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@Husseinisdoingfine You already made it further than I ever did in academia. I never even took calculus. After I quit high school, I tried community college and then quit that. Then I went on to work construction for 10 years. I felt like a huge loser. Now, I'm glad it went the way it did. If I were to have wound up at some college, I'd probably be working a job that does not suit me and married with children right now... totally fucked. Enduring these hard knocks bring strength and wisdom. They make you strong. No pressure, no diamonds. You have plenty of time to figure it out. Also, sociology is an incredibly interesting field of study. Maybe let it marinate for a while. It might grow on you.

I understand! But I think OP caught a glimpse of this "True knowing" and is wondering how to integrate it or if they even should. They experienced it once and have reflected on the implications of its integration and accurately intuited significant fallout from it. Also, I possibly suppressed this. It's been in the back of my mind for years now and I don't let it come up. If you think about, this suppression serves as an acclimation process. Maybe you suppressed it to some degree as well and if so, that might be what allowed you to ease into or embody it to the degree you have? I think that's what I did so it could be going on with others 🤷‍♂️.

@Keryo Koffa 😂😂😂 you are fuckin lunatic!

😂😂😂 You are hilarious. Logically, I agree with you. Experientially, I have to interact with people. If they found out I think they're not real, I would have a problem. I could ignore the problem and continue on in my enlightenment, but the figments will not forget. I am responsible for how I interact with them. it would negatively impact them if they found out. My family is too afraid to talk to me about not believing in Christ because they can't bare the thought of me burning in hell for all eternity. How do you think they'd react if I told them not only is hell not real, they are not real? 😂 Not good! I can't let them know this. I don't think it's wise. I might be wrong. This is just the best way I know to handle my situation. If someone doesn't have many figments who will be significantly impacted, then it might not be a concern.

@Nemra It's been huge for improving my thinking. Unfortunately, ChatGPT now seems almost useless for longer form inquiries or when you need back and forth collaboration. It's accuracy has been falling at a steady rate over the past few months. Fortunately, Claude has proven to be better than ChatGPT ever was, especially with the "Projects" feature. My AI utilization is spread across ChatGPT, Claude, Meta (free), and Perplexity (search engine, free). I use each for different things and sometimes I use all of them for thoroughness. Perplexity is often more efficient than Google when you need up-to-date info. It's nice. You can get really creative with ChatGPT's custom GPTs. Here are a couple examples: Sometimes, you just have a quick question and you don't want any fluff, no bullshit, Just the answer. For that, I created "Direct GPT". 😂 Then, I created another for quick, broad exploration. I call it "Term-cloud generator". The whole point is to feed it a term and quickly discover related concepts. This is HUGE for exploration. Example: https://i.imgur.com/prMLMzN.png You can create GPTs to explore broad or narrow. You can get REALLY creative with this. For Claude, I've been working on a "Project" which is kind of like a custom GPT in ChatGPT, but you can upload files with instructions for it. I've been working on a set of instructions for what I've poorly named "Holistic Understanding Framework (Concise version)". The idea is to feed it a term and it bring me up to speed on what it is as quickly as possible. This is best used for drilling into specific and complex topics. Example: I can provide the instructions for this prompt if anyone is interested.. just LMK. Also, Claude can do stuff like this: Lastly, it's really good for exploring your own psychology. I've often wondered why, as a child, I was utterly fascinated with certain things like booby traps in movies like Indiana Jones, The Goonies, etc,... or why I loved to sling two marbles into a bathtub and watch them interact. Now I know why! This could be its most powerful use case—to assist you in knowing yourself. Also, when you need to go back and forth with an AI, Claude is the best but I fear it's not going to last. I think AI companies gave us dirt cheap access to the best their tech can offer, but only for purposes of attracting business/enterprise clients. They've invested billions and aren't even close to being profitable. Offering their maximum level of performance for $20 a month isn't anywhere close to being viable, which is why ChatGPT doesn't do it anymore. Only the rich get that kind of power. I hope I'm wrong about this. The ways in which these tools can be utilized for higher thinking and understanding is INSANE. I can't go back.

I was once reading "Love is Letting Go of Fear" (1979 bestseller) and the author said this: Isn't that interesting?

Does a bear shit in the woods? 😂

Game theory 101 - When you're predicting what someone is up to, you don't look at what they say. You look at what their incentives are. Is tens or hundreds of millions of dollars considered an incentive? What about access to one of the most elite and exclusive social clubs on the planet? Would we call that an incentive? Many people would kill just for a 100th of a fraction of either one of these incentives. But not Lex. He's a cool dude! Intelligent analysis would NEVER ignore these variables and would ALWAYS account for them in. This is an embarrassing failure of epistemology. To forget about the elephant in the room, which is millions of fucking dollars, and the social status and social ladder climbing of one of the most elite and exclusive social clubs on the planet... throw ALLL that out, and let's just take the carefully crafted public image Lex shows you, use that exactly as it is, toss out all the elephants from the room, and use the crafted image to project onto reality that which Lex wants you to project onto reality, and call those projections reality. If this is your approach and you fancy yourself a rational, objective, unbiased thinker, here’s a good video:

