Carl-Richard

It's a structural problem mostly related to how you haven't presented your own comprehensive take and given your own definitions of what you think a cult is or what you think narcisissm is, etc. (Wilhelm started off the same way and I had to eventually ask him what he thought a cult is and even then he just gave a one-sentence answer which we later discovered was clearly inadequate). Feel free to argue against that, find flaws in the consistency of that. I think the AI at times just assumed people's arguments and framings and put that in someone's blindspot section without going much in depth into the reasoning itself (i.e. it gave more of a summary of points rather than a critical evaluation of points); I hold that for your "1-point argumentation" line as well. And that's to be expected as AI ironically also has trouble with identifying relevance at deeper layers (see me and @zurew's breaking of a 3-times double-checked Claude deep research query in my thread about GDPR and EU AI Act). I'm a bit schizo but I interpret that as a patronizing "poor thang, his brain is broken". Leo's definition doesn't consider it a cult, Wilhelm also didn't think it was a cult but apparently he changed his mind after our discussion. Maybe you wouldn't think it's a cult either if you gave your own definition of a cult.

Even if it might seem like it's not a big issue and people practice it often, it's not actually good debate to have someone who hasn't presented a position arguing against your position (notice how no official debates use this format), it's not good to have someone who doesn't have a goal of evaluating their own position but only seeking what they think is consistency in a local and usually irrelevant linguistic structure. And when that local consistency is dealt with, you find another based on not a goal of arriving at a larger point, but defeating yet another more local point. A bit rambly but: it's engagement at a low level of complexity. It doesn't hold large amounts of data in mind at once. It's a quintessentially "Orange" way of debating, getting caught in consistency testing rather than refining relevance. It's in a sense sociopathic as it's short-sighted, only focused on the immediate present, not a larger structure of meaning. It's a larger problem of epistemology. You are rolling the dice again and again waiting to get a six. Just by probability, you will likely get a six at some point if you roll the dice enough times. Trouble is that six will likely not be very relevant in the larger scheme of the discussion, because you're fishing for sixes in waters where relevance is low. You're like a guy fishing in a polluted lake trying very hard to catch toxic fish that no one will eat. Solution is give your own comprehensive well-thought through take on the entire thing and we can respond to that within our own comprehensive well-thought out take. That's a fair discussion when we're working on two comparable fronts. (Weird analogy, the others were worse): It's like two big lego figures trying to stick together rather than a little one encircling the bigger one and finding any and every possible place to stick to. And it tethers you to your own comprehensive take so you must be consistent to it and you can't go on wild fishing trips trying to roll the dice in the wildest of places.

I've very clearly laid out my issues with Leo's conduct in this thread and other threads I've linked. If you want to create a dramatized movie romantic tragedy disposition of that, that's your prerogative. By the way, this is more of "the method" ("let's forget about this very core trait associated with narcissism and let's discuss other traits as if that will take us anywhere"), and asking a different question like above in tandem is too. If you had an overall grasp of narcissism or simply an overall position on the matter you would just give us your take. The method is ad-hoc, it's p-hacking, it's theoretically undergrounded fishing for significant results (unrefuted arguments). If Integral feeds your posts to his Integral bot debate analyzer, you will get the same result as Wilhelm, that's my highly plausible hypothesis. That's why I get "flippant". I've been taught by the very "master of psychology" to be highly critical of this.

What do you mean exactly? 🙂

I'm sorry, sometimes the method of forum interaction I described makes your responses go under the radar.

Do it then, you're missing out.

Do the ChatGPT response already, we have been dry on AI slop in this thread for the last half an hour.

As I said, we're not in a psychologist office. Nobody is laying on a chair. We're just shooting the shit. If you can't register grandiosity on your personal non-professional non-on-the-job-psychologist symptom chart, then fine, us others can. This is the Elliot and Wilhelm playbook of forum interactions: enter a thread while having no prior overarching principles on the topic, ask a question about a highly minute point, play logic roulette until the point gets refuted, and move on the next minute point, repeat ad nauseum. I'm being flippant the way an elephant flips its ears with its photographic memory. Perhaps I'm being a bit extra spicy today, yes.

Don't mind me "strawmanning" the classic lost-in-irrelevant-minutia line of argumentation that was titrated out of your initial question "would a narcissist leave a thread like this open?". The answer to that question is "yes". There is no way you can know anything at all in the entire universe, except that Leo is the most awake being the entire universe of course, and that this is the single most obvious sign of grandiosity in the entire universe. But yes, thank you for reminding me that we are not inside a psychologist's office.

