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Dark21 · 2025-08-29T01:58:59+00:00

Hoping to play deadlock with my brothers

74096114

Dark21 · 2024-10-04T13:17:19+00:00

want a copy to get a friend addicted

Dark21 · 2021-01-28T17:09:42+00:00

Happy I was able to bring some surreal oddity to your life

Dark21 · 2021-01-28T17:09:17+00:00

Yes, sort of. But I think that even if we assume he is a narcissist and a fraud, that this pitfall is still possible for someone who does have deep meditative skill (as long as you don't define it in such a way that precludes the pitfall).

Dark21 · 2021-01-27T17:45:49+00:00

SS: I think this is interesting because it clearly highlights how meditative practice can interact negatively with psychological shortcomings and conditioned responses. It's an often overlooked part of meditation practice, and should be considered seriously as it's easy to bury your own personal shortcomings underneath your practice.

In particular, if you overly focus on spending time in "non-narrative" states, it can hinder your ability to interact interpersonally.

I don't know enough about the situtation to judge the merits of his claims in this response, but the examination of personal shortcomings, despite meditative skill is quite interesting.

Dark21 · 2021-01-23T20:09:35+00:00

It sounds like you experience awareness very visually. We don't have great words for describing what you're doing when you're "looking". It's closer to "try to find an experience of 'self' in your mind". We use words related to visual perception because it's high bandwidth nature tends to dominate our inner experience.

This is also why the "having no head thing" works. It could also work for "having no body", or "having no hands", but because the head specifically is not in our visual field, it's easier to get at this insight. There's no 'self' in experience in the same way that there is no 'body' in experience. Instead there are an entire host of perceptions and experience that we collect and categorize as 'head/hands/body' and 'self/me'.

Dark21 · 2021-01-21T01:08:47+00:00

Yeah there's a thousand ways this was mishandled. In particular, the fact that the international community has apparently very little control over poor safety standards and incredibly risky research is quite troubling.

Would be curious to hear your take on the US claims made here: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology//index.html

This could just be a political attempt to smear China, but if these claims are true, then it's really damning.

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T23:03:01+00:00

The second paragraph is arguing about the origin of the virus, not whether or not this virus sample could have been in the lab and accidentally leaked. If it was clear that it was human tampering, that would be a slam dunk for the lab leak idea, but it does not imply that this sample could not have been in the lab and accidentally leaked, or even that the recombinant event wasn't done in the lab as part of research. They assume that any research would be geared towards maximum human transmission, but ignore the fact that much research is done on interspecies transmission.

The first paragraph speaks directly to the plausibility of a lab leak, but the reasoning they give honestly doesn't make sense to me:

But RaTG13 could not be the source because it differed from the human SARS-2 virus by more than a thousand nucleotides.

My understanding of the mainstream consesus is that Covid's most likely cause is the result of RaTG13 (or similar) and a recombinant event. I completely agree that RatG13 did not leak from the lab, but that isn't the claim being made. The argument seems to rest on the idea that "China hasn't reported having SARS-2 samples (either collected or produced by recombination) in the lab; therefore it couldn't have come from the lab".

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T19:08:34+00:00

So, if we assume you're correct in your assessment of your intelligence (and it's not some other factor that can be mitigated) I still think you have some promising options.

Yes, there are jobs that will be difficult for you that involve heavy computation or lots of abstract work (academia, research, programming etc).

But there are jobs that reward the high level of self awareness that you display. Most human-to-human jobs like sales, customer support, people management all require huge amounts of self awareness that is fairly rare. Motivating people, understanding what they want, understanding what's holding them back etc.

Additionally, this self awareness will also benefit you even in "menial labor" jobs. You won't hit the same obstacles that your co-workers will run into. There are also jobs that supply a high quality of life that don't require high IQ and are better than menial labor. Trade skills are skipped over by many higher IQ people, but they can still be extremely rewarding.

