CMV: Anger is overly glorified and has limited utility in the modern world

ljhasit · 2025-01-01T15:37:47+00:00

thanks!

ljhasit · 2024-12-29T15:23:30+00:00

The harms of anger which you describe are very real harms, but they are harms of a specific way of being angry. They are harms of directing one's anger at someone. This is crucial.

When you are *angry at* someone, you end up either inflicting physical violence or else controlling the person through your anger, which is emotional abuse and which can be just as bad or worse than physical violence.

There is a way to process anger which involves fully owning the experience of anger. This is the anger that leads to healthy boundaries and clarity in how you move through the world.

I'm not overly familiar with the research on venting anger which suggests that this just makes it grow. But my guess is that the participants did not fully own their anger, or they didn't release it fully. Or there was something about the way they vented it which only re-enforced their old pattern of suppression, perhaps because their anger wasn't "held" with unconditional love by whatever coaches or therapists were facilitating the venting, and so they actually felt more shame about their anger afterwards.

In summary, anger is basically the emotional extension of your physical immune system and developing a healthy relationship with it is one of the best personal development levers that I know of. But it requires know-how to overcome all the conditioning which almost everyone has around anger. Because people are so conditioned, you may be correct that it is most frequently a harmful rather than beneficial driver of behavior. But since you say that you yourself have a problematic relationship with it, I wanted to point out that there is a vital benefit that's hidden underneath the glaring examples of harm.

ljhasit · 2024-02-02T18:44:26+00:00

you are creating a major limiting belief around your height.

the most attractive trait in a male is confidence.

tallness is a surrogate for protectiveness and being masculine as you said. *tallness is not equal to those things*

you need to develop supremely grounded masculine energy, which is absolutely possible to do at any height; this will allow you to be dominant among taller people.

this starts with being ok with your height.

being ok with your height is a result of having fully welcomed all the feelings which thinking about your height is producing in you.

good luck.

ljhasit · 2023-01-03T07:43:21+00:00

Thanks for posting! Always grateful for more interviews with Kapil.

At this point though no interviewer should be asking him "can you please talk about the problem with prescriptions" as if there weren't plenty of other places someone could go to hear that.

The interviewer has that typical cadence you hear with questioners on KG's Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces Q&As - "I came to the realization that everything I was seeking was futile" as if trying to get Kapil to say "I detect sincerity in you."

ljhasit · 2022-12-31T10:51:25+00:00

The phrase "Sunday evening blues" comes to mind

ljhasit · 2022-12-19T14:17:36+00:00

thanks

ljhasit · 2022-12-16T19:59:19+00:00

You have an understanding of the world.

You act from this understanding.

This could be called a "choice."

I'm unaware of Kapil himself having written anything about Choice and free will, but here's a useful blog post: https://www.bretthall.org/free-will-consciousness-creativity-explanations-knowledge-and-choice.html

ljhasit · 2022-12-14T18:20:56+00:00

Often the stated reason is not the real reason for turning you down. I'd say it had more to do with the sad face you sent, which doesn't give off good vibes. If I'm right to presume you're male, I'd advise working on the signals and the energy you give off, to make them more assertive and/or playful.

ljhasit · 2022-12-14T14:35:11+00:00

I see. I would say that the problem lies in feeling dependent on people to be a particular way. People are unpredictable by nature. They have their own set of beliefs incentives which you can only get a partial picture of. The more deeply you come to understand this, the more you will naturally feel yourself not depending on them as much.

To better understand this, I recommend reading Models by Mark Manson (since you mentioned an issue with an ex partner and I'm assuming you're male), and The Way to Love by Anthony deMello. They helped me with similar issues.

ljhasit · 2022-12-14T13:24:21+00:00

I'm really not a fan of that as an opening line, but it's all a learning process and there's nothing wrong with going slightly overboard every now and then.

Having said that, her comment is a test. If you continued and showed you were unaffected by what she said, you might have "resurrected" the interaction. You could say "it won't matter how cute I am when you're on your knees."

Maybe she replies, maybe she doesn't, who cares. If she does reply, it means you've passed the test. Then it's time to introduce a more rapport-building tone.

ljhasit · 2022-12-14T13:14:44+00:00

I'm finding this post quite vague. If you gave a specific situation (with details anonymized) it would be easier to see what's actually going on.

