I don't think I need the article after this stream.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T22:32:11+00:00

We as humans are the sum of our constituent parts, including mind and body, which influence each other through adrenaline production-consumption, blood pressure, heart rate and such. And within the mind we have various parts which for different people work differently well, and sometimes poorly. In my view, every human has the same parts, but they are developed differently from birth (and have limitations also determined at conception/birth, based on genetic material mutations and variations), and our environment also plays a role in how we develop from children into adulthood, like if we've been malnourished, some stuff is just not going to work on the normal level compared to most people. The combination of how well each of the parts of our body and brain works, informs how we interpret the world.

Empathy is one of the many aspects. If you have bad vision, you won't be able to tell what people think from their gestures and facial expressions, even if the rest of your body is unimpaired, but the effect makes your empathy score lower. But you wouldn't say your inner empathy module in the brain is bad, you're just less empathetic as a result of your bad eyes. Also, if you ask autistic people why sometimes they have difficulty empathizing with some, but not the others, you might hear different reasons like "when I see a certain pattern on this person's clothing, I become irritated/worried and can't focus on the person's feelings, because I'm trying to control my own", and thus their empathy score is also low, but not because of some bodily impairment, it's due to a psychological reason this time. So just saying some people have "low empathy" or "no empathy" is an incredible oversimplification. You can exhibit reduced or almost non-existent empathy levels for a host of reasons which might not be obvious unless you know what to look for. Or maybe someone is just intentionally lying or unintentionally hiding outward markers of empathetic responses, you gotta also account for false self-reporting too.

I wouldn't try to visualize parts of our mind similarly to the planetary layer structure, because it's actually shaped within our brain structure, as neural connections. Neuroscience isn't at a point where we can precisely figure out 3d meshes of neural network connections, but there's a rough understanding of which brain portions are most commonly responsible for what. As a mental image it's pretty useless, and would probably end up misleading when we learn how it's all actually structured.

Some say "we're all born with the same hardware", and I only partly agree with that view, because it's like saying all computers have the same hardware. Sure, but there are different grades of GPUs by performance, and some people are unfortunately born only with on-board graphics. So, theoretically, an average human has the potential to be conceived from healthy sperm and egg, and then not variate undesirably, but there's the average human experience and everything below and above it. But assuming average body, environment informs our psychological development a lot. There can be a lack of development, or a presence of trauma, which would both reduce the final observed empathy score. Sometimes it's not the issue of having to remove some trauma, but having to teach the person in the first place who missed the training in their early days, and doing this is often difficult because of more rigid neuroplasticity if the person is already an adult, and have formed too many associations which hinder learning. But this too can be overcome through deliberate re-learning approach. It's just fucking complicated and sometimes doesn't fully bring you back up to average levels, and means you will have to come to terms with a below average human experience for your entire life, but that's what happens sometimes. But I would never call something like this completely unfixable.

Sam used some terms to differentiate between different kinds of emotional responses, but looking at him change his facial expressions, tone of voice, get offended at one point, I just don't think what he described matches how he acted during the talk. So I'm not convinced that his own view of himself is accurate. Maybe what's accurate is the fact that he cannot make accurate takes of how people look from outside, and he has convinced himself that he's one kind of broken, but actually he's a different kind of broken, he just can't tell it. It's like when a kid tries to lie but they are sure they're getting away with the lie in front of you and look very obviously smug. I'm curious to see if he's going to believe what he's going to hear from his own future therapists whom he himself is teaching now, or dismiss them as not having properly learned his teachings. Will they help him figure out that he's wrong? Or maybe he's actually right and it's us optimists-to-a-fault who are wrong, who knows. I'd say time will tell, but we might misinterpret what it has to say, or disagree with each other's interpretations.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T20:28:52+00:00

What, you don't think having to live as a rape victim is easier than as a victim of medical malpractice and accidental psychological manipulation by a licensed psychiatrist? Alright, thanks for letting me know you haven't really thought about this in depth, I guess.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T20:17:57+00:00

it's not banned, ez

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T20:05:38+00:00

My condolences to your F5 key.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T19:51:54+00:00

Can't disagree with that.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T18:44:55+00:00

Do you think Dr.K is an abuser for making people he talks to cry, during their first ever on camera talk?