Meditation has its place in conscious exploration. I'm like you though, not very interested in it. I think it depends on what you're trying to do. It seems like the best modality for gaining control over the body-mind. I'm skeptical of its enlightenment efficacy. Contemplation is king for developing intelligence, understanding, and learning how to mine for insights. I think I heard David Hawkins say something like "meditation is generally thought to be the ultimate practice for enlightenment but contemplation can be just as, if not more effective than traditional meditation". Something like that. The "mind" path isn't for everyone though. For example, I think "feelers" make up the majority of people on the spiritual path. They naturally prefer feeling over thinking and seem to usually have a low Need for Cognition, which makes mining for insights difficult. That said, thinking alone isn't enough. You need some sort of deep feeling thing. IDK how to explain it. Thought should be able to take you to beauty and you be impacted by it. If you can use your mind to find beauty and you are emotionally impacted, and that happens often or if you can do it on cue, I think that is indication that mind path is good. This is all just speculation based on my experience.

Very interesting story. Thanks for sharing! I'm no spiritual master but I've dealt with this dilemma a few times. My strategy was to ignore it and never go back until I'm ready. Thinkin' back, I think this dilemma was the main reason I backed away from enlightenment. I wasn't prepared to deal with the fallout from stepping into it. I think the first question to answer is, is this something you want to embody or not? It obviously has many implications for not only your life, but the lives of those imaginary figments involved. 😂 It would be awkward, indeed, to be in relationship with your fellow humans, family, and friends, seeing them as non-existent figments of Shiva's imagination. People will not like that you've reduced them to nothing, so there will be fallout from that. If you want to embody it, here's a spur-of-the-moment contemplation I would use to comfort myself if I had to deal with this right now. I'm not sure if it will be useful, but it's the best I've got: They're not real I am also not real What is real? The whole thing is real I do love the thing, and they are part of the thing. They make up the thing The same as the whole thing is not just nothing, they too are not just nothing They are just as beautiful as the thing They are the thing This might make you gaze at them with a loving smile, which will make them feel weirded out. If they ask what is wrong with you, do not answer "you are not real" 😂 Let us know how it goes!

I haven't jumped, I've only hypothesized. It might be accurate to characterize Lex as "wanting peace and love for humanity", but his words and mannerisms are not sufficient evidence for me to do that. At worst, he's still a good guy (probably). It's just that I think it's possibly/probably erroneous/overly simplistic to characterize him as someone who wants "peace and love for the world", just as it would be to characterize a Christian televangelists as someone who wants peace and love for the world. If there's something more fundamental that is driving them, it is a bastardization of peace and love, is it not? If I asked you to tell me, fundamentally, what is a Christian televangelists, and you delivered to me: "Decent people who are a bit naive but their intentions are good and they're likely a net-positive." and omitted the elephant in the room that is their self-deception, that would draw my ire. Of course your statement might be true, but it omits important details. Maybe you have details that I don't. I'm taking my ball and going home.

It is indeed in a good place. Even to pay lip service to peace and love is better than not. He's probably a net positive for the world and he may even turn out to be a HUGE net positive. But this has nothing to do with assessing the known variables. I'm not calling him evil or bad. Like, rain isn't bad. Can I call rain, rain, without being told I'm pessimistic?

Thanks, I appreciate that bro!

I don't think he's full of shit on that, I just think it's ok to ask what is driving him. And I have not made a leap, I have it as a likely hypothesis. You believe he's primarily driven by peace and love... but I have not made that leap and will not make that leap without sufficient reason. You are operating on bias here, not me. I have no reason to assume the members of the most popular and exclusive club on the planet are primarily motivated by peace and love. And I don't think you do either. As such, to me, it's an open question as to what is driving him. When I see an authority such as yourself making a claim like this, I get confused.

Well, I said "IMO", but, how do you know what I can and can't know? When I was 4 I saw a wall of books and had a spiritual experience. My Need for Cognition might be beyond your understanding of what is normal for a mind. I consumed more information yesterday than the average person will all year. Not factual consumption, conceptual. Deep shit. I had 10 deep insights into human psychology before lunch time, and that was just yesterday, before lunch. Do you know what it's like to be born intellectually independent, thus, minimizing bias? Do you know what it's like to naturally value the truth, thus minimizing bias even further? Do you know what it's like to have sufficient confidence in your cognition, such that to be wrong is a good thing because that's how you become right? Feel free to show me any error I make, and I will earnestly consider it and correct it. I have been wrong countless times before and am not afraid to be wrong now. Have you ever played poker? You have to make lots of decisions. You will be wrong many times and those errors can be analyzed if you have the courage to ask "why was I wrong?".