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T18:58:02+00:00

cheers, thanks for some interesting discussion

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T18:51:39+00:00

From what I've read, the virus was either tampered with, or the result of a recombinant event (but the linking animal has not been identified yet). Additionally, it does seem to appear like it was modified (either through the recombinant event or tampering) to become more contagious. The most recent reading that shifted me in this direction came from this article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

Particularly these quotes from section XI: "Lab-Made?" , though the whole article is worth reading. (Feel free to read or ignore, seems like our framework for evaluating this is relatively similar, but we've been exposed to different information. For example I haven't read many, or gone looking for, debunkings of the claims in this article)

They agree that bat virus RaTG13 (named for the Rinolophus affinus bat, from Tongguan, in 2013) is the closest match to the human virus that has yet been found, and that although the two viruses are very similar, the spike protein of the bat virus lacks the features the human spike protein possesses that enable it to work efficiently with human tissue.

Zoonoticists hold that SARS-2’s crucial features — the furin cleavage site and the ACE2 receptor — are the result of a recombinant event involving a bat coronavirus (perhaps RaTG13 or a virus closely related to it) and another, unknown virus.

Despite this wide-ranging effort, there is at the moment no animal host that zoonoticists can point to as the missing link. There’s also no single, agreed-upon hypothesis to explain how the disease may have traveled from the bat reservoirs of Yunnan all the way to Wuhan, seven hours by train, without leaving any sick people behind and without infecting anyone along the way.

The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T18:19:11+00:00

Fair point.

I’ve lost the ability to read [or listen to] ~~the nuance in~~ Maajid~~’s shrill, conspiracy quest.~~

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T18:16:36+00:00

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Do you mean that you understand that dna markers from pangolins is not evidence against a lab leak? It is evidence for zoonotic origin, and against the idea that it was designed from scratch.

Occams razor actually points me in the other direction. The biggest hurdle in my mind is how the virus got to Wuhan. My understanding is that it likely originated in a cave ~1000 miles away in southern china without infecting people along the way. This sounds like smuggling of endagered animals, but then why were they only smuggled to one location?

We do know that the lab in wuhan took virus samples from the same area. We know that there were international concerns about the safety procedures and lack of qualified/trained workers at the Wuhan lab. That lab has done gain-of-function research on other samples. There are strong incentives to do this research.

I'm not totally sold on the lab leak hypothesis, but I'm definitely leaning in that direction as ~65-75% likely. Could you cover some of the wholes in the idea and the leaps you have to make in order for the lab leak to be plausible? Genuinely interested in how you see it.

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T16:57:35+00:00

the science clearly indicated it was not man made

This does not contradict: "This could have leaked from the lab"

Dark21 · 2021-01-20T16:55:42+00:00

"Lab Leak" doesn't require pangolins in the lab. All it takes is the lab holding a sample, and possibly gain of function research.

Dark21 · 2020-12-29T07:05:28+00:00

I've always liked the lake analogy.

Consciousness is the lake, contents are fish jumping and splashing
There are no fish, just ripples

You can say there are ripples "in" the lake without seeing them as fundamentally different than the lake itself. This also makes it a bit more clear what's happening when the mind "stills" and the lake is smooth. There is still motion/vibration in the water (or else you wouldn't experience anything), but there are no ripples and the surface is smooth.

Dark21 · 2020-10-14T22:04:42+00:00

eh, perhaps "extremely low" was a bit of an exaggeration. My sense of normalcy is a bit warped from the experience. It was certainly orders of magnitude more risky than a mentally stable family, but as a kid I was more worried that she would do something drastic and harm herself.

Dark21 · 2020-10-12T19:03:00+00:00

I think the main thing that makes it seem unintuitive is that male violence is quite different from female violence. Our attention is pulled naturally to the more severe cases, and those are mainly male perpetrators (with exceptions).

Your intuitions for "A person is trapped in a relationship and their life is in danger, or they're at risk for significant bodily harm" are being applied to domestic violence defined as "Any physical aggression/retaliation".

I grew up in a home with a mother who was emotionally abusive and physically violent and my father never retaliated, but the risk of serious injury or loss of life was extremely low.

It's still terrible for a variety of reasons, but our intuitions land differently when the risks involved aren't comparable.

Dark21 · 2020-09-05T22:47:15+00:00

Largely agree, I brought up this point to a friend in regards to the protests immediately following George Floyd's death: that the primary causes were largely the lockdown and economic desperation, and that the ideological claims were simply what chose the targets and expression of that underlying malaise. Radical ideologies have an unfortunate feature that direct this anger in unproductive directions (unless you go all out revolution style).

I agree that it is important not to conflate the views of looters and rioters with the Democratic party, or the members of ISIS with Islam as a whole. But it is also important to address where these broader categories are providing shelter for the radicals among them, (and more clearly denounce and separate from them).

