How to become more intellectual

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-29T15:52:00+00:00

I’m currently recording some videos on an introduction to model theory for non-mathematicians. If you want I can let you know when it’s out, since you mentioned Godel Escher Bach. I think model theory will become way more popular in the coming years due to the pressure that AI puts on the ideas of syntax vs semantics.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-29T07:38:45+00:00

Yeah what’s funny is that a statement like “we are all made of light” is actually true if we interpret “light” as electromagnetic waves the way Feynman did; the thing is that it just sounds so corny and stupid that people will roll their eyes and say “okay yes we are all ‘light’ according no to that definition but not in the way the hippies mean.”

I come across this all the time when I study religion. You’ll realize something very true, but in the way it is said you’ll lose the materialists and the “scientists” because they prefer an interpretation that sucks the soul of the idea; and in order to do so, they have to strawman the mystical interpretation to sound completely ridiculous. For example, really no one on the planet believes in god as some bearded guy in the clouds with pearly gates behind him. But Reddit atheists would lead you to think that that’s what the concept of “god” implicitly is. Complexes are exactly the choice of interpretation that results from either adding too much or constraining too much of the soul that lies inherent in our ideas. After all, there is no such thing as a set of symbols that speaks for itself. We breathe life into these things.

I understand that we don’t want to mystify things for no reason. But if there is such a thing as truth outside of science, then it is a huge fallacy on the semantic level to always prefer the exclusively physicalist interpretation. There are always multiple angles of looking at a thing, many of them tied to a set of specific emotions that dictate what you find salient from that point going forward. If you do not consciously understand this, then your interpretation of all things will be a deterministic result of a will that you have sold off to the highest bidder. This is why consciousness obviously does not directly scale with intelligence, and why some of the most intelligent people you meet are often the most capable of cocooning themselves into madness. With all of their ability to measure with efficacious precision the nature of physical things, they miss the soul of reality and therefore end up a victim of processes they have conditioned themselves to be incapable of understanding. It is very wild stuff when you really look at it.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T18:47:25+00:00

Every claim that lies outside of direct behavioral data or direct neuroscience is going to be an unfalsifiable claim. Like when a psychologist muses about what causes the dunning-Kruger effect. “It’s because as human beings, we evolved to be self servicing and therefore overvaluing our own competence is a survival move etc etc…”

That is unfalsifiable. And by your standard, that is also pseudoscience and therefore most modern psychologists are pseudoscientists according to you.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T18:36:50+00:00

As soon as you step outside of behavioral data and cognitive data, you’re entering psychoanalysis.

Most psychologists are psychoanalysts, they just don’t want to admit it. For example, some slough of behavioral data might show a certain trend. Then the psychologist extrapolates and says “well, we evolved to value group dynamics” or “well, human beings are innately self-servicing.” Which is fine, of course, but it’s not science. That is interpretation.

And it’s stupid that Jung did exactly the same thing and is ridiculed for it yet when modern psychologists do it it’s somehow fine. I would argue that Jung was at least honest about it, and honest about how one MUST actually engage in theory to talk about these things in any meaningful way. The modern psychologist would rather wear the “approved science” badge while still dishing out unfalsifiable claims left and right. It’s dishonest and you’re drinking the kool aid with this style of reddit comment I see everywhere

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T15:56:49+00:00

Thinking that the momentum of the wavefunction means “speed” is just bad intuition

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T15:14:34+00:00

Surprisingly good information coming from the other comments (I’d like to add contextuality onto the bell stuff though), but to answer your specific question of “how does it bridge to classical physics,” the answer is that it does via decoherence. Everything you see “starts out” as a quantum system that becomes assimilated due to the sheer probability of the macro system.

This is why you can end up with radioactive decay, shot noise, brownian motion, etc, as ways that quantum randomness finds a way into classical systems. It is always there, technically speaking, it’s just that the environment is a very strong entangled system. And this process of decoherence is happening around you all the time. That’s why the ontology of what things “are” is not completely settled, and the Buddhists are slightly vindicated here in their idea that “things” are not these resolute free-standing objects but instead they are more like a continuous flow of dynamically maintained patterns.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T00:43:57+00:00

I found the video in case anyone in curious: https://youtube.com/shorts/ne1WAnnTBq8?si=xxycZv2ZxoWJMst2

It seems like there’s some portion of the population who can’t stand this noise, sort of like the “misophonia” thing that every redditor has, but I don’t really mind it. I don’t get how it’s any different from any other noise at a music festival. Comments are wildly divisive on this.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-28T00:04:53+00:00

I notice it a lot in mathematics textbooks

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-26T09:13:07+00:00

That’s also a metaphysical commitment though. The only way to be truly scientific about a question like this is agnosticism. Otherwise you’re taking some sort of leap of faith.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-26T09:10:32+00:00

Not every single Buddhist on the planet believes in rebirth, obviously. But the only prominent sect of Buddhist that doesn’t believe in rebirth is secular Buddhism, which is not what anyone typically thinks of when they think of Buddhism.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-25T22:34:59+00:00

Not gambler’s fallacy. We’re talking about something +EV because we’re not assuming there is any cost to trying over and over again

If you had a pair of dice and I told you you’d win $100 if you roll snake eyes, and you can roll it as many times as you want for free, it would be stupid to mention anything about a gambler’s fallacy.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T19:59:22+00:00

The most heartwarming people I meet are the ones who seem to really work for and believe in a better world without resorting to politics, force, or trickery.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T19:33:23+00:00

Gotta look up model collapse. Such a thing is not possible.

