Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 26

Consuming cannabis once in your life increases your chances of developing schizophrenia by 2x. Consuming cannabis 50+ times increases your chances of developing schizophrenia 6x. Use of amphetamines like Adderall and Ritalin increases chances of psychosis and schizophrenia. Although rare, drugs like these can induce permanent and irreversible psychosis hardly distinguishable from schizophrenia. Adolescent exposure has greater risk than adult exposure. Cannabis is more dangerous for inducing schizophrenia than psychedelics. So watch out.

Schizophrenia is a highly genetic disorder, but it can be triggered by drugs. If you have mental instability you should be very cautious with cannabis and amphetamines. Schizophrenic psychotic breaks cause permanent brain damage, so they should be avoided as much as possible. Check if anyone in your extended family has a history of schizophrenia, psychosis, or mental illness, and if so, you should be super careful with cannabis and amphetamines.

The legalization of weed is going to create many more schizophrenics.

I strongly advise against chronic weed use. Recreational weed is not a good thing.

Note: Even with 6x increased risk, schizophrenia is still quite rare, so don't freak out. Amphetamines are also good for some people. I am not telling you to stop taking your medication if it works for you. I am talking about people with genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia, which is rare. This information will only be relevant to a small fraction of people, so don't misunderstand its meaning.

Media Matters did an analysis of how right-wing ideology dominates social media. The situation is bad. This is one of the major reasons Trump won the election, because hundreds of millions of people are slowly getting poisoned by right-wing ideology across social media is subtle, imperceptible ways.

Here's their graphic showing the situation:

(click to enlarge)

Read the article:

Media Matters Article

There's an even deeper analysis to be had here. Why is right-wing media so much more popular than left-wing media? Because it's a lower stage of development which makes it more accessible to more people. Stage Green media cannot compete with Stage Blue and Orange media. Green will be less popular and make less money for several profound reasons.

1. A relatively small percentage of humans have reached stage Green.
2. Most of mankind misunderstands and demonizes the stage Green worldview. Green is much easier to demonize simply because it requires higher development and education to understand. So demonizing Green is a profit-making industry all in itself. There are billions of dollars to make just demonizing Green for a living. Just ask Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool.
3. Stage Green is not an effective survival strategy in most parts of the country or world.
4. Stage Green cannot be used to make boatloads of money like stage Blue and Orange can. Blue and Orange media is often funded by billionaire donors who profit from conservative policies and inaction on stuff like climate change, regulation, higher taxes. A lot of right-wing media has huge marketing budgets from rich donors with economic motives. Advocating for genuine equality, human rights, and economic fairness is not profitable. That which isn't profitable isn't marketable.
5. Stage Green is relatively individualistic while stage Blue is highly conformist and dogmatic, making it easier to peddle simple narratives to them. Green is also conformist, but not as conformist as Blue. It is objectively harder to hold together a Green coalition than a Blue coalition. Green coalitions turn into circular firing squads. Blue coalitions rally behind a single strong-man. This is why Trump has such unified support on the right while leftist candidate support is fractured. Far leftists hate Biden and Kamala more than Trump.
6. Lower stages are easier to market and present as simplistic talking points and clips. It's hard to get millions of views on a serious policy discussion about complex economic issues. It's easy to clip and market a simplistic narrative like: socialists & gays evil, trans & terrorists demonic.
7. It's easier to make right-wing ideology and lower stages of development casual and normie-friendly. Serious complex political analysis does not lend itself well to comedy and entertainment podcasts. Trolling your ideological opponents automatically favors lower stage worldviews because higher stages are above trolling. But social media is all about trolling, rage-bait, demonizing, scapegoating, gaslighting, shit-slinging, and viral gotcha moments. Speaking in memes benefits lower stages because intelligent things cannot be conveyed effectively in memes.
8. Left-wing shows require a more educated audience, which is always rarer than an uneducated audience. An uneducated audience is also more profitable because they will buy anything you sell them. Higher intelligence is less consumer-capitalism friendly. You can't convince a highly intelligent mind to buy useless nonsense. Group-thinking fools are ideal for capitalism. Capitalism thrives on milking fools.
9. The higher the perspective, the more it goes against the grain of culture, which requires changing closed minds. Changing closed minds is nearly impossible. Right-wing ideology appeals to closed minds, which is 10x easier than opening minds. It is much easier to deceive than to convince a mind it's been deceived.
10. It's much easier to peddle fantasies and falsehoods than truth. Fantasy is comforting, truth is painful. Fantasy is fun and exciting, truth is frustrating and inconvenient. Fantasy attracts viewers, truth repels them.

Despite what the right-wing says, they are the status quo. Right-wing is always about returning to the status quo. Which is why they have a much easier time with popular media. There is a direct inverse relationship between popularity and intelligence. High intelligence cannot be mainstream since too few have it and it is so difficult to cultivate, and low intelligence cannot understand nor appreciate high intelligence.