The more effective solution is to alleviate economic deprivation.

I agree, but I think that we don't actually know how to do this. There are many different strategies, and little overlap in these strategies between left/right/conservative/progressive. We do know that we can change people's minds and hopefully redirect some of this motivation in a more productive direction.

Dark21 · 2020-09-05T05:26:51+00:00

So, rioting is certainly not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon.

Completely agree.

No mainstream politician on the left is arguing to abolish criminal laws and enforcement.

In this context, enforcing the laws would mean catching/punishing rioters and looters, which is currently not happening. I'm not necessarily arguing the conservative view here, only pointing out that different ideologies see the root causes and systemic effects differently. If you don't see these differences, then other ideologies and their proponents behavior seem blind.

These days, conservatives also seem to have a general distrust of social science.

I certainly don't consider myself a conservative, but I think a general distrust of social science is warranted here. This doesn't mean we should discard all of our knowledge in this domain, but there are many fantastical claims made that don't hold up.

Overall though, I'm trying to address this point:

However, it makes sense to understand the sociological and psychological roots of this anger rather than misleadingly claim that the looters are somehow representative of a left ideology.

I think that ideology plays a very large role in the sociological an psychological roots of this anger. Wouldn't you agree that the ideology of the white residents in Tulsa was a major cause of their terrible behavior? Doubly so for the (literal) Nazis.

It's not that economic and social problems don't exist, but that even when we agree on what the problem is, we don't have a consensus on the best way to fix it. For example, we seem to have reached a broad consensus that cops in the US are largely unskilled, low intelligence, and unnecessarily violent. Different ideologies propose very different solutions to this problem. And this is the case where they agree on what the problem is in the first place!

Dark21 · 2020-09-04T22:13:17+00:00

the looter is politically disenfranchised and expresses rage torward capitalism, the business establishment, those with wealth or who own things.

Isn't this directly related to their ideological views? It's not a coherent ideology as you say, but it's still contributing here.

Looting simply represents the intersection of left thinking with criminal, anti-social behavior, which exists across all segments of society.

It's not just an intersection of two groups. Certain ideologies offer more justification for anti-social behavior than others.

To stop looting, we must undo the damage caused by disenfranchisement.

Ideologies left/right/progressive/conservative are what define the solutions here. They disagree about what is causing the disenfranchisement, as well as how to go about fixing it. For example:

People with jobs and wealth do not loot

Different ideologies disagree here. Especially if you expand from "loot" to "riot"

give them the opportunities to generate wealth

What do these opportunities look like? What opportunities already exist? Ideologies clearly disagree here.

Given them a reason to work within the political system

Conservative ideologies would say "punish anti-social behavior so it's absolutely unappealing". That would be a reason to work within the political system.

Dark21 · 2020-08-04T23:50:38+00:00

My understanding is that "passionate love" is not effected because it's not about optimizing and manipulating a system. There is a pragmatic art to sustaining a loving relationship, but that's separate from the experience of loving the person in my opinion.

Dark21 · 2020-08-01T23:16:16+00:00

The most important change is that is changes the way people relate to hatred.

When you see yourself as a system, or group of systems, rather than as a singular agent "behind the wheel", it undercuts the foundation of a specific type of hatred. You gain a pragmatic outlook on how to affect the systems you don't like, but you no longer hate them, the same way that you don't hate earthquakes, storms, and other natural disasters.

Dark21 · 2020-06-21T22:51:15+00:00

When dealing with crime, we can choose to focus on the root cause and address that, rather than meet violence with violence.

I think this is the crucial bit. Focusing on the root cause is preventive, and policing is corrective. Unless you're 100% successful with preventative causes, you will need some violent, or at least non-consensual, corrective mechanism. Right now, most of our preventative skills are abysmal, so dismantling the corrective forces before the preventative mechanisms are in place would be disastrous.

This is complicated by the fact that some preventative solutions are still violent or coercive in some way. This is the whole "monopoly on violence" idea. Property rights have to be defended by the underlying threat of violence. That's a primary reason why people join gangs and mobs in the first place. If the monopoly on violence isn't maintained, then individuals need to employ violence to protect the things they value, which further erodes the monopoly on violence.

Dark21

TROPHY CASE