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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.

Hi. I'm typing this as a forum post because it would be nice to have some input or wisdom from other people. I'll try to keep it relatively concise, though I fear it might evolve into an oversharing blog post. Some background: I'm 23. I have one semester left in my university studies. My home life didn't exactly set me up for anything—my dad has a traumatic brain injury and my mom has autism. They both work low-level jobs like call centers or at Walmart. I was able to move out at 18, work a lot while going to community college for math, save up a lot of money, then somehow get accepted to the University of Texas (in mathematics); with a full ride, due to the fact that my parents are poor. Moreover, my two roommates and I bought a house together in Austin, immediately before Elon declared he was building his cybertruck factory here (it has since appreciated in value considerably, but the profit will be split between the three of us). Since I began community college at 19, I thought that I wanted to go to graduate school and do my PhD in math. I was able to get into an undergraduate research program (in geometric group theory) last summer, and our preprint has recently been accepted for publication. At this REU, I met a girl and we have since fallen in love. She is a double major in compsci and math and graduates at the same time as me, she has a 6-figures programming job lined up after graduation. We are currently in a long-distance relationship as the REU was deliberately comprised of people from all over the nation. The Uncertainty: As I did more math, it started to get substantially less meaningful to me. It very quickly gets so abstract that you can no longer talk about it with anybody in a meaningful way; during my last semester, in my graduate course, it began to feel highly contrived and disconnected from anything helpful to society. Moreover, during this time in university, I spontaneously developed insomnia for almost two years and got seriously burnt out (it has just recently improved a lot). I no longer want to go to graduate school—it would require 6 more years of my life dedicated to problems that feel ridiculously contrived, followed by a lengthy time trying to climb the academia ladder. From my time at the REU, I learned there are people much younger, smarter, and better than me at math. I would not be a luminary academic or anything. I have a strong internal sense that I could spend six years in a better way. Yet, I have no idea what to do in absence of this, other than planning to move in with my girlfriend as soon as I can (this is where I fully noticed the downside of buying a house with 2 other people: if you want to leave, they have to have an alternative living situation lined up. Regardless, I think it will work out fairly well, and I can be out around this time next year). I really hate the idea of working a desk job. I had a desk job as my first job when I was 18, and it was so miserably depressing that I quit after 6 weeks—it caused my back to constantly hurt from all the sitting and it was generally soulless. This makes all programming jobs very unappealing to me, despite the fact that with half a year of training, I could probably land a pretty good one. Though if I was going to go this route, I would get my masters in Data Science. My girlfriend has offered to simply be the sole breadwinner for us both, as she makes so much, but this idea is very unnerving to me. At the same time, she is an unreasonably good partner, and so it might not actually be so damaging to the relationship (I am highly confident that she means this when she says it). In any case, I could still work a small amount to pay rent, and not be completely dependent on her. This additionally has the advantage of being completely able to focus on my own pursuits (which are, as of yet, undetermined). Uncertainty tl;dr: Basically, I would like to do something that I have some passion for but that doesn't completely abandon my past accomplishments: I should have a BSc in Math with a 4.0 GPA after next semester, a publication, and probably $30k-50k in profit from selling my house. It feels like all industry pursuits for mathematicians are desk jobs in some way. Also, I would have to simply work for a company, which sounds very unappealing to me. Maybe the best option is just to get a high-paying programming job, work it for 5 years and save all of my money, then leave.

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.

Things can be social constructs and still reliant on biological makeup (and I would argue that gender does, though there are some very radical people that argue its SOLELY based on identity — this seems to just completely annihilate the categories of man and woman) For example, race is a social construct, and it is not completely devoid of a biological basis. Another example is “attractive people.” If a society deems high cheekbones, say, as attractive, this this provides some biological basis for the social construct. In general, you shouldn’t take “socially constructed” to mean “arbitrary.”

I guess I am not very surprised about this, but I thought it was interesting that they want to raise the age to starting HRT to 21. Not even 18 is good enough; I assume they want to slowly raise the age until trans people can't exist (or... exist in a worse state that makes conservatives even more uncomfortable?) I live in Texas and am 23 on HRT. Hopefully I can age faster than they can raise it.

I think that it is easy to (having an objective perspective on the matter, not having recently had sex and feeling violated, and having the full wealth of knowledge of SD) make a criticism like, "Your spiral wizardry abilities are bad and youre not effectively communicating to different spiral dynamics levels. Furthermore, the fact that you did not intuitively pick up on this other person's spiral level, despite never learning about this model, and adjust your communication to match it shows that you were really expressing a lower level of development in this moment." It just feels like either too strong or irrelevant of a criticism to make. It's not as if he's trying to maximize other people's understanding of him in order to avoid conflict at all moments of his life. It seems like he was okay with her leaving when she wasn't able to take on his perspective. Should he be obligated to handhold everyone as much as possible, and, if he does not in some cases, he suffers the terrible fate of his part of that interaction being demoted to stage green? This seems to force stage yellow into stage where you have to constantly tailor your words to what you believe the other person's views are.

Currently watching this, and I like mrgirl even more now. His talk about his goal with 'debates' was very yellow-y and enlightening. His views on consent, the subject of the actual talk, are interesting as well. I recently had a complex sort -of-nonconsensual sexual interaction on Halloween (I was the one coerced/pressured in some sense), and it's helpful or interesting for me to think about this through mrgirl's framework. EDIT: Wow, the conversation just got better after the debate talk!! Probably the best I have seen from him so far.