This is a very good psychological analysis. I love psycho-analysis of Trump because traditional political analysis is insufficient to make sense of his behavior because we're dealing with a serious personality disorder here. What's needed is a deep understanding of how ego and how corruption works, which is my wheelhouse, and which is why I like to talk about Trump. Although I'm trying not to talk about him because I know he's just fishing for attention and I don't want to play into that.

I think one of the great disservices the media did over the years is to not offer enough psychiatric analysis of Trump. Nearly all analysis of him was political and cultural when it should have been psychiatric. Because the politics around Trump have always been secondary to his personality disorder. But there is a stigma in the mainstream about psycho-analyzing subjects from a distance. But in the case of politicians it is necessary because psychology drives everything.

The key insight to Trump's behavior is that everything he does, he does to maximize attention and feed his need for narcissistic supply. Trump is like a drug addict chasing the high of attention and power. It doesn't even matter if it's negative attention, he decides policy based on how much attention it will generate to feed his pathetic, love-devoid ego. This is why putting a malignant narcissist into a leadership position is the dumbest thing imaginable. And since a narcissist of his caliber is unable to admit any wrongdoing, the more mistakes he makes the more he will double-down, causing things to spiral horribly out of control. And unlike his first administration where there were a few adults in the room to reign in his ego, now the Republican party has completely capitulated to his ego, which is really, really dangerous.

"In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down."

Attributed to Francis Bacon but certainly a fictitious story.

Nevertheless, this story illustrates deep problems of epistemology: dogma, group-think, appeals to authority, shooting the messenger, demonization, and paradigm lock.

Empiricists, scientists, rationalists, and atheists like to quote this story to point out the dogmatic ways of religion and the triumph of empirical method and enlightenment values. But they draw the lesson too narrowly. There is a deeper level, a deeper lesson to this story. Two lessons actually:

1. Empirical method itself is non-obvious. It took mankind a long, long time just to understand that reality requires empirical testing to understand. Many today still haven't learned this lesson, which is why belief, faith, dogma, and superstition are so prevalent. But today scientists themselves take empirical method for granted as something simple, obvious, and given — never bothering to question its limits.
2. But the deepest lesson of all is that the real issue here is not religion vs empiricism, it is paradigm lock. And paradigm lock is not limited to any paradigm such as faith or armchair metaphysics. Paradigm lock also, and especially, applies to empiricism itself. It is actually unknown if empiricism is the correct epistemology. Just because it happens to work on a horse does not mean it will work across the board, nor that it would get mankind to ultimate truth. That assumption is an unempirical performative contradiction or a self-refuting idea.

Today, if I stand up in front of a group of scientists at a conference on the nature of mind and tell them that mind is God & Love: just unbend in a manner coarse and look within yourself to find answer to your questionings, they will fly upon me just like that youthful friar, cast me out forthwith, and declare the problem an everlasting mystery because of grievous dearth of historical and empirical evidence. 600 years have passed but the epistemic lesson has not been learned.

As non-obvious as it is that you must look inside the mouth of a horse to know how many teeth it has, it is equally non-obvious that you cannot apply this method to understand ultimate Reality. Maybe — just maybe — ultimate Reality has unenumerable teeth. What do you do then?

It's amazing that it never occurs to most scientists today that counting the number of teeth on a horse is not a good way of understanding horses, nor ultimate Reality.

If your method is to count your way up to God, you'll never arrive.

- - - - - - -

Note: I was asked, So what's the solution? What's the right method? The solution is to do serious philosophy (epistemology & ontology). Understanding Reality requires a serious attitude towards the problem, taking nothing for granted. Epistemic mistakes happen when humans underestimate the seriousness of what it means to know anything. You must treat knowing like it's the most profound and sacred thing. Like you're defusing a nuclear bomb. Despite what scientists say, they do not have this degree of epistemic and metaphysical seriousness. The right attitude is critical. Philosophy only begins when you understand the depth of the problem. How can anything be known at all? How can anything exist at all?

This is an excellent break-down.

Nazism is a stage Red-Blue phenomenon. It's the bottom of the barrel of Blue. It appeals to people who are Blue with a strong Red streak. People with anger issues and trauma who find violence appealing. It's pre-rational, pre-scientific, mixing mythology with quack race-science. It's appealing because it offers a cheap, easy sense of life purpose, but it's a toxic life purpose. You don't need to invest serious effort to find your life purpose, you just join a group and adopt their purpose as your own. It gives an easy sense of meaning rather than doing the difficult work of confronting the meaningless nature of existence. It provides a cheap and easy sense of community. Rather than learning how to socialize in a more refined way, you can just meet every week with a group of like-minded friends, get drunk, and bond over your shared racist identity and hate of some out-group. So you can see how Nazism serves many of the lower level needs on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but in a toxic way.

