Carl-Richard

The concept of a male escort, especially a high-rated one, is really fascinating. Notice the personality type. Notice the social status, the philosophy and values, the type of interactions that women want out of it. They (the good ones) seem like highly caring, sensitive heroes.

Resilience only takes you so far when your own resilience is used against itself. Big muscles when smashing a hammer against your own skull. Inner conflict is the ultimate pathology because it turns your resources into resources for self-destruction. In fact, being very resilient and active in response to inner conflict (by actively ruminating and trying to find a solution) is over time a losing strategy if the problem doesn't seem to have a solution (you're essentially just wasting energy and beating yourself up for no seeming reason), so you move over to helplessness and a more passive state where you don't entertain solutions, and this is directly tied to the experience of low mood and low energy (it comes from a lack of movement, lack of discovery, lack of action, a more passive form of suffering). What people with depression usually do is they oscillate between states of rumination and helplessness and opt for pseudo-solutions and various coping mechanisms and dissociate themselves from the causes of the internal conflict (which limits their cognitive scope, their emotional attunment) and end up in this overall lousy and low-functioning state (and if they get really helpless to the point of hopelessness, they might take their own lives). You don't take your own life if you merely have poor cardiovascular health. That's at best a contributing factor among many others. Calling poor health "depression" is understandable due to the symptom overlap but overall a bit misleading. Therapy and identifying the source of conflict might ideally be the first course of action, then getting to the point of solving it might involve trying to increase resilience again.

If there was ever only one technique that could be described as "the key" to Enlightenment, it's the letting go technique he describes at 4:47:

You can point to specific physiological mechanisms in either case. You don't need to gather some college students together to make a plausible conclusion. An analogy is not an equivalence. I know what to tell me: tell me why I cannot make conclusions based on mechanism and only conclusions based on highly specific (but also limited) empirical dispositions.

Distinguish between manic thinking and depressive thinking. The distinction is the level of perceived control and harmony with one's wants, desires, values. I don't think it's the majority of depression. The majority of depression is in being in conflict with yourself, and in the more severe forms, you see no way out. Can you be in conflict with your values, desires, wants while being physically fit, and how does that look like? I would say poor health brings you into a low-functioning state which can exacerbate existing internal conflict and depression. If you simply lack internal conflict, poor health just comes off as e.g. reduced working memory, brain fog, lower energy capacity, exhaustion, numbness, lower sensitivity, bodily aches and pains. It's the distinction between having a car with a poor engine vs a car where the steering wheel is stuck in one position so you can only drive in circles. Even with a poor engine, you can go where you want to go, but it may be a bit harder or take a bit more time or work. But if your steering wheel is stuck, even with a good engine, you will be stuck driving in circles.

The evidence isn't "conclusive" either that stabbing yourself in the eye with a toothbrush impairs driving skills, but there are other ways of concluding that than waiting for a scientist to gather a group of college students together and asking about their wanking habits.

Our current prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, as a person (his recent politics is a range of flops but it's not really about corruption on his part), is pretty good. Same with Minister of Finance and ex-NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg is probably the most liked politician across party lines in our country and is considered a living legend in many respects.

LMAO

"I just follow the dietary recommendations from the national institute of public health; they have 1000s of scientists that have done more research and better research than I could ever do".

His daughter is a vegetarian, sometimes pescatarian, not sure how he thinks about that yet 😀 Maybe he is projecting some frustration with her onto me. He is very like "rational", "I take every vaccine that comes out", he says like it's a point of pride, like he is scolding those who have a different opinion (not that I'm principally anti-vax). He seems to have placed me in a certain "wacko" alternative box (which I have actually done myself over time through a realization about how alternative people work, but I'm of course of the belief that I'm coming from a more principled and nuanced position and not some sheep-like trendhopper): I one time on a holiday with them refused taking antihistamines (offered by my doctor mother) to reduce symptoms of mosquito bites, and he was like to my mom "is he antivaxx also?". Then he said the most ridiculous thing: "I knew a guy once who got cancer who refused to take modern medical treatments and only took alternative treatments. He died". That actually blew my mind how ridiculously presumptive and also just brute way to respond to someone who refuses to take some pills for symptom relief for mosquito bites.

40 was probably hyperbolic. But I've thought a bit about it. 😃🔫 I didn't bring it up. He sort of confronted me about it. I was just explaining why I don't really eat fish (they asked me). And he was like "but what about this: ...". Yeah, in a weird way, even though I know what I want, the argument really dug itself into my mind. It's like a really alluring prospect that "what if you can just read a few sentences and that's it?", even when you know about the limitations or downsides of that. So I wanted more reasons to not entertain it as a good argument, even though again I have assessed it essentially for what it is (e.g., I don't have a problem with using institutions as a baseline, but it's the exclusive position of "only that" which is so - disturbing). I think I really just wanted to reground myself in the position that being open and interested in information about all kinds of things is ok. All my life I've been surrounded by relatively open people. It's a first where I've ran into someone this principally not-open.

