Socrates

Academia Is A Sausage Factory The funniest part is the comment section, which functions the same when someone gives up their religion. When you notice this, the mechanisms of dogma are the same amongst those two; it is really funny.

@UnbornTao Depends on the context. In this context, finger pointing to the moon, you're looking at the finger, what a way to demonstrate unintelligence. edit: I'm actually convinced most people dont EVER intersect with intelligence, and even if they do by accident, they dont notice it because you gotta have it to do so.

Most of what you're describing isn't stupidity — it's the predictable output of a system that never installed the prerequisite for intelligent behavior: self-observation. You cannot be anything other than self-biased when your entire formative experience was designed around external compliance — grades, approval, social scripts — with zero structured exposure to introspection. The system doesn't produce low-intelligence people, it produces unintelligent ones. People who are cognitively capable but epistemically blind to themselves. You couldn't engineer a more effective intelligence-suppression system if you tried. The real prerequisite — before psychology, before philosophy, before any self-development — is thousands of hours observing yourself. What triggers you. What you want and why. What you believe and on what basis. Without that foundation, behavior runs on inherited script. Not chosen, not examined — just executed. This is the distinction you're missing entirely: you're describing conditioned narcissism and emotional immaturity, then labeling it stupidity. These are different failure modes. A highly intelligent but insecure, trauma-shaped person produces identical behaviors to a genuinely unintelligent one. The word "stupid" collapses that distinction and does bad diagnostics. The harder truth is that these people have no meaningful free will in the domain you're describing. They are running executable files from their upbringing. You wouldn't blame Firefox for opening when you double-click it, nor would you expect Internet Explorer to open. Blame requires the possibility of choice, and choice requires self-awareness as its prerequisite, which was never installed. This is not a defense of the behavior, and it doesn't mean the behavior is tolerable to live with. It means you're misidentifying the cause, which matters if you actually want to understand what you're dealing with or decide what to do about it.

Population studies answer a different question than the one you're actually asking. They tell you what works on average across a group. You're not a group. You're one person, with your specific metabolism, gut microbiome, stress levels, and sleep patterns. And here's the deeper problem: that average often doesn't exist in reality at all. If two people are 160cm and two are 200cm, the average is 180cm — but nobody in the room is 180cm. The number is real on paper and fictional in reality. Diet research does the same thing — it produces recommendations that may not correspond to how any single participant actually responded. You're not just getting someone else's result; you're potentially getting a number that belongs to nobody. The only experiment that's actually about you is the one you run on yourself. That's not arrogance — it's just correct epistemology. N=1 self-experimentation, done with attention, gives you direct information. A study gives you statistical noise filtered through people who may have completely different bodies, awareness levels, and even the ability to report what they're feeling accurately. Trusting the institution isn't humble — it's outsourcing a job only you can do. And if you actually want to be scientific about it, run the experiment yourself. But do the opposite of what institutional science does. Science isolates variables because that's the only way to publish a clean paper. But you're not writing a paper, you're living a life. Your job is to include as many variables as possible — sleep, stress, training, food, mood, all of it simultaneously — because that's the only way to get the full picture. A controlled study that strips away context to find a single clean signal is the least realistic condition you could ever test. Reality doesn't isolate variables. Neither should you.

Not an ideal choice, but considering the current state of the USA being Israel's whore, anyone willing to push against this is a warrior of good. I dont see why the filthy, fat israeli rat randy should be in Congress, let alone breathe after suggesting nuking Gaza, but Dan is the problem when he wants a sovereign nation and not a colony of Israel. Im really surprised these scumbags havent face actual consequences from real patriots as they should.

That's a funny and unexpected collab. But the reason I share this is how much better quality the conversation is compared to the Dr K one. An orange scammer with an open mind (relatively) and in good faith is a better conversationalist than an academic jester in bad faith who thinks that they already know everything and can't even ask quality questions. Let that sink in, being good faith is the only prerequisite for quality conversations. THE ONLY! The more you grow, the more you will see how much academia corrupts the mind from a young age, and it mainly functions as a crutch for self-esteem and limited identity. The moment you think you already know, your learning is over, and you're stuck.

