Joshe

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.

Lmao. Come on baby, wrap your mouth around this latex.

This is the whole reason statue of limitation exists. Memories eventually become unreliable unless they're kept alive. The Mandela Effect comes to mind. Was there a show called "Sex In The City" or "Sex and The City"? Is it "Oscar Meyer" or "Oscar Mayer"? Is it "Sketchers" or "Skechers" shoes? Did the Monopoly Man have a monocle? Is there a hyphen in KitKat? Did Forrest Gump say "Life is like a box of chocolates"? Did Curious George have a tail? How did Mickey Mouse hold up his pants? Did Sinbad play a genie in the movie "Shazaam"? lol Answers: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/entertainment/g28438966/mandela-effect-examples/ Aside from making shit up, we also create memories by imagining things, and then in the future we sometimes mistake what we imagined for an actual experience. For example, when I was a kid I heard stories about traumatic situations that I was too young to remember, and so I created really vivid pictures/clips in my head about what took place, and for most of my life I thought those imaginings actually occurred. We're all susceptible to these things.

lol, he's the first video that shows up when you search YT for "surface lexicon vs deep lexicon". If not, it's this dude: Not sure about that particular video though. If not, you should be able to search his channel for "lexicon" to find it.

The reason you can easily wake up at 4am to catch a flight but not to go for a run is because you don't perceive real consequences of not going for the run. Same with your boss. Not meeting your work obligations/deadlines has real, immediate consequences. What seems to be highly driven people is usually just people avoiding consequences. Self-help tells you these people are operating on some kind of drive, grit, and determination. But really, those are downstream of them just avoiding pain. This goes for the grandiose egotist as well as the guy who quit his job to start his own business. Not doing the thing has severe consequences for both. Trying to manufacture a meaning structure around the thing you want to do will not work. You have to see and feel the consequences and they have to be real. Consequence motivation doesn't need maintenance like narrative motivation. You don't have to remind yourself that it matters when the consequences are real. The energy comes from keeping the inevitable consequences in mind.

Same here. Writing is fine but real-time conversation sucks. Just some rough ideas I've played with: "Articulation skill" depends on many complex things. "Domain familiarity" is just one of the factors involved in how well you can translate your understanding to speech. What often looks like good articulation is actually an emergent result that arises when high verbal fluency and high domain familiarity combine with a specific cognitive structure operating with specific values. lol On Facebook, I was just watching a live stream of a fella I grew up with in my class who has apparently gone insane and is doing a walkabout in Mexico and thinks he's the devil. He talks with such verbal fluency it's mesmerizing and I'm jealous. Verbal fluency alone can produce the illusion of good articulation, but combine that with high domain familiarity, and we start to see what looks like great articulation. But it's not as simple as having a ton of domain familiarity either. It's also how your brain processes and stores information, which directly affects how accessible it is to be verbalized. I don't have the cognitive aspect fully figured out but I think one of the biggest things that handicaps people is non-linear perception/processing. More linear/sequential thinkers will have an easier time translating their understanding because how it is processed in sequence. I think people such as myself will just never be able to articulate very well across the board due structural contraints of the mind. I could learn to articulate well on specific topics, but it wouldn't transfer over to other domains. If I wanted to improve, I'd zoom in on the specific topic, drill specific vocabulary and phrases, collect canned phrases for various situations, transitions, etc, and simply practice verbalizing. But trying to get good at articulation in general seems incompatible with my hardware. I could make some small gains, and I'm not saying it's impossible to make a lot, but I'm pretty sure it would require never-ending maintenance on a scale that wouldn't make sense. There's a dude on Youtube who has some good ideas about surface lexicon vs deep lexicon.

lol. No, walking and listening to an audiobook.

Damn, that sucks it's happening there too. Same thing happened to the amazing dive site I went to. Not sure if it's too many tourists touching the coral or just the water is more polluted.

That looks like a fuckin alien lobster, lol. You ever scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef? I've heard it's the best scuba experience. Scuba diving felt very spiritual to me. Heightened sense due to risk of death, a totally new world with all new creatures, diminished mobility and all you can hear is your breath. One of my favorite experiences.

Never really took selfies much but I found one from a year or so ago:

@UnbornTao My boy looks like yours except for the tongue, lol. And when he was younger:

The same way you’d quit anything. By getting lost in the weeds of something else.

You only need a solution for fear if it's a problem. And it's easier to endure fear when it comes than to live in fear of it coming.

Obviously. Seems to me that if you actually do have love/compassion for Leo and care about the community, you'd be concerned about the highlighted behavior rather than pretend it doesn't exist or whitewash it.

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.