I agree that this does not give a complete picture, but I think it is important to acknowledge and plays a large role. You are not purely an individual, nor are you purely determined by the environment. The two are interrelated and so both places seem like valid areas to make changes in. I do agree that from an individual level, analyzing the problem like this is very disempowering since the solutions are not able to be achieved by you alone. However, forming organizations that bring awareness to these topics and try to bring structural change to the US is an important thing to do, because these things play a huge role. Also, these structural and historical things have to be at least acknowledged on the individual scale because it simply provides more information and a clearer picture as to why you're in the current situation. I don't think I would necessarily agree that the narrative should be more focused on individual choice because individual choice is not a solution that everyone can implement. Moreover, if your goal is to make changes to "Black America", a term that is necessarily a collective grouping of many individuals, it makes sense to examine problems in a collective sense. This means examining histories and structural issues. It feels very odd and ineffective to take a problem that is necessarily collective, even in the phrasing, divide it down to the individual actors, and then try to influence each one of them by giving them general guidelines on how to improve their lives. I'm sure most people have heard these things. It's like, suppose we made two words. One, we work on the systemic issues directly and in the other we say things like, "stop being single mothers. Aren't you aware that this is bad for many reasons? Also, commit less crimes. This is causing many issues as well. You need to take personal action to fix these problems." The former seems to be more effective since we are trying to work on a collective problem. For a single individual, the latter seems to be more effective, as the systemic issues effects on an individual are more pernicious and abstract. I agree that this may happen, however it depends on the black friends that you make. There are black people who follow, say, Candace owens or Jesse Lee Peterson who would be fully on board with the things you say, since it mimics a lot of their talking points. For this reason, I'm not sure I really like the, "make more black friends," solution, because the implication is really something like, "make more black friends that are reasonably close to my current position." And even if you did this, they would likely respond in a similar way to Terell. I think Terell's goal here is to make you more aware of the black experience or develop a higher level of empathy for black people which will inform your views better. I would need to think about this more.

https://youtu.be/OpMdjv-EElU His days are likely to be numbered, given the state of cancel culture and people's urge to deplatform rather than engage. That, or he might be able to change things for the better if he can survive it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-UH6VOg4Zo I will make no claims as to Destiny's position on the spiral, but here is a very recent pedophile talk where Destiny has a detached way of thinking about pedophiles, with empathy for them, and everyone else is extremely mad (they are conservatives). Except for Stardust who comes in at the end. Kind of interesting to see the difference in perspectives (note: Brittany Venti has prior beef with Destiny, partially from this exact same topic, which makes things more annoying and less productive).

I've also been meaning to watch this! I think they will get along very well from what I've seen (I watched the gender one), since they can both think about things in a detached way.

Comparing facial structure over huge stretches of time is silly. Your skull is made up of bone pieces attached together by sutures, and these bones can move depending on many factors. For example, stroke victims who lose the ability to move one side of their face have actual bone structure changes over years. For a more extreme example, look at how Steven Hawking's bone structure has changed over the course of his life. Your environment shapes a lot of who you are. This is not to mention that differences in lighting can do A LOT to make your face look different (try this at home with a camera). ALSO, I bet it would be relatively easy to find pictures or videos of Joe Biden at points halfway between these two images, and there would be continuity. I mean at this point, I could go through the entire article and push back on every claim he makes like: There is absolutely no way people who engage in flash polls on the internet are a representative sample of the American population. Think of how many working-class Americans there are that barely use the internet at all. I don't even think this deserves a reply. This is something that someone who is terminally online would say. Trump was an extremely divisive figure who used Twitter extensively and in a novel way, compared to any other president. Of course he is going to have more Twitter followers. His tweets were all over the news a lot of the time. I have seen this video before and it seems highly plausible that it is actually real; check out some of the pictures from that day. The microphones are oriented in a counter-intuitive way. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/18/youtube-videos/no-biden-didnt-fake-interview-front-green-screen/ But I don't have the time to do this, nor do I think it is worth it; this seems to just be pure insanity. Rigorously debunking all of these claims would take so much time that almost nobody would bother doing it. Even if it were done, people will just make up more nonsense that you then have to figure out and debunk. How would it be possible to fake an entire president with a (somehow extremely accurate) body double and create all of these photoshopped images and fake media creations. Think of how many individual people are involved in the U.S. Government and interact with Joe Biden. NONE of these people are going to notice? Or they have, and they are all in on the conspiracy? At this point, there is nothing you can do anyway and you're just completely fucked with no solutions.

I didn't know exactly what category to put this video in on the forum. The people in the video are at such a low level of development that all their values are centered around immediate basic survival; it's very eye-opening because it shows that people at lower stages on the spiral (if that's the model you're going with) really cannot care about higher values.

That's a good point too! We're essentially the same, just with more complicated/abstract problems from a more complicated society.

Well, the people who are going to engage in the debate have to form some coherent mental picture of the world in order to then argue about how we should change them (well, at least if they are going to use reason, but some level of reason is required for it to have any sense of meaning at all. More importantly, we have gone through the western enlightenment and most people are now going to form/change their beliefs with varying levels of logical thinking). Currently, it seems that one of the most effective ways to do this is to use statistics and the social sciences, and it seems like the best way to access these things is via the internet; either in articles or directly on the study databases. I'm not really sure how it could be any other way; people have to read articles and statistics in order to get familiar with the current data available about the topic. Unless by "pursue truth" you mean Destiny should become enlightened and realize there are no real problems in the world apart from our ideas about problems, and thus Destiny no longer feels the need to convince anyone of anything at all. At which point, I would wonder what the point of browsing the politics section of the forum is. If you mean Destiny should find out what is true about things like gun control and systemic racism and simply be content that he now knows, then I have other issues with that that I will give if this is indeed what you mean.