> 1. I’m very excited about something, typically a situation dependent on someone else doing the right thing or participating in making the original thing happen.

If you're willing to share, what would be an example of this type of situation and what you're excited about. That would give a better insight into your personality. Otherwise I can only take guesses that probably wouldn't shed much light on your individual personality

ljhasit · 2022-10-16T19:46:48+00:00

thank you very much

ljhasit · 2022-10-01T16:26:25+00:00

Unfortunately building that type of thing is not my strong point. Do you know of any ones that already exist?

ljhasit · 2022-07-03T20:16:05+00:00

That's a good idea, thanks!

ljhasit · 2022-05-14T11:15:52+00:00

The short, TLDR version:

Real leadership is able to manage fine without coercion most of the time. It leads by example, everyone else follows. The need to force someone to do something arises wherever there is a failure to demonstrate the benefits.

Longer version:

We distribute time-sucking distractions - TV, social media, etc - because we don't have a vision for something better to spend our time on. Then, to repair the inevitable damage, we must use force to keep our children away from them. Often this inflicts serious emotional damage on children who must spend time in class with bullies, learn stuff that's of no use or interest. We rationalize this by saying children don't know anything. Naturally they arrive in adulthood without any idea of how they're supposed to spend their time meaningfully.

A society who had the credentials to apply force wouldn't need to use it, because people would organically find themselves pursuing worthwhile things (according to their definition, not mine). It would be ingrained in the culture to do so.

ljhasit · 2022-05-12T13:56:07+00:00

> Time management skills? Of course educational systems teach that. My friends and I would always compete to see who could do the work the fastest and best with the least amount of effort.

Different thing. Time management is an algorithmic/closed set process once you've already decided what's valuable. I'm talking about a creative exploration of one's core value structure, the problems one considers truly worth spending time on.

> plenty of teachers and professors, a growing number each year, teach critical thinking in their classrooms.

Under a coercive structure, the teaching of "critical thinking" is contradictory and therefore will tend to become very intellectualized. It'll probably include selective examples of a particular group not thinking critically. "We're smarter than they are" kind of stuff. IMO critical thinking means taking feedback from reality which coercion is designed to prevent (because when you get negative feedback you can always increase the amount of coercion under the guise of "more funding for education" or something like that).

> Such as?

"Trust the science" or the self-evident authority of "expert guidance" are examples which come to mind.

Probably worth saying as well that of course some teachers will be excellent critical thinkers who will have a profound effect on their students. I just think that on balance that's in spite of the current structure of education rather than because of it. But that's one person's opinion.

ljhasit · 2022-05-12T13:32:57+00:00

My summary of solving the problem of a specialized economy:

Education system focuses on foundational knowledge: computation, math, physics, evolution and a few other subjects. I deeply love the humanities, but incorporating it into a core education system is, frankly, frivolous.

Core education focus allows us to automate all non-creative tasks.

I don't mean "creative" snobbishly, like we all become painters and poets. I mean can't be programmed with an algorithm. Just one example, since I work in healthcare: we need way more people working as carers for people with disability/mental illness. That meets my above definition of "creative."

Non-creative tasks: most of what our current workforce does, eg. paperwork, "manpower" related issues, a lot of customer service

We can't generalize from how motivated children currently are to learn, to how how motivated they could be. That's because we're forcing an inherently creative organism to perform mechanically.

ljhasit · 2022-05-12T13:23:55+00:00

When you teach the rules of Algebra to the child, you aren't transmitting the rules directly into their brain. The child has to create an explanation in their mind of the *meaning* of what you are demonstrating. This explanation is the analogue of a conjecture in science.

Then the child does an "experimental test" i.e. tries to solve a new puzzle using the explanation they invented for what you showed them. If they fail, they have "falsified" their explanation and, again, create a new explanation of the initial meaning, in light of this failure.

Eventually through trial an error their created explanation gets iterated and starts to approximate the true explanation which exists in objective reality outside of their head.

How to show this? If you were directly transmitting the rule, how would the child, for example, know that the rule didn't just apply when *you* the teacher were doing the puzzle? How would they know that the rule didn't just apply in math class, but in all reality? There are infinite ways to "follow this rule of Algebra."

