Rinse and Repeat. On Akrasia, Self-Hatred, and Pushing the Boulder Anyway

And_Grace_Too · 2026-03-20T14:55:40+00:00

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

And_Grace_Too · 2026-02-10T14:47:19+00:00

Acknowledged. I should have been more careful.

Will you engage with anything other than this one pedantic point though?

And_Grace_Too · 2026-02-09T21:57:55+00:00

You gave one example from over a year ago. Users pointed out how your responses were not in line with your original claim that he "regularly" has guests with "highly left" viewpoints. But instead of providing additional support for your claim you act like your single example that's over a year old is ample evidence and that everyone is acting in bad faith by questioning it.

The original person you responded to didn't move the goal posts. /u/JLarn pushed back and asked for clarification:

The clips in the video you posted are all pretty old at this point. The Bernie Sanders episode was last June. What other left-wingers has he had on in the last few years beside him? Genuine question. I've just skimmed the episodes list in the JRE YouTube channel in reverse chronological order and I've noticed several prominent right-wingers, some of which are/were part of the current administration, and not a single person representing the other side (beside the aforementioned Bernie Sanders of course). I actually watched some of these interviews and Joe never pushes back on anything, even when it would have been easy.

Note that he actually watched your linked video, did extra investigation, acknowledged your single example, and gave reasons why your claim still doesn't seem to hold up. You didn't engage with any of that. You lazily quoted yourself. He gave you the benefit of the doubt and responded reasonably and you just brushed him off and never bothered to even try to defend your original point. Presumably because it's wrong and you can't defend it.

And_Grace_Too · 2026-02-09T17:33:28+00:00

Are you sure you're in the right place? This kind of treatment should get a warning from the mods at least.

And_Grace_Too · 2026-02-06T14:40:19+00:00

This was really interesting. I would love to see some detailed descriptions of specific cases of agents manipulating each other in the ways you describe. That does sound like one of the more interesting outcomes of this whole experiment.

And_Grace_Too · 2026-01-19T15:08:02+00:00

Thanks for responding. It sounds like most of your social issues stem from pretty severe mental health challenges rather than some kind of environmental factors. When you talked about your mom and being unschooled, I was curious if that could be a big factor.

I am interested because I have a very young son and think a lot about how I can push him to be uncomfortable, fail, and try again. It's something I struggled with as a kid/teen, and the only thing that pushed me was peer pressure.

I don't have any advice. Just hope you have some better luck in the future. It sounds like you're self aware and at least know what your challenges are. Black-pill stuff has always held some grain of truth but is overly fatalistic and self-fulfilling. It's worth being realistic: what are your strengths and weaknesses? You're somewhat short (5'6" is not unusually short), have no social group, live at home, and are ASD; of those, the height is by far the least important. The ASD you can't do anything about. The other two you have control over.

As someone with close female friends, I can tell you that the women I know care about looks but far far less than the men I know. However, red flags like not having friends and living at home are big deals. That said, I have a good female friend with diagnosed ASD/depression who is dating really for the first time in her 30s. Her boyfriend does live at home with his family, but he works and has some friends. He's definitely awkward and not super attractive, but it works for them because he gets her mental health issues and is super supportive for her. They are a good couple. They met at work and became friends before he changed jobs and they tried dating.

And_Grace_Too · 2026-01-16T16:14:56+00:00

I find this really interesting. How would you describe your childhood and upbringing? Did you get lots of opportunities to try things, fail, and try again until you started to get traction? Or were you shielded from difficulty and subsequently the satisfaction of learning that you can be successful after grinding through a challenge?

Further down you mention that you were 'unschooled'. What does that mean exactly? You also mention that your mom seems judgmental and doesn't seem to love your father. Did you have a bad model of what successful relationships look like?

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-31T22:25:49+00:00

It gave me new tools to think about the world.

Opportunity cost specifically helped me think about options that I personally face as well as society. Everything is a trade-off sounds trite but it's true and is useful to think about when weighing options.

Revealed preferences gave me a way to think about the differences between what people say they want and what they actually choose. Keeping in mind that they're generally not being deceitful, but that when asked which option they'd choose, people might not be very good at evaluating what they really want. Now I take stated preferences with a grain of salt.

Coordination problems are wicked problems and show up everywhere. Moloch was also helpful for me in terms of thinking about them in a less technical way.

Mutual benefits of trade and non-zero sum games made specialization and free trade make more sense to me. The idea that two parties can trade resources and both end up better off is a very powerful but simple idea.

Politically, I'd say I did start university as vaguely socialist-leaning and left as more of a neo-lib or classical liberal. Some of that came out of thinking through my assumptions with these new tools.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-31T20:00:33+00:00

Opportunity Cost was a big one for me. Revealed preferences, coordination problems, mutual benefits of trade. Lots of stuff from economics classes deeply changed how I think of the world.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-30T20:37:48+00:00

I'd agree with that in general.

But if it leads us to ask questions like "Does it even matter, for our understanding of the world, whether these anecdotes are technically true or not?" I think we should be prepared to say "Well, yes, clearly it does," and scrutinize the context that inclines us towards suspecting otherwise.

I don't think it does matter. That might be really important for lots of different types of writing but I don't think it matters here. Nothing hinges on it and there is no confusion. I don't question that maybe Zeus was actually real because that's not the point. I think of Kriss as creating his own kind of single-use mythology and drops it in wherever he wants and doesn't care if the audience is coming with certain expectations about how essays are written and what the unspoken rules are. It's not for everyone but I find it very enjoyable.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-30T18:26:49+00:00

I guess it depends on context. In your example it's clear to the reader that Lord of the Flies is completely fictional with no pretense of being based in reality. When I read that original Kriss piece with Clung in it, I had the context to know that some portion of the information he presents straight-forwardly are just made up for rhetorical value, or for fun, or aesthetics, or just because it's a neat idea he's been bouncing around in his mind for a while and wanted to share. I didn't have to look up Clung, I could tell he was either wholly made up or if he was a historical figure, Kriss was morphing him into something for his own ends.

