Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 4
I study and try to understand many social systems. But I noticed the following devilish paradox at the heart of this endeavor: Any social system you try to understand will happen from either inside or outside the system. Either you are an intimate participant in the system or you are an alien outsider looking in. If you're looking from inside, you have a lot of direct experience and intimate detail, you know its workings much better, but at the cost of being co-opted by the system. Just to be in the system you must be part of the system, which means part of the system's survival. Your survival gets interlinked with the system, infecting your mind with bias, blinding you just by virtue of being too close. But if you're looking from outside you lose that all-important direct experience of the system, but you gain objectivity. Your survival is no longer tied with the system so you can't get infected by the bias and group-think of all the insiders.
This is true of all social systems like: the CIA, the military, the Catholic church, science, academia, the Senate, the Israeli government, a terrorist organization, a cult like Scientology, a corporation, a marriage, voodoo, etc. (Try to think of more examples where this applies.)
For example, I can't know as much about Israel as a native born Israeli who was raised there for 20 years, who went through the Israeli education system, who spent 3 years in the army, who consumed 20 years of Israeli media. So I'm missing that direct experience vital for grounding my understanding. However, since I'm looking at the Israel situation from the outside I can be more objective because I have no horse in the race. My survival isn't at stake. I don't have to be loyal to the system. I don't have friends who will ostracize me. I don't have 20 years of pro-Israel self-bias to work through. This allows me to see Israel in a more objective way than a native born Israeli.
However, the trickery doesn't end there. The paradox gets even deeper because detachment from a situation creates its own kind of bias, a bias that comes from taking the imperatives of survival in the Middle East for granted. It's easy for me to sit securely in America and criticize Israelis who have to endure rocket attacks on a regular basis. It's easy to fool oneself by turning survival into an abstraction while sitting in a position of comfort where one's survival is handled thanks to one's excellent government infrastructure or just good fortune, like having rich parents. I see scientists make this mistake in assuming that they have the best handle on reality because they are seemingly so detached from the human condition. But are they really? Maybe they aren't as detached as they think. Or maybe their detachment and so-called "rationality" and "objectivity" is precisely their blind-spot.
So you're damned whether you study such systems from the inside or the outside. Each vantage point presents unique biases that are difficult to correct for. When studying such systems try to notice which vantage point you're looking from, inside or outside, and try to anticipate the biases and blind-spots that correspond to each. It's easy to misunderstand social systems as an outsider. But its also easy to misunderstand them as an insider! For example, as a teenager it was easy for me to see that a war in Iraq was a bad idea, even though I didn't have any government or military experience. Actually, it's precisely because I didn't have that experience and I wasn't an American citizen filled with patriotic outrage post 9/11. But many highly experienced government and military people couldn't see it because they were too close to the system, they were insiders. But at the same time this doesn't mean that I was qualified to speak on or handle foreign policy matters.
Here's another way to look at this: Consider the epic task of trying to understand mankind as a whole, as a system. How would you do it? You could do it from inside, as a human living on planet Earth who went through the entire human education and enculturation system. Or you could do it from outside, as an alien looking down at Earth through a telescope. Now, here's the interesting question: Which view would give you a better understanding of mankind? The alien would have a much more objective view of mankind, free of all the petty human biases, dogmas, assumptions, tribalism, and ideology. But would this alien really appreciate what its like to be a human and why humans behave as they do? Can you really know what being a human means unless you've lived through all the human biases and had to survive as a human, under all the limited social and political conditions of Earth? That's a very hairy sort of thing that no self-respecting alien would want to dirty himself with. But then again, if you really wanted to understand the human condition you'd have to expose yourself to it a lot more than through a telescope. But if you did, you might end up like one of those dirty biased dogmatic humans.
Sometimes I wish I had more of an inside view of systems like academia, science, Scientology, Al Qaeda, the CIA, the Israeli government, etc. Then again, if I did I would be so corrupted and co-opted by those systems that I could not do the work I do with Actualized.org. Could you imagine understanding Nazi Germany from inside vs outside? That's tough. But wait, it gets worse. Could you imagine understanding the Holocaust from the inside vs the outside? Ahhh, there's the rub! Now you see the problem. Does anyone really understand the Holocaust from the outside? Then again, how much would you have understood it from the inside?
So add this to the heap of all the other epistemic challenges you face.
How is it possible to understand a system without intimately participating in it? And yet, how is it possible to understand a system by participating in it when participation distorts your view of it? The entanglement problem strikes again!
And finally, consider this interesting possibility: This is such a deep existential problem that God himself cannot know what terrorism is without becoming a terrorist. In order for God to be Omniscient he would need to experience terrorism from the inside, because outside would not be good enough. How could God be All-Knowing if he didn't know the interiority of terrorism? And that's why terrorists exist! Contemplate that.
Here's a simple trick for learning better and deeper. Whenever you study a subject, especially if you're reading a book, make a habit of supplementing your learning process with multiple modes of media, especially visual. Incorporate images, video, maps, photographs of important people, cultural elements, geography, etc. If you do this, your learning will become so much richer, more enjoyable, and you will retain the information for a lifetime rather than having it fly out of your head. Never just read a dry book.
Here's an example of how I apply this:
When listening to an audio book about the history of the CIA, whenever an important person, event, or part of the world is mentioned, I pause and google for stuff like: photographs of the key historical people mentioned, maps of the country being talked about, major city locations, photographs of the geography of that country, photographs of the city, Wikipedia pages about important people, places, or events, and YouTube videos on any of the above. So when I'm reading about the CIA's operations in Afghanistan I pull up a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all their major cities. I pull up photographs of Al Qaeda terrorists. I read their Wikipedia pages. I look at geography videos about Afghanistan. I read about Afghanistan culture. I watch videos about the Taliban. I pull of photographs of opium fields. I search for statistics like population size.
