Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

It's pretty amazing how well Bohm grasped God despite being a scientist and not being God-realized.

This is an amazing interview with a former high level executive of Facebook's security team. It offers a nuanced behind-the-scenes look at the complexities of managing misinformation. It also offers important lessons in systems thinking.

I want you to notice several key points while watching:

• Notice the depth of complexity to this problem. There are no easy solutions. Notice that it's never as simple as "Facebook bad", "Facebook biased", "Mark Zuckerberg bad", etc.
• Notice that all the actors are acting from good intentions, trying to do their best.
• Notice that no one is in control. Systems of such massive complexity are outside of anyone's control, even the CEO or the world's richest people.
• Notice the two-way causal connections between giant corporations and governments. Is the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog?
• Notice that this thing we call "Facebook" is a sub-system of the larger system we call society, and that all of it is rapidly evolving and actively surviving. Notice how powerful collective survival is. Facebook is struggling to survive, governments are struggling to survive, political parties are struggling to survive, individual political leaders are struggling to survive, businesses and advertisers are struggling to survive — and all of these threads of survival are entangled in what we might call a survival tapestry.
• Notice how difficult of a job it is to run and/or to fix a system like Facebook. Imagine yourself as the CEO and notice how difficult your life would be, how much sleep you would lose over all this, how much you would struggle to make the right decisions, how much your integrity would be tested, and how often you would be criticized by both insiders and outsiders no matter what decisions you made.
• Notice how much wisdom, intelligence, integrity, consciousness, love, and selflessness would be necessary to properly oversee a system like Facebook and to keep it from falling into devilry.
• Notice how profoundly epistemology shapes society, human behavior, and survival. Notice that this whole issue of "misinformation" is really a subset of epistemological problem: How do we know what is true? Who gets to decide what is true? Which perspectives are more valid than others? How do we avoid bias and self-deception? How do we avoid the spread of falsehood and corruption? Notice how an abstract field like epistemology gets cached out in the real world. In other words, when you interact with a social media platform like Facebook you don't think to yourself, "Ah, yes, this whole system is built on a series of complex epistemic issues." No. To you Facebook presents itself as just a place to talk to friends. It isn't obvious that Facebook shapes your perception of reality or that epistemology at play.
• Notice how this whole issue of misinformation is an example of the broader concept of devilry which I've talked about. Notice how the problem really boils down to: How do you stop devilry from spreading and overtaking truth/goodness/love?
• Notice how the complexity of these Facebook problems can be extrapolated to other large systems within society such as governments, corporations, academia, science as an institution, the education system, medicine, the food industry, the entire economy, the military, capitalism, socialism, political parties, geo-political rivalries, non-profits, etc. If running Facebook is so hard, consider how hard it is to run all the above in a non-devilish manner. Notice that even if you ran these systems with the best of intentions you would still fall way short. Can you see how you have underestimated the depth of the Facebook problem? Now try to extrapolate your error to all those others systems, which you have also been underestimating. This should leave you with a humility with respect to criticizing and judging complex systems which you barely have behind-the-scenes experience of. Notice that how a system looks from the outside is not at all how it works from the inside.

These are some profound lessons in systems thinking, all from one interview.

And lastly, I want you to notice how many high-level lessons can be contained in a single interview when you know what to listen for and when you have a deep background in the kind of theoretical work we do on Actualized.org. This is a meta-lesson. Notice how much deeper your understanding of this interview is if you have done the work of internalizing some of the foundational concepts I talk about in my "foundational" episodes. This is the power of our work: your understanding of things becomes so much richer and more nuanced.

David Bohm was one of the few scientists who actually knew how to think:

FYI, thought does not create consciousness. Consciousness can think. But what is thinking? What a thought!

A lot of gullible folks have jumped on the anti-mainstream media bandwagon by rationalizing that mainstream media, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and corporations cannot be trusted because all they care about is maximizing profits. However, what these conspiracy theorists don't realize is that alternative media is MORE corrupt than mainstream media. The selling of conspiracy theories is not some innocent pursuit of truth for truth's sake — it's a huge underground business that allows people who would otherwise be poor or mentally ill to rake in tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. Realize that alternative and independent media has even less integrity and checks and balances than mainstream media and giant corporations. Because it's easier for someone like Alex Jones to get away with low integrity behavior than it is for a corporation like CNN or Merck. It's not an accident that low integrity people are attracted to conspiracy theories. These theories are attractive because they can be used to build out an entire life survival strategy, as Alex Jones has done for himself.

Think about it: if someone paid you $55 million per year to believe in some conspiracy theories, would you have the intellectual integrity to say No? Or would you start rationalizing to yourself how some of these theories might actually have merit? The notion that independent media figures like Joe Rogan are not corrupted or influenced by money, power, or fame is laughable. When you are making 7 or 8 figures per year, you will start believe whatever bullshit comes out of your mouth to earn you those 7-8 figures. This is a problem even if no corporate sponsor is directly paying you to say specific things. The peddling of conspiracy theories and anti-mainstream media perspectives draws in and riles up a huge crowd, which is then directly converted into $$$. This is the anti-mainstream grift. This grift is so sneaky that even the people doing it don't realize they are grifting. Because the mind does not see ideologies which serve its survival as a grift, it sees it as "merely me speaking truth to power".

The sad reality is that you can make more money telling a large crowd of fools exactly what they want to hear than even CNN makes off advertising from big oil and big pharma companies. If fucking is the world's oldest profession, selling ideology to gullible fools in the name of truth is the second oldest.

Steve Aoki debuting new music at Hakkasan, and me winging a friend.

Music, is, love, forever;
Move, unite, dance, together.

Social psychologists have identified 4 different attachment styles. These styles distinguish between how you relate to intimate partners. Knowing your attachment style, where it was sourced from, and how it works is foundational for success in intimate relationships.

The 4 attachment styles are:

• Anxious
• Avoidant
• Disorganized
• Secure

Three are dysfunctional, one is functional. Obviously your goal should be a Secure attachment style. 66% of the US population is Secure.

You can take a free 10-minute online assessment to discover your attachment style: Click Here

Post your results here on the Actualized Forum.

Attachment theory is really valuable to study if you want long-term relationship success or conscious relationships. I'd say this is a MUST for you. It's also valuable to understand your partner's attachment style and to understand how each attachment style is generated from childhood — this will help you raise mentally healthy children.

Learning this set of distinctions can also help you screen out potentially toxic partners with highly dysfunctional attachment styles. You want to be good at identify the attachment styles of the people who you're dating and sleeping with as soon as possible.

My attachment style is somewhere between Avoidant & Secure.

What's cool is that if you have one of the 3 dysfunctional attachment styles, you can change that through personal development and spiritual work.

Happy New Year 2022 from the two best nightclubs in the world: XS & Zouk.

Props to Zedd for going all-out with his music and lights. He killed it.

Speaking of Detoxing Heavy Metals, here's a must-read article about the 100-year history of leaded gasoline and the corruption that kept it in place:

A Century Of Tragedy

Read it to understand how bad lead contamination is.