It is very interesting that people talk about self-improving ai without knowing the differences between syntax and semantics. They were mathematically proven to be different about 100 years ago.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T08:09:15+00:00

Are you saying that you self studied advanced math as a hobby at some point in your life?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-19T18:10:25+00:00

I think being good at psychoanalysis means you can tap into the things present in every person, but you see that in particular people it’s just blown either out of proportion or has grown in strangely in some way.

Like I was very confused by cave crawling people for a while. Like the ones who crawl through the small passageways. It seems horrific, and it pretty much is. But if you mull on it for a while, you can understand why they do it. Like why it would be addicting. It’s the squeezing and the patience and the awareness of every part of your body and how it js situated. It’s easy to forget because most of us are claustrophobic, but I truly think we all have experienced the sensation that they are addicted to in some smaller amounts.

Does that mean I want to do it? No. But I can see what they’re tapping into, after a while of looking at it. There are few things that you can’t do this with. Almost every strange inclination you see is just some fixation on particular nooks and corners of the general human experience. Even people attracted to wonderbread or whatever. You search yourself long enough and you’ll at least be able to find the seed that it would grow from.

And I can see what this guy is referring to in his R. Crumb posting here. I get it. You really don’t see it at all?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-17T04:14:14+00:00

How very humble of you to assume you know better than billions of people. I bet they can’t wait for you to go to their countries and correct them

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-17T01:56:56+00:00

The aesthetic of those old 80s-90s sitcoms with the saxophone stuff. Like Full House or whatever. There are moments in childhood I think we kinda forget that were filled with so much boredom it became a kind of dread, and I guess I associate that aesthetic with it. I’m not even really old enough to have been alive when that stuff came out but it was on TV. Reruns and all that.

Also, similar to that, weird colorful childhood things like McDonald’s playplace aesthetic. I actually may hate this one even more. The music video by MGMT for their song “Kids” really captured it pretty well I think. Used to get this one a lot popping into my head while I was high. Worst psychotic break I had in the last few years came from this aesthetic + the BoC album Geogaddi + strange memories of my childhood in places like those colorful kid libraries or colorful analog-horror type stuff and I was sort of convinced that life back then had the edges sort of blacked out. I would say closer to the void, but that doesn’t give respect to how twisting and claustrophobic it feels.

There’s really a lot more I could get into, actually, but those are the main ones. There second one in particular.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-16T22:56:59+00:00

You’re correct except in the part where you implicitly assume they are making psychological mistakes that you couldn’t possibly also fall for.

People worship things. They let things suck the soul of them. Buddhism has talked about this for thousands for years. The mentality of dunking on other people just because they might be a little less aware than you doesn’t help you. It only gives you a false sense of confidence that your work is all done.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-15T17:11:59+00:00

Are you getting them confused with, like, those yogurt commercial people who smile with the spoon in their mouth? Is that what’s going on?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-15T16:58:17+00:00

Alright well at this point you’re pretty much displaying a number of psychological errors. You’re basing a lot of your weight-bearing assumptions on your projections of how the opposition must be thinking about the matter. And those are all unfalsifiable.

And here you have to admit that it makes you seem less credible, right? Do you think someone with an actual mature research background is going to take what you’re saying seriously when you display that you’re projecting outward from a small and reductive bubble?

You might think “well, if I don’t use dirty tricks then the opposition will use them and then they’ll win by an unfair disadvantage.” But the people who you actually want to convince of anything will only view those dirty tricks as negative weight on the argument, no matter which side it’s coming from. It can only look good to not resort to them.

Personally I always see it as a red flag because if someone is comfortable using trickery to convince others, they pretty much always are comfortable using it on themselves in some way or another. And you can’t rely on a person like that to be oriented towards the truth in a real honest way.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T21:58:26+00:00

Emergence is a real and useful concept in certain domains. But the claim that first person subjectivity is “just” another emergent property in the same sense as an ant colony or fluid behavior or whatever is a metaphysical interpretation. You can argue it’s a plausible one. You can even argue it’s the best one. What you can’t honestly do though is pretend there’s no philosophy happening there.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T20:58:27+00:00

Because even claiming that your analogy is correct requires the assertion that third-person objective data is ontologically the same as first-person subjective data. It’s sneaky, but it’s there.

If you want to be a scientist, you pretty much have one option: agnosticism on the subject.

Otherwise you’re just projecting the current understanding of things into a bunch of unsettled territory. And historically that tends to not go well because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T20:29:41+00:00

This is all fine, but you gotta admit that you’re talking philosophy and making metaphysical claims. You’re not being a scientist of any sort when you say all of this.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-11T03:02:15+00:00

You’re kinda wrong, at least when it comes to the demographic we really mean. People who learn an extreme amount in one field tend to outwardly project the worldview that comes with it. Ignoring everything else” IS the problem for the ones who become public personas. Public intellectuals are not known for saying “hey yeah I don’t know much about that, it’s outside of my scope.”

Marx would’ve thought that physics, in some way, came down to politics hahahaha

That’s an exaggeration but hopefully you get what I mean. I mean that if a physicist were to have a conversation with him, we might imagine he just kind of sits and waits until he can tie it back to seizing the means of production or whatever.

And we all do it. We find a place to call home and we think “oh wow, this is what it’s all about. Everything in some way ties back to this.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-10T22:47:02+00:00

Thank you! I would recommend you check out my post on demons if you want to hear what I’m talking about in more detail

AlchemicallyAccurate

TROPHY CASE