@Leo Gura I don't have an agenda for Lex to share. I just don't like when the most fundamental things about an item are obfuscated, especially when that obfuscation turns vice into virtue. Also, I have not said his approach is detrimental, I just pointed to his bias. Whether it's good to push back or not, I do not know and I don't care because it's not my business, nor something I can change. The point of observing and analyzing him is not to judge or finger point. It's to simply understand what is going on.

I agree with all that, including his right to conduct himself how he wants. 100%. I might be projecting my own communication style onto you but not sure. If someone's primary impulse is material gain, with peace and love as secondary, I'd never characterize their core motivation as peace and love without clearly qualifying that distinction. The pursuit of worldly things more fundamentally shapes their actions and decisions. Framing their guiding principle as peace and love, without acknowledging its most likely secondary nature, misrepresents their behavior. To me, this risks elevating a non-primary influence to primary status and distorts understanding, but like I said, this might just be a difference in thinking/communication style. When we're debating someone's potential impact on society, it's important to dig into their real intentions, not just the ones they say they have. There was this study on Prius buyers - turns out their main motivation wasn't actually protecting the environment, but to signal virtue. We need to know the actual drivers (no pun intended) if we're going to observe and assess accurately.

Maybe they're just skeptical about his desire for peace and love because when they look on the surface, the first thing they see is a rich guy who just so happens to be best friends with two of the most influential people on the planet, Rogan and Musk. This "want" Lex has is highly unusual and odd for his station. People are right to be skeptical and if you're not or have not at least worked through the skepticism, you have a huge fucking blindspot, and it's weird. IMO, Lex believes he wants peace and love, but I think he's thoroughly self-deceived. Of course, he wants those, but he wants the lifestyle of the rich and famous first. You seem to be reluctant to touch upon the self-deception mechanisms that are potentially, and IMO, very likely in play here. I don't think Lex is a bad guy. I just think he's living the high life on the lifestyle brand of "peace and love". To assert and characterize the primary intentions of Lex and Musk as "wanting peace and love and what's best for humanity", just seems like a total failure of sense-making. TOTAL FAILURE! That's what galls me!

Also spineless and careless. For those of us who've connected the dots and seen that many of our serious problems stem from ignorance and falsehood and how those proliferate via incentivized information manipulation, we understand the necessity of implementing reasonable restrictions. Some people lack either the intellect and/or moral development to arrive at this conclusion. Someone once asked me why I care that Fox News fucks over our epistemic commons every night on prime time TV. Those are the types of people who are absolutists. People who simply don't care.

I'm not sure. They're saying the owner/operators of Tenet Media knew the money was coming from Russia. If that's true, it wouldn't surprise me if Tim Pool and the others were also aware.

Would he have pushed harder on Biden or Kamala? Obviously, yes, else he never would have heard the end of it from his social circle. Is there any utility in assessing his integrity, or would doing so automatically assign you the label of green judger? Here's some yellow speak: Observation scope: Leave lofty spiritual clouds and zoom into human society and its component parts Component in observation: Lex Fridman Goal of observation: Analyze component's motivations and integrity for purpose of assessing systemic impact What are good and bad aspects of this component? (Good and bad relative to the goal—systemic health) Good: Brings value to many in various ways Bad: Audience captured, integrity is compromised Attributes relevant to integrity assessment: - More vibes driven than ideological - Audience captured to a significant degree - Higher than average intelligence - Higher than average conscientiousness - Game-theory aware - Heavily influenced by epistemically compromised social circle (Rogan, Musk, other popular kids) - Myopic perspective. Naively values short-term social harmony over long-term systemic health. Opportunities: - Non-alienating content can be used for deradicalization - Foster sentiment of camaraderie and unity - Normalization of diverse perspectives Threats: - Seeming acceptance of radical viewpoints can radicalize fence sitters and fortify bad actor positions - Unconscious dissemination of misinformation fueled by naivety and bias (largely influenced by epistemically compromised social circle) - Spread falsehood to large swaths of people Obviously, you could spend days expanding upon this, but I think this is largely an accurate representation of this component's state. LOL.

After 3 or 6 months of success, I often lose touch with my why. I find environment design just as important as mindset. https://i.imgur.com/zN29Bgp.png

Yeah, too boring. You could still glean some insights from a game theory perspective, if you were playing that game, but it's just too boring at this point. Lex's games are interesting.

I guess you're right. It is easy for many. I guess I just wanted to lash out against it.

Yes, It's possible. You can even register businesses in other states and depending on where you live, you don't always have to register a business. You can set up a website right now and start selling digital files. How would anyone know? It's been changing but IIRC, credit card merchant companies only report your income to tax man if you do over $20k + 200 transactions. So if you only do 199 transactions, they don't send that to the tax man, AFAIK. You still have to be honest when reporting your income, but there's no one knocking down your door asking what kind of shady business you're running. Your message includes "business administration", "hiding things from your family" and "rectum". You trying to get set up on Onlyfans or what?