This is a good case-study in lower vs higher perspectives. See how many of the lower perspective traits I talk about in my video Lower vs Higher Perspectives apply to Nazism. The more examples you study of lower and higher perspectives the better you will train the neutral network in your mind for distinguishing them. But it's not enough to just study these examples, you want to contemplate what drives this difference in lower vs higher. Why is higher higher? Not in a technical sense but in its existential essence. Why is Nazism a lower form of intelligence? And what does it say about the nature of higher intelligence? Understanding this allows you to get of sense of what the highest intelligence must be, which gives you a North Star to orient your life towards.

In the end you see that Nazism is just self-deception. So just by taking self-deception seriously allows your mind to avoid all these severe life-traps. Nazism is a gross self-deception which is easy to see, but there are much more subtle self-deceptions, like science and rationalism. Intelligence is the mind's ability to see-through all self-deception, of ever greater subtlety, until even the self-deception of an external material world and human self is seen through.

This is why Actualized.org focuses so much on self-deception. Because if you can solve the problem of self-deception in general you solve a thousand different problems and traps at once. Understanding the mechanics of self-deception is the greatest test of mind's intelligence. Actualized.org is the comprehensive study of self-deception in ever greater subtlety. Actualized.org is the science of self-deception. By the time my work is done, Actualized.org will have unearthed and analyzed every way the mind deceives itself, because that's what mankind most needs to learn. It is vital for mankind's well-being and development that the study of self-deception be integrated into as early in the education system as possible. This is one of the highest levers for uplifting mankind, and its for this reason that it will be vehemently denied and resisted.

A new book just released called Careless People (aff link). It's written by an ex-Facebook executive now turned whistleblower. I just finished reading it. It paints a damning picture of the corrupt ego-minds that run Facebook. I highly recommend reading the book and supporting this whistleblower whom Facebook is right now trying to silence and harass with lawsuits. Facebook is trying to get this book banned, which is the biggest reason you should read it. Read this book if you want an intimate case-study in Tech Bro corruption.

The corruption of the entire Facebook ecosystem and the ego-minds who run it is appalling. Facebook is poisoning the epistemology of billions of minds across the globe. Toxic stage Orange epistemic perverts run Facebook. These perverts are now also 100% politically aligned with Trump. Facebook is a platform for oligarchic mind control. Facebook whores out the minds of billions of people to sell to the highest bidder. That's their entire business model, and their management — from Zuckerberg down — is so blind, corrupt, immature, and narcissistic that they don't even know what they're doing. Facebook is directly responsible for bad faith actors like Trump and MAGA winning elections. Political operatives love Facebook because it allows them to micro-target ignorant people with misinformation to win elections, and in return Facebook gets promises from these politicians not to tax and regulate Facebook. It's profoundly toxic to healthy democracy. And of course, if you're an investor in Facebook, or even just the S&P 500, you're benefiting from this corruption.

Notice, one of the biggest problems with super-popular podcasts run by comedians is that they unintentionally whitewash corruption. The hosts of these shows do not have enough education or epistemic seriousness to challenge or pushback on the corrupt celebrities who do rounds across these shows. Powerful celebrities are exploiting the comedian podcast circuit because comedians are not serious people and will not seriously challenge their corruption while at the same time giving their corrupt ideas tens of millions of free views and also the tacit endorsement of their personal brand. And so, in this way, the entire culture is slowly poisoned.

Look at how this works: comedians draw in the flies with honey (the promise of laughs), like clowns at the circus. Then capitalism takes over, milks the flies, and poisons their minds with pro-oligarchic, corrupt, anti-democratic cultural memes, ideology, and mind viruses. The flies are corrupted and happy about it because they don't know any better and the comedy is the Trojan Horse. Fun vibes are just the salve for the deep epistemic corruption injection. This happens because the podcast host doesn't care about truth-seeking and is just chasing views, clicks, and fame, which itself is the prime corruption. If the podcast host did care about truth-seeking, his podcast would immediately be 10-50x less popular and no celebrity or billionaire would want to attend. So it's a situation of you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Which is how all rich people operate and how corruption multiplies. This is the definition of elitism, but the insane self-deception here is that the comedic vibes make it seem like this is anti-elitist.

Every major center of marketing power has now been co-opted by either uneducated or corrupt people and used to push low quality political discourse, such that 99% of mankind has no way of making sense of political reality. This is the perfect recipe for the death of democracy. Democracy cannot survive when ignorance and corruption is up-ranked by every algorithm and every platform.

Stage Orange has reached such peak toxicity that American corporations have sold out democracy to increase next quarter's profits. And now on top of this we're getting for-profit AI — the effects of which we still haven't felt. The people running these AI companies are the same people running Facebook. When you understand this, you see the deep shit we're in.