L0l. I mean I have 40 arguments already. I just want to hear more. And I already gave him my main position (on diet) which is about how I feel when doing x thing and then taking things from there (and invoking science as an explanatory framework is natural there). I'm more existentially threatened by the entire thing and what he said before that. "Instead of learning about health, [...]". That shot me right in the skull. There is such a thing as people with low openness, people who are so pragmatic they are willing to drop entire fields of inquiry just if it's practical and "safe enough". Meanwhile here I am, wishing to find more arguments about one thing this person said. I'm just different. And it's kinda sad because my mom (who is married to my stepdad) is a doctor and constantly talks about health. That's like the main topic at the dinner table. Meanwhile he seemingly has a principled position that he doesn't talk about health (he literally answered when queried on his silence during those discussions "I don't talk about those things"). He likes to talk about (the culinary aspects) of food, wine, and maybe some engineering and physics but that rarely enters the discussion. He's like the complete opposite of my father 😂

Kill meee, now I have another reason to cringe when at the gym. Some observations I've found myself: So much gen alpha music (and probably earlier) steals whole songs, perhaps modulates and changes the rhythm and places a generic EDM beat on top. Like purely shameless stealing. The last example I heard of this was with The Sound Of Silence cover by Disturbed (which is itself a cover, so it's already recycled); and it's so bad to listen to because they sped it up so much the vibrato sounds like something from an Alvin and the Chipmunks YouTube cover. "Don't you worry about a thing, everything is gonna be alright" lyrics is everywhere and it drives me beyond the realms of insanity. Lyrics about partying and getting drunk (not a purely gen alpha thing but still). Songs where you just know some producer used a list to check off the most formulaic ways to create a song that maximizes commercial appeal.

When you're in the statistical worldview, - you are acutely aware that many things can influence one thing, and their relationship is statistical (quantitative). Some things can have a strong influence, other things less of a strong influence, and some things only a weak influence (e.g. the butterfly effect). In reality, there is a huge web of influences, where each influence is a particular node or string on the web, and each node is weighted with a certain strength of influence or statistical value. For example, ADHD can be influenced by beliefs, experiences, genetics, etc. Even if you think one of these things have a stronger influence, it doesn't mean it can only be reduced to that thing, and talking as if it can be reduced to that thing can lead to problems with accurately talking about and perceiving reality. Words like "partially", "mostly", "some of", "many", are often used. - you often say things are "probably so", "most likely", "less likely", "probably not". It does not preclude you from making firm and exclusive analytical statements (e.g. "given x and y, z is true or false, coherent or inconsistent"). But you are very acutely aware when something is statistical and probabilistic so you don't overstep or overgeneralize or oversimplify. - you realize a thing can be many things at the same time. There is often not just one way to do things, or one thing you can do at any one time. "Should I meditate every day or should I do retreats where I meditate more deeply?" Why not both? "That's the placebo effect". Why can't it be a real effect and placebo at the same time? "Trans is social contagion". Why can't some of it be real trans and some of it be social contagion (both within and across individuals)? "Yes — both" is very often realized to be the answer. The statistical worldview is a way to conceptualize nuance and holism, as opposed to black-and-white thinking and naive reductionism. It's also related to the modern scientific framework of putting numbers and quantities to these relationships. Modern science, especially human-oriented science (e.g. medicine, psychology), primes this kind of statistical thinking where everything is viewed through statistical associations (mediation, moderation, correlation) and ways of quantifying them (effect sizes, correlation coefficients, measures of statistical significance). If you do enough scientific thinking, in the right fields of science, you will eventually end up viewing a large chunk of the world this way.

Just chop off your.. hand.

The PFAS.

"There are stupid people and there are smart people" is the most stupid way to view the world.

Aim high.

AGI should be able to drive a human body better than a human or else it's just a garbage push-to-start token shuffling machine, only a glorified gumball machine (this is a false dichotomy but it's for the lols).

What about poisonous plants? We've been through this before. When in doubt, don't. I prefer sperm. But sperm is actually technically a venom because it's an animal shooting something into an other organism that may cause the other organism to die. (That's a joke and a horrible stretch of definitions outside their common usage 🤓).

😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

I've been watching national cable news in my country and noticed "it's not x, it's y" AI sentences from the news anchors. I've also smelled AI on the radio. I want to pour gasoline on the world.

What about Ozempic but for porn? 😂 Wait... does it already work for porn? 😂

Because we want them to screw open a Coca-Cola.

@zurew And I'm like yeah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, reality is weird, and it has always been weird. What does Bernardo think about the three body problem or morphogenesis in biology or simply chaos theory? There have always been clear limitations to trying to deduce laws and getting a clear picture of reality. Models have always just been like small doodles on top of an infinite stack of papers. That we find out that big grand daddy God also has a mind of its own, that just adds more to the fun. Models have always been domain-specific. That "seeing through sense organs" explains some forms of vision but not others is totally fine. To get limpy about that is like getting limpy about being able to get ice cream from more than just one ice cream truck. You're still getting ice cream; you're still getting an explanation that can give a satisfying account (if you just drop the idea of "The Ice Cream"). Or in other words, sense organs are nice explanations for the game called physical reality. But you can level up. It's been a while, but I think Tom Campbell's model has a better approach to dealing with these notions (he created his model largely as a response to dealing with psi phenomena). In fact, I remember Tom Campbell's model specifically helped me underscore that conventional naturalism like that championed by Bernardo is a choice or a preference for how to explain reality and that you can go outside of it, and not just by being a retard and retracting all explanatory power like in solipsism or refusing to explain anything like in metaphysically naive non-duality, but by perhaps expanding explanatory power):