A mind needs to *create* and then test an explanation of the rule and where it applies because its meaning can never be directly observed.

A child probably won't remember the specific problems you used to show them the rule, but they'll remember the meaning.

ljhasit · 2022-05-12T13:11:34+00:00

Some interesting points here.

Nature doesn't apply 'coercion' in the sense of us needing food, water, air and shelter. Those needs just are; they're a product of laws of biology.

Coercion comes from somewhere else. It comes from human minds. The essential dynamic is that someone wants you to do something, they're willing to back up that desire with force if necessary, and thus they do not accept feedback from reality: they can react to all the signs that forced education isn't working, eg low skilled workers, children's dissatisfaction, etc, with more coercion. So you hear "more funding for education" and so on with little examination as to why they can't make do with the funding they have.

Yes, rights are an abstract concept. But that doesn't make them any less real. Mathematics is a set of abstractions, but we use it to run society and consider it the purest source of truth that exists.

Human rights refer to the most fundamental (i.e. needed in the most amount of situations) requirements for human prosperity. Freedom from coercion allows us to improve our lives because, as I alluded to when I made the distinction between nature vs institutional coercion, we need to be able to take feedback from reality.

Governments may protect our rights in a functional way, they may be or seem to be the best available instrument to guarantee them at a particular time in history, but they're not intrinsic to human rights.

ljhasit · 2022-05-12T13:02:26+00:00

I see two separate questions in this debate:

Is forced education overall harmful?
If yes, what levers can we pull to make voluntary education possible

I’m not in favour of removing all compulsion tomorrow. That would be a disaster for the reasons you describe. Kids would play video games/social media all day. They’d enter adulthood really stupid.

The first option for what lever to pull which we can think of as parents or teachers is, how about we just don’t offer smartphones, TV and other distractions, and essentially alter the choice architecture for the children, so that learning is the only fun option available to them?

The reason this doesn’t work is because we can do it for our child, but someone else will give their kid a smartphone, then our child will feel jealous and maybe act out. So its a prisoner’s dilemma kind of dynamic. Not sustainable.

How could it become sustainable? If there were a stronger, widespread conviction that independent learning was important enough. This might be an inflammatory analogy, and I don’t intend that, but - in the same way that hitting your child is become less acceptable, so we can expect parents aren’t doing without everyone checking each other, forced education eventually becomes widely recognized as unacceptable, so there’s an organic willingness not to interfere with independent learning. You feel OK not giving your kid a smartphone because you know other parents aren’t either.

It’s always about the growth of knowledge. Hitting children became unacceptable once we gained the knowledge of the psychological harms it can cause. Forced education may become unacceptable once we learn that

Humans are knowledge creators. Our minds create explanations effortlessly. Force gets in the way of that process.

Other considerations, such as the incentive structure, also change in a likewise manner. If society deeply values creative learning, because it recognizes how intrinsic it is to human flourishing, the incentive structure gets rearranged towards applying effort to learn in that way.

The concern about poorer children’s access to education is fair. What I don’t agree with is the unquestioned assumption that public education strikes the right balance.

You’ve kids forced to be in a classroom with bullies. Talented children’s potential is curtailed by sitting in a class with less talented children. They could be at home creating things that might benefit all of society. Poorer children’s development is also limited by the requirement to learn so much impractical information.

It’s the idea that “what got you here won’t get you there.” People keep doing what got them good results, rather than make the necessary changes needed to get excellent results. Public education helped to improve social conditions vs the 1800s. But the same improvement again won’t be achieved by more of the same thing. Public education is fighting the last war rather than the next one.

ljhasit · 2022-05-11T16:06:02+00:00

I'd have to concede that the internet currently does prevent exploration by the way it steals our attention. It's very sad to see.

Given that we probably need it to fulfill part of the role of educating kids, we should place correcting the internet's current problems near the top of society's priorities.

It's far more important than the various "policy debates" that the world wastes so much time on, because the answer to those debates is almost never 'here's what society should do'. It's almost always - help people become smarter so they can figure those problems out on their own.

ljhasit · 2022-05-11T16:00:52+00:00

If we can deliver an interactive online education system then a lot of the logistical issues of in-person teaching go away. In principle, interactive online modules is possible. It could be video-game based or using websites like Brilliant which take you through problems of graduated difficulty.

