhere and largely understood it before I even had a word for it. Why would I have such a heightened sensitivity to it? That's what I've been trying to explain. If you're actually interested, try to imagine being born with this orientation: Some people are actually born this way. Rare, yes, but it's more like 1 out of 100 or 200, not 1 in a million. These people don't need a deliberate epistemic project to reach non-conformity. All they need is increased self-awareness to honor their architecture, which is almost inevitable given their makeup.

I'm not discounting the work you've put in. I'm saying your non-conformity would have emerged regardless, without epistemic mastery.

Right. But some people are naturally put off by it and compelled to uproot it. If your system rejects conformity from the outset, mostly all you need is self-awareness to honor it. That, and a lifestyle mostly detached from social environments. No big epistemic project necessary for this orientation.

You're ignoring the fact that your system has been flagging conformity as a violation since childhood, before you ever did any serious epistemic work. I was sifting through your blog and found the perfect example: Why did this experience register as "wrong"? I myself have been experiencing this same internal friction for most of my life. In high-school, I noticed how conformist everyone was and it came to disgust me. By the time I hit 20, I realized it wasn't just the kids, it was the whole of society. And I realized all of this without any intentional epistemic work. How did I notice it without even trying, and why was my response to it disgust and disdain? The answer is, a very specific cognitive architecture produces exactly this. And that architecture can be understood. The best model I've found so far to explain it is called OPS (Objective Personality), which is built on top of Jung's cognitive functions.

Same here. But that's just a self-awareness milestone. You may have freed yourself of conformity just a few years ago, but I'm betting you've been noticing it within yourself for most of your life. And each time you noticed it, you felt compelled to address it. Right? That's what I mean by "structural non-conformist". Someone who is structurally conformist wouldn't even want to know they were operating on conformity. Much less address it should they be made aware of it. They'd sweep it under the rug because it doesn't register to them as a violation. But for the structural non-conformist, it makes perfect sense why you'd feel compelled to address it: Because your system is built to generate its own models and evaluate by its own standards, so when it discovers it's running on something it can't trust because it didn't verify, that's a violation of one of its top values: self-verified coherence. The main point is that these types naturally reject conformity. Not out of some rebellion or epistemic standard, but as a structural cognitive bias toward self-verified coherence. Conformists don't feel the need to reject it because their cognitive bias is toward social coherence. Neither chooses their bias and neither can escape it. Regarding the autonomous stage, people such as yourself are operating on hardware that makes reaching it almost inevitable. It emerges from self-awareness after decades of running a specific architecture.

@Leo Gura Your cognition is structurally non-conformist. You didn't arrive at it through decades of rigorous epistemics. Nature and nurture gave you 3 traits that all but guaranteed non-conformity. independent perception (builds own models of reality rather than importing from consensus) independent judgment (evaluates by internal standards rather than tribal expectations) behavioral energy directed inward (processes internally rather than engaging in the social field) Combine all 3 and you get someone who can't be a conformist without significant discomfort. I'd say this is roughly 1-2% of the population - far from 1 in a million. Roughly 43% of the population operates on dependent perception AND dependent judgement. Which means about half the population imports their model of reality from consensus and they calibrate their decisions to the tribe. And everyone else is missing one or the other or lack the inward energy orientation to shield them from the social field. So, roughly 95% of the population is missing at least one of the ingredients you need to be a true non-conformist. None of this can be fixed through epistemic labor because if your perception is oriented toward concrete reality, building independent models of reality isn't something you can just decide to prioritize. And if your judgment naturally defers to the tribe, you can't just say fuck the tribe's opinion. The thing that makes someone conformist isn't how they think - it's what their mind prioritizes. Which they have little to no say over. So, you're telling structural non-conformists who didn't undergo your epistemic project that they're actually conformists, and you're telling structural conformists that they can be like you if they try hard enough. lol. Both are wrong.

My favorite feature. If you've always been drawn to whiteboards and infinite canvases, you likely have non-linear cognition. And your preference for these things is your mind recognizing a compatible workspace for your thinking. Infinite canvases let you build and hold entire structures at once, which allows you to zoom into individual parts for analysis, and then zoom back out to see how it coheres with the whole.

What they want the silence to become biases their music choice.

It's because your cognition. I have the same thing. Even if I have a deep understanding of something, that understanding is not stored as something I can easily show due to the storage format. If you asked me about this topic in a conversation, the process of me trying to serialize my understanding for speech would make it look like I don't know jack shit or just making stuff. Someone with a fraction of my understanding on the topic could easily come across as more knowledgeable just because their fraction is stored differently. But when I sit down to write it out, the depth of understanding deepens fast because I have time to connect and process all the relevant nodes in the network. But even after bringing order to it in writing, my mind just discards the linear scaffolding the writing produced because it doesn't value retaining it. I might value it, but my mind don't. My mind treats it like a means to an end. This is why I mentioned "values" earlier. You ever hung around people who randomly recite a full poem or song lyrics? Their minds value storing verbal patterns. Someone like George Carlin can spout off 50-items lists because he values it so much. But you usually only value something to that degree if your native architecture is built for it. The only way for me to verbalize my understanding would be to intentionally drill the specific points, which I'm very capable of, like memorizing a poem or something, but I just can't be bothered with that. And you're right, if you have the cognitive architecture I'm describing and want to speak with some authority on a topic, it's difficult. You could do it, but you'd have to learn to suspend your default perception, not augment it. My theory is perception is actively interfering with your ability to speak, because you can't linearize while you're still seeing holistically. So you have to shut that off and start valuing storing verbal material. To get a sense of the architecture I'm trying to describe, check out this video: Don't view that video from the MBTI lens. Separate the concept from the MBTI model. Mainly look at the cognition of the INTJ and see if that seems like what is going on. Also:

You've already leveled up. If you did nothing but work as a paramedic for the rest of your life, that's already enough to die proud on your deathbed having lived a meaningful, responsible, impactful life. So I'd maintain that first and foremost and I'd put a check on the desire to be more, and I'd fully embody my lot and only my lot for a good while. Paramedics would be held in much higher regard in a more sane world. As far as I'm concerned, they're in the trenches doing God's work. I'm actually struggling to come up with a career that could facilitate your self-development better. If you remain conscious, the career itself would develop you far more across every line of development than any self-dev or spiritual bootcamp you could fathom. It's also worth considering that even if you were a successful self-dev coach, it would be hard to do more good as a coach than you could do as a paramedic. Becoming a coach could easily be a step down if your goal is to actually be of service. And spoiler alert: There is no mountaintop. The mountain top is a narrative the ego thinks will satisfy it. The mountaintop narrative works like this: ego generates a destination it will never let you reach, because reaching it would end the story, and the story is the ego. The ego identifies a gap between what you are and what you could be. This creates a a hunger. Close that gap (reach the mountaintop) and you'll finally feel complete and the hunger will be satisfied. But the ego has no interest in actually closing the gap because the closed gap means the ego would have nothing left to do and it would die, so of course it creates another mountaintop, to infinity, until you see the mechanism. "Ascending" is the ego's favorite trajectory. This is not to say don't strive for better. Just to remain suspicious of what actually is fueling it.

If you have very high confidence that Forrest Gump said “ life is like a box of chocolates”, then you have high confidence in something that isn’t true. Lol. It doesn’t matter if it’s trivial or irrelevant. It’s good to understand the implications of this.