something_else

@Leo Gura Have you ever tried mescaline cacti? For practicality reasons that's what I'm planning on starting with

Says who. How would you know? I meant conscious in terms of being aware of why exactly you were watching porn in the first place. If it's out of addiction you have no control over it then we agree entirely, where we disagree is that it's impossible to enjoy it in a way that is not destructive to your psyche. I suppose most people who watch it probably are addicted, and it's definitely something to be careful with. But it seems like you've turned it into something that triggers a pretty aggressive reaction in you which I'd say is something else to be careful of.

Nope. If I had to guess, to stop it from being overcrowded and restrict the list to books that are really the cream of the crop

If you're a little bit technical you can find the old books that used to be on the list but were removed. If you right click on anywhere in the book list (likely under Emotional Mastery in this case as @Waves pointed out) and click 'Inspect element' on Chrome you can see commented out HTML for all the old books. Perhaps you'll find it there?

Maybe if you're addicted. You honestly think watching porn once a week or whatever is gonna damage you psychologically? You probably get more psychological damage by obsessing over how bad and evil something is than indulging in it consciously and in moderation.

I practiced self-inquiry pretty heavily for about 3-4 months, at the end of which I had my first experience of a different state of consciousness. I identified with perceptions like the sounds I was hearing, mainly water running as I was in a public bathroom practicing self-inquiry. Yes, I had my first mystical experience in a public bathroom cubicle while a dude was shitting in the one next to me. It's a long story. It was nothing ground breaking, but it was the first "Oh shit there's something worth further investigation here" experience. Weirdly, after that I had a really difficult time doing self-inquiry, I couldn't focus on the questions and my mind just wandered. Perhaps the ego was thinking "great, we got what we wanted, no need to look any further hee hee " Anyway, I've now been doing Kriya for 6 months instead to quiet the mind, and I'm planning on experimenting with more psychedelics as soon as that's practical for me, then I'm going to start up self-inquiry again. It did do something for me.

Are you trying to tell me you think you're better than the people thinking "I'm better than you"

Consider that you don't know that much about the dating scene yet, and that you're extrapolating a lot from limited experience and hearsay from communities online like blackpill/redpill. What they preach is so so so easy to believe when you don't have a lot of experience socialising or talking to people in person, but really how do you know any of it actually applies to the real world? I'm only a few years older than you so I can hardly say I'm that experienced with dating either, but accepting that you don't know how dating works yet leaves room for the idea that you can learn. You're just inexperienced, and that's normal. Accept it and start looking for ways to change that. Online dating is kind of a crutch, even if you can make it work for you. At least, I have used it as a crutch, and I'm in the process of trying to change that

Discrimination is not really something that can be solved by throwing more money at the problem

There's a whole section in the JP video about how the vast majority of Green people don't want equality of outcome and those that do are on the extreme side

I haven't watched the Gödel video, but I can imagine how considering the metaphysical implications would be worthwhile, or at least interesting. It demonstrates the absolute limits of symbolic logic and mathematics, two of the most widespread ways for reasoning about reality that humanity has. Why not consider the metaphysics of that?

Funnily enough, I was in a very similar situation recently. I just completed my 4th (final) year dissertation for my degree, and throughout the entire thing I felt almost exactly as you describe in the quote above. My topic was very open ended and there was a very real possibility that I was going to have little or no results up until the last month or so. The sense of impending doom, but not knowing exactly what kind of doom, is excruciating. Your mind assumes the absolute worst when it doesn't know what the worst that could happen is. I don't have advice for you other than the obvious; it will be OK, you will get it done, the worst case scenario is not as bad as your imagination wants to think it is, nor as likely to happen as your imagination wants you to think it is. See @ivankiss comment! But what I can tell you is that you are most certainly not alone in feeling this way about big university projects, it's essentially how you're meant to feel. I mentioned the particular kind of stress about my project I was experiencing to one of my friends who is also studying a similar topic, and what he said to me that was particularly cathartic was "all university students feel this way about their thesis".

You need at least one spades worth of midi-chlorians to jump like this: Comical children's character? No. Darth Jar Jar? Yes.

Hahaha, even by stage orange standards this kind of obsession with aggressively debunking a single person is unhealthy Last updated May 8th, the person keeps their work up to date. They might even see this thread en route to find outrageous statements to cherry pick

@Leo Gura Criticising materialism doesn't trigger people's defence mechanisms as much though. It might be an easier way to get through to people. The quantum mechanics video you made was the one that finally opened my mind, and if I remember correctly that was because it made me question materialism. I don't think it's as hard to make people question materialism because it's more abstract and inherently philosophical, so people are more open to discuss it. Compared to when you question science and people freak the fuck out because their worldview is built on all the cool shit they attribute to science. Obviously that fact itself is why it's important for people to address how they view science, but I think discussing the idea of reality not being perfectly material is a better way of opening people's mind in the first place. It worked for me, and that approach helped me have some cool discussions with my friends where they were able to acknowledge that there are lots of ways in which materialism doesn't really make all that much sense.

@Leo Gura That's a cool idea actually, and I agree with its inferiority when it comes to measuring someone's in the moment wit for sure. Along with Fischer chess, another cool variation I saw recently which works around the same concept was Fog of War chess, where you can only see your opponents pieces that are in the line of sight of your own pieces. https://www.chess.com/terms/fog-of-war-chess Similar idea to Fischer chess where you can't reliably prepare, but rather than initial randomness you have partial observability, it really fucks with your mind and leaves a whole shit ton of room for creative strategies. I would also say that the preparation component of classical chess still has merit, surely planning counters to your opponents preferences is an important part of strategic thinking, even if that works out as raw memorisation in this case.

@Leo Gura It's a huge part, but there are more possible chess games than atoms in the material universe, and that figure was a napkin math estimate. No one actually really knows even roughly how many possible games there are. So yea, raw memorisation is essential at the start and middle of pro games sure, but at some point in the game the players have gotta start using human heuristics to narrow the search. By the time an endgame is reached memorisation can't be a factor unless it's the memorisation of an algorithm or set of principles. Also, what happens if your opponent plays a completely unexpected move? Even after a few moves, there are more positions than you could feasibly memorise in a lifetime, at that point the heuristics and principles are required too.

It depends what you want to memorise. Method of loci is a way of making your memory intentional and controllable instead of wishy and washy. For it to work, you need to be able to break a concept down into specific chunks that can be stored and recovered to reconstruct the original concept. That makes it great for concrete things like names, procedures, vocabulary, cards, numbers etc. Once you get into more complex topics, the effort of breaking the topic down into chunks that can be stored easily in a memory palace is usually greater than the effort of just using your regular old memory. However even in these cases it is a fantastic tool for memorising summaries of a complex topic. This gives you more confidence in your natural memory for the topic as others have alluded to being effective earlier in the thread. It's not difficult to learn, visualise leaving your phone somewhere in your home and capture that feeling. Remembering where you put something extends to the mental model you have of the world as well as the physical world, it's really quite neat how your brain does this. Then all you have to do is replace the phone with some kind of symbol that reminds you of an idea/name/number etc. And use free resources, like artofmemory.com and their forum, the core technique is so simple that anyone selling you a course is probably trying to teach you extra crap you don't need.