@zurew Outsourcing is inevitable and not inherently problematic. The goal isn't independence from all external input—it's retaining ownership of the conclusions. You outsource the technical and mechanical parts of validation: the experiments, the data collection, and the methodology execution. What you never outsource is the evaluative layer—scrutinizing sample size, methodology quality, experimenter incentives, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. That part stays yours. The smarter move is a reduction to fundamentals. Most topics have a small number of high-yield structural questions that determine the shape of everything else. Getting those right produces more epistemic value than mastering the technical periphery, and it's more time-efficient. The technical experiments become inputs you filter, not authorities you defer to. The one honest complication: identifying which experiments are high-yield versus low-yield requires some prior competence in the domain. That distinction isn't always visible from the outside.

The office and friends are cringemaxxing

https://zeteo.com/p/mehdi-goes-head-to-head-with-professor-jiang ***( i suggest watching the full interview) Watch how triggered and combative Medhi gets in this one (noted that I usually like this guy). Anything below yellow has emotional reactions to other stages. If any perspective actually triggers you, you aren't yellow yet. Also, notice how still clinging to arbitrary facts like the meaning is baked-in, an orange/green person is, as if a fact has any inherent meaning in a vacuum, or as if it produces any actual understanding without context/interpretation.

@Leo Gura The only part I can be more charitable on is "extremely unlikely, not impossible." Noted. But notice what you just did. You had an opportunity to defend the substance of your position, and instead spent your entire response policing how I read your quote. You have no argument to defend the original claim, and correcting my reading doesn't produce one. On the substance: extremely unlikely compared to what? If serious university graduates also largely fail to develop transferable rationality—which domain-dependence strongly suggests—your position becomes "rationality is rare everywhere, but marginally less rare in universities." That's not the strong claim you're making. And you're confusing correlation with causation. The selection problem goes completely unaddressed. Intellectually serious people are funneled toward university by default. Of course, most visibly rational people have degrees. That's a pipeline effect, not institutional causation. When you have an actual argument, I'm here for it.

@Leo Gura You're conflating the source of rationality with the institution that claims to teach it. Rationality as a capacity predates universities by millennia. Aristotle, Socrates, and a long line of thinkers developed rigorous epistemic frameworks with no formal institution behind them. The idea that rationality is essentially a university product is a very modern and very provincial assumption. On your second point, "poor students don't reflect on the classes," you're dodging the actual criticism. The argument isn't that the curriculum lacks rational content. It's that the system's incentives, structure, and culture don't produce internalized rationality in most graduates. If the output is consistently poor, at some point that's the system's problem, not a coincidence of bad students. And your own position undermines itself. You say rationality "is taught at university," but teaching and learning are different things. If the majority of serious university students still outsource their validation to academic consensus rather than developing independent judgment, then whatever is being taught isn't landing. That's not a defense of the institution, it's an indictment of it dressed up as one. The stronger point is simpler: a person who independently develops the ability to construct models, test claims, and update beliefs without deferring to authority is rational by any meaningful definition—regardless of whether they ever set foot in a lecture hall. Gatekeeping rationality behind institutional credentials is exactly the kind of authority-dependent thinking the argument is criticizing.

Actualized Quotes #481 This is probably the worst take I've seen from Leo. Public education is 95% pre rational in itself; repeating and parroting "correct" scientific ideas isn't rational nor does it introduce you to rationality, it is blind indoctrination, hence it is pre-rational. Every uni student and academia-influenced person I know has no method for validating facts, nor does he care to develop one; he just takes an opinion, filters it through the academic who already verifies his preexisting beliefs, and basically outsources the whole process. This isn't rationality, this is fancy pre-rationality portrayed as rigor, and only naive conformist idiots fall for it. Someone mastering rationality DESPITE university indoctrination is even more rare. So if you want to make a statement like that i'd be more willing to argue that you should treat people who went to college like pre-rational baboons than the other way around.

Piers has shown his colors multiple times; he is just another cheap whore for the zionist terrorists.

Why are so many mods so underdeveloped in here? Admiring Vitaly is like admiring Trump. The other clown is a nazi zio. Why is the bar so low? @Leo Gura

It's really interesting to see how you approach this, since the conversation can literally go anywhere depending on where you steer it. What happened to the destiny talk? You could've tried for a dr K talk before he went out of your league in subs