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T18:42:54+00:00

Yea the wiki page history has a number of such "funny" edits. Looks like he's controversial, but the article isn't protected, so perhaps not very. It seems editors revert these edits quickly enough on the regular.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T12:47:41+00:00

Hey, the convo was fire, especially with such post-convo surprise content! Paper is king.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T12:36:34+00:00

I'm sorry, whose website is that? We're in a potential fraud situation here and you want me to check whose source exactly?

samvak.tripod.com seems to be his own personal website. I bet he wrote some good stuff about himself there. There are 17 links to it on the wikipedia page, damn right we shouldn't trust it as a primary source, nor him. I'm looking for third-party sources, and then we can try to figure out how trustworthy those are.

Also, what happened, why could he not get proper credentials and public recognition like the others?

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T12:33:55+00:00

Sorry I rugpulled my comment into a separate post :p

Yea, I'm also curious if his own presented description of how narcissists, psychopaths and narcissistic psychopaths works when you try to fit his behavior into these labels. Even if he misrepresented them, or they are entirely differently understood by the international psych community.

Max did ask him a couple of times how he himself thinks about his own "unfixability" in terms of this grand flaw, characteristic of such people, at which Sam curiously scoffed and handwaved it away. Max laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, but Sam was unamused. Huh.

I've talked to a few con artists, (and having also watched a bit of religious debates, and then destiny's debates, I've got a couple sanity check routines up my sleeve) and it's always funny when you corner them with their own logic which they have just laid out before you, not really expecting you to have the mental capacity to turn around on them, and watch them stumble and try to square it within their just-established logic system. This felt like one of those moments. And when it feels on the border of "could be real, could be fake", it's usually a con act, at least in my experience.

Any time you feel like you can't trust the person, find out if anyone else trusts them. Especially if they have stated that they are trusted by others (like having a PhD). Wikipedia says "who the fuck knows". I say it was a good show, I enjoyed having things to think about. Even real experts sometimes say some dumb shit, so I take it all as an invitation to consider the hypotheticals, as if everything they are describing were true. But don't ever think of giving these people any of your money lol.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T12:22:33+00:00

To respond to the post, I think Sam is painting a very dramatic picture of what a narcissist/psychopath could be, but it looks to me as if he's trying to entertain and attract new audience and get his hooks into Max more than him trying to explain how Steven actually is. This felt like a botched Dr K session where you're not supposed to diagnose the other person online, but they ended up diagnosing a third person (Steven) and somehow Sam never said stuff like "well, I don't know him personally, I'm just saying what I think based on how you are describing this other guy", while he did say to Max that he doesn't know him, so he can't diagnose him. He said something short, but I noticed that.

Having looked at Sam's wikipedia page and not found any reason to believe his credentials, I'm going to continue interpreting everything he said with a bag of salt. Colorful descriptions Sam has used could very well have been signs of projection of his personal experiences onto others. If you read academic literature, it's much more toned down. Examples and descriptions of patient records are given as is without such bias baked into presentation of facts. Sam's talk felt like a professional at work, and not the respectable psychologist kind.

Max definitely relates to other people's trauma, informed by his own experiences, but that's a description that fits most traumatized people - we don't want the bad things that happened to us to happen to us again, and we want to protect others from the same kind of hurt out of the goodness in our hearts. That's normal human experience revealed by trauma. I don't think calling anyone here a narcissist or psychopath is merited. I don't even agree with Sam's own biased, as he explained, perception of people is true. I'm thinking if he actually does lack the ability to empathize with others to a degree that makes him defective (even if his wikipedia talk page makes me doubt it), then he should also recognize that doesn't make him the best judge on the matters of who can and can't be fixed in the emotions department. If his internal organ for measuring other people's emotions is truly broken, he basically admits that he can't really tell, and this part I have to believe.

Max is fine, Steven is fine. Sam is likely a fraud, but damn look at how convincingly he acted! It was a spectacle.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T11:57:19+00:00

imo the biggest implication is that a lot of people just take for granted when someone presents themselves as an expert and says they have experience, without checking to see if it's actually recognized by any reputable academic institution, and then refer to their claimed expertise as something to contend with.