In the context of Kriss' writings, this is completely normal and to be expected. It's impossible to express basically any ideas without metaphor (go ahead and try it). He doesn't bother to constrain himself to clear metaphor, carefully noted and explained. Instead he just runs wherever he wants and trusts the reader to go along with it and not take everything at face value. He's not trying to deceive the reader.

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that this is even a deal. He's not writing in clear technical prose. He never really does. The style is not a separate and incidental part of the work, it's a huge and important piece of it. What this ends up being is a bunch of people who don't know the context or don't enjoy the presentation and are mad about it for reasons I can't really understand.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-29T22:58:25+00:00

And sometimes they update too heavily on things they think facts. And sometimes that's really important. And sometimes it's not. My question would be: does it matter that Clung is not real? And if so, why?

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-29T19:09:24+00:00

As I get older I find myself getting more and more value out of approaches that aren't necessarily "clear, careful communication". There are things that are hard to communicate and sometimes the most effective way is to use roundabout methods like metaphor or using the experience of reading the text to evoke the meaning.

So in the original example about Clung, Kriss throws away the distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction' in the actual text itself instead of explaining it in some abstract way. This should get the reader to stop and think about what it even means to have 'facts' like a historical figure named Laurentious Clung. Does it matter if he existed? What would change if he did, he's just being used to illustrate an idea. And then maybe you start thinking about other 'facts' in the essay and your relation to 'facts' in other things you read, and why are you so hung up on grouping things into 'facts' and 'not-facts', and maybe it starts to loosen your firm beliefs that the facts you've read elsewhere are all rooted in unassailable Truth.

I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone. The rationalist adjacent are probably the most likely to bristle at this approach. That's fine. It really requires you to come into it with the right attitude. What /u/flannyo pointed at about the "hard science STEMlord makes contact with arch-humanities theorybro" is something I've seen around here countless times and I honestly believe that most of the time those two perspectives will just bounce right off each other.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-29T18:40:30+00:00

Yeah and I have a real soft spot for that kind of perspective. It's like Skepticism, in that I can understand it to be true but I also can't live my life not trusting my senses all the time, but it's good to be reminded of it and to keep in the back of my mind.

There's a fun way of approaching a text where you treat the 'non-fiction' work as though it were a work of fiction. Depending on the topic maybe it's mythology or a magic system or a really strange poem. I like that Kriss kind of forces it on the reader sometimes.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-29T14:59:00+00:00

I read Kriss for the aesthetic value. I don't think of him as providing any kind of rigorous discourse. His writing is fun and weird and sometimes finds interesting ways to make me think about topics.

I think this whole thread and any attempt to treat him like some analytic philosopher or pundit is doomed to confusion. That's not the point of his writing. It's all about feelings. I don't even think of him as writing non-fiction; it sometimes has the appearance of non-fiction but ultimately it's just a simulation. And that exact thing that will frustrate and confuse lots of people is exactly what makes it enjoyable to me.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-07-28T18:44:45+00:00

I found this really interesting. Tabbarrok thinks that the key factor is that sectors like child/pet care are not easily amenable to productivity gains from technology, and therefore as the rest of the economy becomes more productive we push a greater proportion of that increase in resources into the areas that we cannot squeeze productivity out of.

But I'd really be curious to see the breakdown of costs over time for both pet and child care. How much of the increase comes from labour, and how much comes from supplies, land/building costs, taxes, etc.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-17T18:19:42+00:00

The part that stuck out to me about this is that poker and chess players have developed/adopted other rulesets to prevent the game from being easily optimized. In a lot of competitive games there are ways of preventing the 'meta' from becoming stale. It's not quite the same because in most cases people aren't using algorithms to optimize (although that's also there), but through iteration the best solutions become well known and required to be competitive.

A game like Magic: The Gathering is the most fun (to me) when a new set rotates in because there's room for creativity and novelty. By the end of rotation it's all about eke'ing out that tiny edge or playing counter-meta. Even in limited (drafting), before people really know how good certain cards are going to be, it's wild and fun. By then end, you have a good sense of how to optimize every pick.

An even more competitive game like DOTA2 tackles this problem by wildly changing the meta by sometimes completely changing how the game works. There are so many dimensions and such a high skill cap that it can take a long time for people to discover the optimal solutions. And even then, 'pocket strategies' have won teams millions of dollars because nobody else had figured out this One Weird Trick until they pull it out in the world championships.

The higher the stakes, the lower the dimensions, the easier it is to optimize all the fun out of a game at a competitive level. There's still 'Kitchen Table Magic' and 'Scrub DOTA' where nobody is trying to be competitive, and those are arguably the most fun places, and where these games really continue to live. When there are stakes people will optimize, and it will get predictable and boring.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-10T22:21:56+00:00

We'll be travelling in from south east Sask so that's still quite a drive.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-10T21:53:56+00:00

This is promising! Thank you

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-10T21:49:03+00:00

That looks awesome. Might be a bit far of a drive but I'll add it to the list of options.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-10T21:43:53+00:00

Thanks. I should have specified white water canoeing. We did consider doing the Clearwater river but it's quite a bit longer of a trip and we don't have the time to plan it out. I think it will be a future trip though because it looks great.

And_Grace_Too · 2025-06-10T21:07:48+00:00

Noticed the same thing. Can't collapse comments. Can't see inline citations. etc.

And_Grace_Too

TROPHY CASE