Of course this is time-consuming and you cannot do this for everything in a book, but it's important to do it for the most important few items. This is what true learning involves. The old days of only learning by reading a dry book or consuming a single source or a single sensory mode are OVER. Now that we have YouTube, Wikipedia, Google images, Google maps, and AI, all of those tools must be used together when you're learning anything new. You combine all those modalities and sources to gain a rich, comprehensive, multi-sensory, multi-perspectival grasp of any situation. This makes comprehension so much better and it makes you emotionally invested in what you're learning, so that it's beyond trivial facts. This sears images and meaning into your mind. If you learn to learn like this, it's a game-changer. You will go from hating learning to loving learning. I think many people, as kids, never learned to love learning because they were not shown this process, and also because this process was impossible to do before the Internet and AI Age. But now nobody has that excuse.
AI is a huge new mode that must be added to any learning process. The function of AI is that you get to ask custom, highly specific questions about any aspect of the subject which you're confused about. This effectively gives you access to a free private tutor. As you're read, use AI to ask questions and clear up confusions. Just the process of asking AI will ingrain concepts and ideas into your long-term memory.
The key to life-long memory of things is making them relevant, meaningful, visual, emotional, and tying them into a larger purpose. Stop trying to memorize stuff, instead focus on making stuff relevant and meaningful to you. And one of the best ways to do that is by making it visual.
This channel has the most mind-blowing 3D animations of how vehicles. It's so impressive my jaw dropped watching it. A single guy created these insanely detailed and precise 3D animations in Blender. It takes him months to model and animate each one by hand. He even composes the music. This guy deserves an award for excellence. This is YouTube at its finest:
I often like to say that humans are stupid, but the intelligence of humans is astonishing when it comes to engineering. The engineering intelligence that went into creating these vehicles is so astonishing that just understanding the scale and precision of what humans have accomplished here can be a spiritual experience.
Do you comprehend the scale of intelligence that was required to engineer the SR-71 Blackbird? Do you? Really look at it. Try to imagine what it would take to engineer an SR-71 yourself.
Humans are stupid when it comes to matters of politics, spirituality, and philosophy. But humans are insanely intelligent when it comes to feats of engineering. That's one of the paradoxes of mankind: astounding technical intelligence, yet profound metaphysical, epistemic, philosophical, spiritual, and political ignorance and immaturity. How can we be so smart and so stupid at the same time?
Side Point: Notice, if you developed the kind of 3D modeling skills and attention to detail that the maker of these videos has, you could easily make a great living either by making your own videos, or getting hired by a studio. Developing this kind of 3D modeling skill would be challenging, but doable. Very doable. You could even do it all by yourself, 100% online, at home, just by watching Blender tutorials and courses.
Notice that the excellence of your skills would be obvious to anyone just by watching a single one of your videos. So you would only need 1 video to sell yourself to employers. You would not need a degree or even a resume. All you'd do is show them a single video and they would hire you immediately, simply because you are so excellent they would be fools not to hire you. This is a powerful example of how you can bootstrap yourself to major success. But don't draw the lesson too narrowly here, I'm not just talking about a career in 3D modeling, you can apply this method to all sorts of other careers that have nothing to do with 3D modeling.
People often complain that no one wants to hire them — that they apply and apply but no one calls them back. That's only because you have not demonstrated any exceptional skill. The solution is not to send out 100s of applications but to make yourself stand out by developing and showcasing exceptional skill. Or, to put it more simply: teach yourself to making amazing things, and people will instantly hire you, and you can ask for 150% the normal salary. And, you don't need a voluminous portfolio. Don't focus on quantity, focus on just 1 amazing piece of work. This is how you bootstrap personal success. You could do this even from a 3rd world country. You could do this living in Iraq. The best way out of poverty is to build the skills to make amazing things. If your skills are good enough someone will offer you a visa out of your underdeveloped country. Or you can just enjoy working for yourself.
It's amazing how American media does not speak about the ethnic cleansing which is at the heart of the founding of Israel. There could not be an Israel without a massive ethnic cleansing campaign, and it is all explicitly admitted to by their own past leadership:
It's so simple once you see it:
Israel is an ethnic cleansing project.
Of course!
The truth is so simple, yet so ugly, that anyone involved must deny it.
I love the geography and architecture of the Dogon tribe. Such a beautiful place.
Damned fascinating how Stage Purple tribes live. What amazes me is how predictable life at these stages is. Spiral Dynamics explains it perfectly.
Once you understand Spiral Dynamics, you see that all cultures and societies on the planet in Tier 1 are as predictable as sheep. True freedom of mind does not take place until you transcend Stage Green. Until then you're just one or another flavor of sheep. At Tier 2 there is finally the chance to make original sense of reality. But there is a kind of primitive beauty to Stage Purple. These people are ignorant and self-deceived but make up for it with heart, soul, and sincerity.
When you are too liberal a coyote runs off with your dog ;)
Some years ago I went to get healing from a couple of New Age psychic mystical reiki healers. They put me a table and did reiki on me. But while they did that they would also ask me all sorts of spiritual psychological questions. One of the questions they asked me was, What was my spirit animal? I said I don't know. Then they told me to say the first animal image that came to my mind. I said coyote. They told me to imagine that I was a coyote and to act like how a coyote would act. So lying there on the table as they did their reiki I howled:
Aaaaaahhhhooooooooo!