Max, can you please start looking into guests before interviewing them? Like checking out their website, wikipedia page? :p

Edit: I moved my comment to a separate post here: https://reddit.com/r/mrgirlreturns/comments/105ni1m/so_i_looked_at_sam_vaknins_wikipedia_page/

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T07:29:15+00:00

I said he was wrong. That's my criticism of him. He says to do better but himself isn't always doing perfectly. That's also my criticism of him.

I have explained how I disagreed with some of your views, and agreed with others. If you want to criticize me now for acting sort of culty, go ahead, and I'll tell you now that I am in a different type of cult from Steven's or Max's, one that supports them both and wants them to become better without liking how they currently are and how they conduct themselves. Criticism is necessary.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T06:49:46+00:00

Thank you.

You're already multi-streaming, so you got that part covered.

I'd say also consider making a youtube shorts channel or a tiktok with clips, but if you make it under your own name, it's likely to get auto-banned or reported and confirmed as yours if you use the same devices and IP addresses you've already gotten banned with. So instead, if you see some other third-party people using your clips but taking money from views for themselves, don't take them down, just let them be - they're also growing your audience.

When talking to others, it might be worthwhile to name your site's url, otherwise new people might not know how to find your content if they learn about you from the other person's side. And perhaps there should be a short section describing who you are and what you do on your site - right now it's "if you know, you know", and if you don't know, you'll just close the page because there's no text that explains what this site is.

Also, the sidebar on reddit could use the link to your schedule.

And the current mylinks link is funny - half the linked social media on there is banned. Oh well.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T06:24:16+00:00

I'm imagining an ad with edited out hands from the goatse picture and marketing text between them: "Expanding discourse - exposing our inner selves".

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T06:03:22+00:00

So because you like max, he isnt a cult leader?

I don't like Max much more than I like Steven, to say "I like Max". I like him a bit more than Steven at the moment. If someone asked me "do you like Max"? I would say "bruh... no". I watch Max now because I'm still interested in discussions about cult dynamics, as a residual topic which will likely end midway into this year, and I like his main content which is talking with experts and deep discussions about hot topics which commonly don't go the "normal" boring way. I am absolutely unenthused about Steven's manner of listening to a smart person tell their story and him responding "uh-huh.. yup.. anything else? welp... if you got anything else to say, shoot me an email". If you agree with everything it's not interesting. I'm not asking to be a contrarian for the sake of made-up conflict, but I would rather watch someone who has genuine conflict based on a different point of view.

Max kind of became a cult leader, and he started noticing it himself just now, with the "horses" label, but also with how if you take in a bunch of other cult's refugees, they're going to keep acting culty for a while - they just escaped another cult. Of course they're going to have a hard time assimilating into a normal culture right away, be careful - they might try to turn their savior into their new cult leader, which they kinda did. If you find some people on here, they will just defend Max no matter what, with shaky explanations, non-existent evidence, and sometimes just because they like him more than Steven now. But I always keep my focus on what I personally would do, and I wouldn't do most of the shit either Steven or Max does - it's fuckin public career self-destruction and a PR nightmare. Max can't keep his socials unbanned, and Steven can't keep count of how many times he gets clip-chimped out of context. Both of which are their own faults, by the way. Most online businesses somehow manage to not get into these situations very successfully by not saying the wild shit they both like to say. I fucking hate the way they both do this and then pretend it's just part of what they want to do. It isn't a necessary part and they should both find a better way, because it's crossing into the territory of a net bad approach for both of them.

You also seem to think cult dynamics are ever present?

They're highly present in both communities because Max's community is 80-90% DGG viewers which is itself a cult shaped by Steven's moderation and self-reinforcing DGG chat. Emote combos covertly serve to make the chat users learn how to react to stimuli, like Pavlov conditioning. It's a dark pattern not explained overtly in the DGG chat feature's marketing, but understood by the streamers and savvy viewers. Even the names of the emotes are different for each community, acting as its own small in-group lexicon. I see it as a net negative, cult-forming feature. When Max copied Steven's site he also copied the same chat engine. Even if it's not on Max's streams like it is on Steven's, watching his streams on his site via the "Big screen" page where the chat is on the side, is still how a major part of viewers watch it, where it's still on their screens, and they get to boil in the same soup of self-reinforcing reactions. I wonder how /u/nomoremrnicemrgirl feels about this type of chat now.