Oh, Elliot out here trying to convince us that a guy who literally thinks he is the most conscious being in the entire universe is not a narcissist. Narcissism does not mean not tolerating disagreement. It's more means not tolerating not being superior or dominant. If Leo values open discussion and seeing himself as a reasonable person open to critique (and perhaps like he is not a cult leader, who would close all critical threads), he will do that and it's perfectly consistent with narcissism. The problem would more occur if you were challenge him on any of those things. But then again, if he values people challenging him, then he may allow that, but inside he could believe he is still superior (and he may tell it right to your face). Narcissism becomes tricky at higher levels of cognitive development (like all things do, where things become nuanced and complex). Max Karson (Mr. Girl) is another example. He will come off as extremely reasonable and open. But there is also an extreme grandiosity in how he conducts himself.

There are two levels of dealing with a retard. At level 1, you mistake their retardation for your own, thinking it's your inability to understand them (you think it's on you that you don't understand them so you're the one who feels like a retard). At level 2, you clearly see that they are retarded and that you wouldn't be able to understand them because they are retarded. Level 1 usually means you're a bit retarded yourself (for whatever reason, transient or stable), level 2 means you're less retarded and can view retardation from a greater perspective, not being hypnotized by it as much.

There is therapy, but that also has limited efficiency for that kind of problem.

You guys have just gone with the assumption he has presented that he is not creative. He has not gone into any detail on what he means. Somebody who is catastrophizing like this always need to be asked to investigate their assumptions before you start validating them.

If the psychosis description doesn't seem accurate, remember I said "psychotic tendencies and other concerning behavior". You decided to focus in on psychotic tendencies in particular (a common thing you've done in this thread, focusing in on parts of an argument). That's probably partly why my mind went there. I would concede that if you want to be very strict about definitions of things like "delusional thinking", then the Leo gun scenario need not necessarily be "psychotic" (the exact details around that situation might have involved things that one could likely classify as not "delusional" in the strictest sense, but if you ask any psychiatrist, it's still concerning behavior especially in its seeming abruptness and discontinuity with prior behavior). A more fitting description would be (all assumptions considered) "sudden ungrounded and concerning behavior brought on by psychedelic intoxication". So if not a "psychotic break", perhaps a "concerning and conflicting psychic break". Nevertheless, your attempt at appealing to gradations ("everybody has been suicidal before') doesn't work here because it undermines all traits that can be classified as psychotic. Everybody has had delusional thoughts, everybody has had hallucinatory experiences. And we're not talking about simply threshold experiences. We're talking about serious cases of those experiences. We're not talking about having simply had a thought with the content containing suicide, like anybody probably has had. We're talking about being in a place where you were "so close" to shooting yourself with a gun.

@integral Get off the cocAIne.

@zurew "Actually, people writing a 'defamation piece' is a good thing". 😭 That's some slimy ass narrative control ("mind control"?) right there.

When reading Article 5, it was unclear to me whether I should interpret that last part as "potentially leading to" rather than "necessarily leading to". Here is the wording from the Article 5:

Oh god, leave the fucking place.

Does the AI consider that even if you remove social media scraping but keep the text field function, you can paste text from an online profile of a non-consenting person and thus perform a non-consenting profiling of that person? Thanks for running it by the way.

ChatGPT (Plus membership) Always longer answers.

Especially with the advent of the "cult" of best-selling books, which is less about academic rigor and more about what is most intriguing and disturbing, which is what the anti-cult movement where Leo gets his definition from plays on. Of course cults are associated with "mind control" and "brainwashing" and "sexual/financial exploitation" in this context. That's what sells. Less people want to hear about cults that believe in slightly wacky things, more about evil boogeymen, mass murderers, rapists, psychopathic manipulators.

Yes but it doesn't give definitive answers, and to the extent that it does, I don't trust it (because I've asked it similar questions before and it seemly didn't even know about the EU AI Act, which is maybe understandable since it's new).

We're honestly discussing what a cult is and when people want to steer the discussion towards talking about negatives, that's what happens. That's a function of Leo insisting on defining cult as something negative and his minions constantly begging for any clue that could satisfy that definition. Had this been my forum or had I been having this discussion in one of my earlier university classes, we would probably talk about how weird your beliefs really would have to be to be considered a cult, not the level of "brainwashing" or "mind control" is supposedly required (although that could be a side discussion about those kinds of cults). My professor opened the discussion of cults saying "cults are not necessarily something bad, that's a common misconception" (paraphrasing). Leo has chosen a different route and that is reflected in his discussions. When he wants to project the notion of cult as something negative and something external to him, don't be surprised that when people disagree, that projection lands squarely back at himself.

Notice that a lack of argument is not a virtue. We've seen this false dichotomy before too. I believe lots of things are a cult and I would be happy to be a part of probably many of them. Though I would prefer if the larger society was also on board.

Ghis-laine Max-well 👏 Yaas. Shoulds, more shoulds. Yaas. "But he is not all bad". Yaas. I think we've uncovered the script.