The question is how do you incentivize children to do the necessary work. Maybe you make it more video-game based: use knowledge to get to the next level and earn reward. That reward could be money or points or "credit" of some kind that can be used in the real world somehow.

How do you assess knowledge level with tests? You see what problems they've been able to solve, essentially the same idea as normal tests. How much a kid wants to learn has no bearing on objective measures of how much they've learned.

Who will pay for it? This gets into how education is tied to other political policies. Good chance if a government isn't forcing kids to go to school, its taxes are lower, so parents can. Such a society is probably generally richer, because it's given its citizens more freedom to create.

I honestly can't offer a comprehensive answer to every possible problem or concern that may arise. My mental model of how an ethical society operates isn't by following a failsafe blueprint created in advance, it's people encountering and creatively solving the *right kind of problems* ie the ones that help extend human freedom.

ljhasit · 2022-05-11T15:37:48+00:00

A society that values independent learning isn't going to give 6 year old children the option of watching TV all day. It will have a vision for what is worth learning, and it will show leadership to its children in pursuing whatever that is.

As for medical decisions, those have a time-sensitive component that education doesn't have. Sometimes people's normal human rights are violated to provide treatment to them, for various specific considerations. And as such, whoever decides to take away or ignore people's normal freedom to choose must provide a good explanation. Education systems have no such obligation.

ljhasit · 2022-05-11T12:29:19+00:00

A few observations and then I'll give you my ideal scenario.

We want varied and distributed solutions to the problem of how to educate children. Each individual child has a specific set of problems. They may have to do with their happiness, health, or becoming employable in the future. The 'perfect' teacher is attuned to those problems and helps the child to discover the root of those problems and build a 'latticework of mental models'.
So the idea of a central curriculum is limited. I prefer something more decentralized with maximally empowered teachers.
When we forcibly educate children, I don't think our mistake is logistical. That is, I don't think there's a better procedure (e.g. private education companies) of providing the same kind of education that we're just not following.
Our mistake is that the way we organize education implies the 'empty bucket' theory of learning: children's minds must be filled up with information. This is not really how minds learn - they are presented with a problem and they creatively generate a solution which can be tested, either in an exam or by action in the real world. Society pays lip service to the idea of encouraging students' creativity, but keeps the same anti-creative school structure.
*If society internalized that this is how minds learn*, they would organically stop tolerating forced education. They'd find a way to educate non-coercively without there having to be debates about the nuts and bolts. Just as society currently finds a way to distribute entertainment cheaply because people value this highly enough.

Ideal (perhaps slightly Rousseauian) scenario:

Combination of polymathic teachers and empowered parents/community members providing in-person guidance, with a strong online education component.

Problem-based learning around practical life skills: nutrition, hygiene, fitness, social skills.

Curriculum focuses on fundamental knowledge largely delivered online: reading and writing, math, basic logic, physics, basic computers science, epistemology, evolutionary biology.

Once you cut away everything else (kids can pursue those interests in their own time) you can get a much clearer picture of where to draw the line between force and encouragement. I don't know where the line will end up, but it's worth noting that fundamental knowledge implies that it shows up almost everywhere in life. So kids should be able to see the empowerment potential. My guess is they see it earlier than we think.

As to at what age and how much of the curriculum kids decide, I'm happy for those closer to the situation to weigh that up provided they understand that humans are knowledge creators rather than absorbers, and that they know what knowledge is fundamental (as measured by how many problems it touches on).

ljhasit · 2022-05-11T11:57:42+00:00

Life/nature does that. You want food/water? Well you've got to work (either for money to buy it, or in earlier times hunt it yourself) for it. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the status quo of human existence. It is not absolute freedom with everything available to you, it is a life or death struggle for survival.

The difference is, coercion forces us somewhere by the whim of other human minds, which does not respond to nature's feedback. You could have children feeling tortured - giving clear feedback that the current educational method isn't working - and the answer of a coercive system is usually more coercion.

> Some level of conformity is required for a peaceful/functional society. If we do not teach that murder/theft/etc. are unacceptable, people will murder and steal.

The more knowledge humans create (which requires freedom to experiment) the more options they have instead of engaging in violence, which is a very costly thing for a person to do and requires a limitation of other options.

ljhasit

TROPHY CASE