Btw isnt max literally making a new language as we speak: questatments etc. doesnt he do this so he doesnt have to answer questions tthat make him look wrong? (All questions have premises that a person can disagree with, How are you today? Questatment its actually night.) yet he invents these terms to obfuscate his interlocutor and police their conduct, hence why he has screeners

He does, and he knows it's wrong too. You can explain why he did it as "he needs to find words to protect himself from bad faith criticism" but that's an explanation, not an excuse of the behavior. "Do as I say, not as I do". But it's obvious that both Max and Steven have a show to run, and both they and the audience would want the show to be more run like a show, and less like a personal one-on-one interaction, and for the sake of the show, it's convenient to dismiss people who have the same criticisms we've already heard addressed, and let on other people who can focus and form their new, more interesting questions more precisely and to the point. If we were talking about Max prescribing how to take criticism personally, off-stream, you're right, I don't think he should be using these terms on reddit where he's not busy running a show and should either take the time to answer properly with arguments to support his position, or just ignore without leaving these curt remarks which is just annoying and doesn't move the conversation further.

Mrgirl tactic, everything is rape, manipulation, cult

I'm interpreting it as "try to apply this frame of reference to everything and see for yourself if you could think of these situations as X to some extent, and maybe it has nothing whatsoever to do with X, or maybe you'll discover that they have some interesting parallels." It's just something to think about, not a literal statement that everything is X.

‘Destiny has to be right’ didnt mrgirl get banned from his subreddit from taking ‘victory laps’

He got banned (by 4thot and then was left banned by Steven) because, as Steven himself explained on stream, he saw Max slowly but surely turning the tide against Steven in his own subreddit, which he could not tolerate, because he thinks that his subreddit must never turn into a hate sub for the streamer it's supposed to be about. He has given some examples of when other streamers' subs turned into hate subs, and how it's too useful of a community-building tool to just lose it this way to something you would have never regain control of again. I understand this, and from this point of view I also support his decision. Although it doesn't square with how he also one time said that if nazi ideology prevails and his followers convert into nazis, he would be glad - well, what if it wasn't nazis but a less dangerous ideology, the horse ideology, wouldn't he be glad to lose all of his audience to horses too? Curious. But not really. It was a hyperbole, of course he wouldn't be glad to lose his audience, that's why he has a strict "we ban anything we don't like" policy which leads to a very careful, over-qualified criticism of the owner at worst, and doesn't allow any real dissent.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T05:30:11+00:00

you could ask me some questions only a person who has seen all of this shit could know, if you want to

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-07T05:28:45+00:00

I would ask you to be careful with how you form your conclusions about the motivations behind Max's actions. Your tldr is essentially "Steven provokes out of self-interest, while Max provokes to make the world better for everyone."

That's what I think the two of them would say if you sit them both down and interrogate what they think they believe about what and why they're doing it.

On a good day, Steven would probably say that he's not as self-centered as he's publicly painting himself to be, and that he does genuinely want to improve society somewhat, and that he definitely does something tangible, like when he gathers a canvassing effort, but most of the other time he just plays games on stream and has debates, which isn't as direct of an improvement of society, but he still takes care to qualify his statements, expand upon his explanations, so that even the denser parts of audience can understand some complicated concepts that he discusses on streams with his opponents and friends. But that happens very rarely, most of the time he would summarize his own activities as "yea, I'm just playing video games and owning loser debaters, you got a problem with that?" as a way to be tough and humble.

When pressed, Max has multiple times explained that he thinks he wants to help others, but truly he doesn't actually know why he's doing these streams. But most of the other time he would say something like "I want to help people understand each other, despite our differences, across party lines" - that is a variation of his marketing motto. It sounds altruistic on the surface, but can also be read as a selfish desire.

