Ves

It's surprising that you find the men around you fall into this fairly strict dichotomy. I'm a guy, so I don't pay attention to these things as much, but it seems like most of the guys who have been around me in my life were fairly normal. I would even say that beta soyboys who are into spirituality were much rarer than Trump supporters.

Pxie wanted him to give her a large amount of money, so much that she didn't believe he would ever be willing to do it (something between "pay for her law school" or "a million dollars" iirc). It seems she decided to sue him partially because of this and partially because she didn't feel he was trying to make things right/taking it seriously enough in general.

Is Notebook LM really so good? My one experience with it was feeding it a paper in pure mathematics straight from the arXiv, and I got the vaguest overview that you could possibly imagine. Sure, it was an extremely technical paper and there are limits to what I should expect. Maybe the system can't even parse such a paper very well. At the same time... the podcast was basically just two people getting sidetracked constantly, and when they were on topic, they could only make up incredibly banal analogies. Imagine two people with ADHD adlibbing a podcast over a topic they have zero knowledge about. It was even more concerning because I first heard about Notebook LM from other graduate students (most of them in some kind of science field) who seemed to find it valuable. It is better with less technical data? They can speak meaningfully and productively in a focused way? Maybe I should try it again with excerpts from a novel to see how nuch better it is.

A good (and fairly long) video a friend sent me: It talks about the evolution of Facebook's destructiveness to our society over time (in particular, the troll farms and Russian disinformation). And not just our society! At some point, Zuckerberg rolled out Facebook to Myanmar and other third world countries. It ended up severely amplifying racial tensions which lead to an ethnic cleansing. Pretty concerning; I don't see these issues going away anytime soon. Or improving at all -- Elon Musk bought twitter and basically just turned it into an unregulated Russian bot farm where misinformation is allowed to run rampant, often even further spread by Elon himself.

Democracy requires some foundational prerequisites to be true in order to work effectively. People need to have accurate and high-quality information available to them, and they need to be able to make sense of this information in a high-quality way. Having massive amounts of pure garbage flooding all social media platforms undermines the first prerequisite. The fact that most people have a low capacity for high-quality sensemaking (for various reasons: education, tribalism also fueled by social media) undermines the second. Russia knows this, and this is why they pay people like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin to spread tons of garbage for no other purpose than to sow discord and undermine our democracy. The idea of free speech has become weaponized to allow massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda to spread. People, say Dave Rubin, will say things like "the marketplace of ideas," because people superficially love the idea of this. Then they use it to continue to spread tons of garbage everywhere. It's obviously hard, though, because you also can't just start banning certain types of speech. If you try to ban misinformation, more than half of the country freaks out. If you don't ban it, they continue to be poisoned and the quality of the country slowly crumbles. The only way out is some kind of cultural enlightenment, I think, but this doesn't seem like a real possibility either when people are arguing about whether or not hurricanes are made by the government. I believe this issue will only continue to get worse in the future. The only positive shift that comes to mind is that I have a vague memory of some fairly popular podcasters recommending people to heavily cut down on their social media intake or to stay off of it, but I don't think this is enough.

I was born male and took estrogen for 1 year. I stopped nearly 2 years ago. My sexual attraction to women never changed, I met my current girlfriend near the end of my time on estrogen. This happens to many people, there are a lot of trans woman lesbians. Also you can reverse it — at least, for males taking estrogen — depending on how long you were taking hormones and individual factors. My body went back to normal over a few months, except for the fact that I have some fairly mild gyno now 😔. (Unless you meant different hormones?)

I don’t think this debunks IQ so much as it debunks learning that your IQ is some number and then deciding to never try learning anything because you feel its worthless to try. I do think it’s wise to be honest about the realistic paths you can take in life given your capacities (IQ being one type of capacity). You just shouldn’t decide to never learn anything because you (incorrectly) assume its impossible for you to do so.

Sorry, I meant you can practice the SAT to increase your score. That‘s all that really matters for the colleges :-).

I think it is correct that SAT scores are fairly correlated with IQ. You can practice to increase your score, though. When Leo said that SAT scores dont affect how fulfilling your life is, I think he meant that this is independent of IQ. Meaning that you should refocus your goals to have the best/most fulfilling life you can and not stress over how low your IQ is. I doubt its below average anyway, if you made it through a high-school education and did decently. You might as well pick any other attribute you have that isn't in the top 1% of the population and stress about that.

I have some advice, maybe. I spent high school playing video games and didn’t decide I wanted to go to college until I was 19 or so. I went to community college for math while working part time, saved a lot of money, then transferred into one of the best universities for pure mathematics in the US (probably top 15). So: all hope is not lost if you really want to go to a good college. This option is probably better, too. Now, this only worked out because I made a 4.0 in community college, and I am not sure this is possible for everyone, particularly in math. It does require some innate talent. You should be able to do well enough, though, even if you don’t get into a top university. Just do as well as you can and apply to transfer later. You shouldn’t have FOMO; the events will happen to you too, just later. Though, I still feel the way you do, sometimes. I think I want to go into academia, and there are insanely cracked people that learn an unreal amount of (say) modern algebraic geometry as a high schooler. One in particular I saw is teaching a course in K theory as an undergraduate, while also taking a ton of graduate classes every semester. There are always better people to compare yourself to. Each of us can only do the work we can do, though. I am sure you can continue on in community college, make friends, transfer into a university, and have a similar experience.

I think it's really going to depend on how much time you want to put into learning math. I'm fairly confident that, with enough time, you could learn enough math such that the exam isn't very difficult for you. This may require relearning a lot of basic math from scratch. I say this as somebody with a publication in pure math. However, given that you hate math, this may not be the best path forward; Leo's path may be a better alternative. I think the cost of his approach is that any time you do encounter math in your degree, it's always going to be fairly confusing and painful. For a psych degree, you probably won't need to endure too much, so I think this is a valid tradeoff to make. I think my only remaining worry is that the "memorize and grind through" approach may end up being more work in the long run, but it's hard to say. Deeply learning a lot of math concepts takes a lot of time as well.

Well, in some sense, getting a full-time job to do some math-related work for an arbitrary company already feels like selling my life. I will avoid working overtime, though, considering I already don't want to work full-time.

This is probably what I'll end up doing. I do want to start some sort of business or independent venture of my own at some point, though. It's just hard to know 1) specifically what I should do, as well as 2) when to do it. I have an idea in my mind of creating youtube content. Perhaps I can do that on the side, even if I have a job. It probably makes the most sense at this point to work a job with good pay for awhile, and acquire a lot of capital/financial independence.

I guess that's the thing. At one point, I did have a grand passion. I spent all of my time for several years doing pure math and became pretty good at it as a result. Good enough to publish as an undergrad, at least. Now that I realize how much of my life would be eaten up by struggling to comprehend increasingly meaningless complex abstractions if I go into academia, I am less interested in it. Thus, the passion has collapsed, but there is nothing left in its wake and so I feel sort of directionless. Of course, I am still going to college so it's not as if I am actually directionless, yet. I just don't know what comes next and I have no grander vision like I used to. Maybe you're right. I think it's reasonably expensive though. I've slowly depleted my savings over the years of going to college because math at university is so difficult that I can only work 15 hours a week—just enough to pay my bills. I'll keep this in mind for the future, though.

You have a good point, I think. Especially if I can do a work-from-home type job, which are increasingly more common. However, I feel a strong internal sense to start something on my own as well. It’s just hard to know whether I should attempt to do it now, or whether I should work until I’m, say, near 30 first.