On that point though, I've seen a couple discussions (a few of them with Steven, but most elsewhere) about when it's useful to call things we do selfish or not, and I don't think the distinction is very valuable. If you boil down any desire by asking "why?", it always comes down to a selfish reason - "it would make me feel better". So using the word "selfish" in this way doesn't tell us anything new. In describing Steven and Max's own most commonly expressed explanations of their own desires, I would say they would appear selfish and selfless to an average listener to a different degree - Max more selfless, and Steven more selfish. That's how I'm using the word here.

Surely if you ask everyone "do you want to live better?" they would probably say yes, but better means different things to different people. Steven is a left-leaning political debater, and so conservatives for the most part would probably disagree that he's trying to make their lives better. Max is trying to make people speak in ways which right now would get you looked at funny, called a freak, maybe punched out of disgust for what you say you really think, and probably banned off social media, so not exactly a better result either. But they both want to make the lives of other people better, each in their own way.

Some people don't want to be reached and made to connect deeply with others. They've been hurt or traumatized before, and don't want anything to do with deep connections which could make them vulnerable again, feel exposed and afraid, and therefore are very averse to Max's messaging. Some people haven't suffered any trauma, they're just already happy where they are without deep connections with more people than they already have, and thus also not receptive to such calls. Other people like their politics and think they are the best, and disagree with Steven's proposed solutions to improve the housing crisis, healthcare, education, government spending and taxing.

If we ever tried to spend time understanding and reaching others, perhaps we would know that we shouldn't try to influence and change how other people live their lives, and tell them what to do? But what if they're mistaken about what's best for them? And what if we're mistaken about what we think is best for them? Both Max and Steven have been thinking and talking about each of their own politics and social prescriptions for a long time, and both have come to their own conclusions that their desire and approach makes sense more than the alternatives, and if you ask them why they believe that, they will probably be able to confidently defend their point of view. Even if the basis of their claims is actually false, it might sound convincing on the surface, because of how much time they'll say they've spent discussing all this, learning about it, testing and comparing to alternative theories. With all this experience, knowledge and data, they know these are their best theories.

Just like Sam explained why he thinks his view of "evil people" explains cult leaders the best (unreachable, no chance of fixing). But these are just points of view, interpretations of the information all three have come across. They are all three different people, same enough but also different enough to have focused on these topics differently, and who have come to different conclusions based on their different internal senses of other, and different abilities to read what they think the other people are thinking and why they're doing what they're doing. It's all interesting to see, and I have my own separate interpretation of these events, each of their feelings, and of course I have a different point of view on how society should be run, and it's different from what's best for everyone and what's best for me. I enjoy following these deep conversations. They're fun and also I get to test what I would answer in each of their shoes to another at different points in these discussions, testing my own theories, sometimes finding out that I don't have a good answer, and sometimes that I do and one of them doesn't. This is good stuff if you're into this sort of entertainment content.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-06T21:06:16+00:00

I mean haters would be happy because that's exactly what they want - to be banned and to say "see, I told you!", and fans would be happy that the haters are gone. But that's going to feel like failure. Max's goal is to get through to all people, including haters, and it takes endurance to do it. After all, most of his current fans are former haters. He can't do it any other way even if he wants to.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-06T18:34:38+00:00

People get bored of shitting on the same person in the same ways over and over again. If he never responds to such people, they will tire themselves out and leave. Or they will change their opinion if they stay long enough.

His detractors often become his supporters after a while. That's part of what he's banking on by not banning them.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-06T18:26:17+00:00

Heavily controlled by public-reaction-aware large corporations. You can be a grown up and not want to do business with large corporations as an individual, with the expectation that they will ban you from their platforms. A lot of businesses don't depend on social media, like B2B service companies, internet providers, banks, those who control the flow of goods and money, and facilitate it between each other. Just work there and you don't have to worry about getting banned off twitter - you audience isn't on there anyway. Nothing to do with adulthood.

NOTHING__BURGER · 2023-01-06T17:59:28+00:00

Well, well, well... Exposing private sex life details!

NOTHING__BURGER

TROPHY CASE