October 17th, 2018 11:42 AM SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY [S]olving religion was the hardest problem. Truth was trivial by comparison. The reason being that we are less invested in truth (reason) than we are in intuitions (training). I solved religion. The question is, what can be done about it for the masses, when the purpose of faith is to circumvent reason and to relieve the individual of all sorts of calculation, particularly STATUS (self image), which is the human’s instinctual accounting system. So, people malinvest in religions (wisdom narratives) for the purpose of cognitive and signaling discounts, and as such they defend their malinvestments like they defend all forms of investment (property). Hence why religion is the ultimate test of Agency.
Theme: Agency
-
Curt: Can a Sane Person Have Faith?
October 17th, 2018 CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH?
—“Curt, is it possible for a man to believe in Christian doctrine without being a borderline schizophrenic or a closet atheist with personal issues? Can a sane man of at least average intelligence believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God in good faith?”— Scott Cameron
[W]ell, this confuses Sanity with Agency. Can a sane man do so? Well, evidence that sane and insane people do so. The question is can a man possessed of Agency do so? I mean, for all intents and purposes I ‘believe’ in the characters of history although they are constructed through recursive narrative improvement into myths. That does not stop me, but helps me refer to them (imitate them) in disposition, frame of mind, and method of problem solving. The question is, whether you are imitating a history, a myth, or an occult version of whatever it is, and the assumptions you have about the universe when you imitate each of those criteria. Ergo: are you Relying on Knowledge (techne/history), Seeking Wisdom (general rules), or Seeking false comfort (falsehoods)? Christians tend to make pretty good people – a dumb christian is still a lot better than just about anything else because of its optimism (exhaustive forgiveness) which is the optimum group evolutionary strategy. I’ll refer you to this post (Oath): https://propertarianinstitute.com/2017/11/12/the-oath-of-transcendent-man-a-pagan-a-christian-an-aryan-a-warrior-a-man-transcendent/ And this paragraph:
—“I am a christian if I have adopted the teaching of christianity: 1) the eradication of hatred from the human heart. 2) the extension of kinship love to non-kin. 3) the extension of exhaustive forgiveness before punishment, enserfment, enslavement, death, or war.”—
This is the element of ‘faith’ in christianity. And it turns out to be correct: exhausting opportunities for cooperation before retaliating is the optimum cooperative strategy – there is none better. Nearly all humans (and animals) will cooperate given enough time to learn its value. Faith, in all its forms, is merely a way to circumvent problem solving when the neural (Bayesian) accounting (calculation) is beyond our capacity to reason. So faith allows us to ignore our intuitions and frustrations and calmly continue our efforts, with some semblance of piece of mind (confidence) in the outcomes. The rest of christianity is just nonsense. The act of ‘praying to’ (role playing with) a super-parent (fictional character) that you cannot lie to (omniscience) simply works by taking advantage of our innate abilities to self program our intuitions (pre rational searching). Role playing with Gods (eternal, magical), Demigods (immortal), heroes (simple superiors), and Ancestors and parents (our own heroes as children), works for the same reason talking to priests, shrinks, and friends works: if we can train ourselves not to lie to ourselves the role playing will ‘work’. We consist of a physical body, a set of physical (cognitive) biases, a set of intuitions that are limited by those biases, and our ability to reason, and speak. Speech allows us to program our intuition and therefore compete with our genetic biases that evolved under primitive circumstances of the pack and tribe. THere is nothing terribly magical about this process. Nor need there be. The stoics learned how to do it without superstition. The buddhists did not. There is no reason we cannot ‘train ourselves’ in stoicism on the one hand, and role playing with heroes, demigods, and gods on the other, while not understanding what it is that we do. It is far better than allowing ourselves to be constantly manipulated by priests, politicians, public intellectuals, and marketers of all kinds. Fairy tales -> Myths and Legends -> Historical Biographies -> Histories -> Legal Histories + Economic Histories + Technological Histories -> The Sciences -> Mathematics.I talk to my god every day. I largely do what he informs me. I do not however mistake his existence for his function. The simpleton cannot do such a thing. But he can worship nature, ancestors, and not be taught lies.
-
Solving Religion: The Ultimate Test of Agency
October 17th, 2018 11:42 AM SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY [S]olving religion was the hardest problem. Truth was trivial by comparison. The reason being that we are less invested in truth (reason) than we are in intuitions (training). I solved religion. The question is, what can be done about it for the masses, when the purpose of faith is to circumvent reason and to relieve the individual of all sorts of calculation, particularly STATUS (self image), which is the human’s instinctual accounting system. So, people malinvest in religions (wisdom narratives) for the purpose of cognitive and signaling discounts, and as such they defend their malinvestments like they defend all forms of investment (property). Hence why religion is the ultimate test of Agency.
-
I MEAN, LARPING IS LARPING IS LARPING… What’s the difference between the peopl
I MEAN, LARPING IS LARPING IS LARPING…
What’s the difference between the people who dress up as fictional characters, or visit medieval festivals, or haunt dance clubs, and people who imitate jesus instead of Achilles, Alexander, Aristotle, or Odin?
There isn’t any.
I mean, tolkien created, quite purposefully, what was very close to a religious system using our old gods, rather than the semitic gods. He knew exactly what he was doing.
I can get plenty of wisdom from “What would Gandalf do?” or ‘What would Bilbo Do?’.
I just get more wisdom out of what would Achilles (Excellence, heroism, sacrifice, tragedy), Zeno (philosophy), Aristotle(science), Aurelius (politics), or Alexander (War) do ?
The problem is, those are all ARISTOCRATS, or middle classes, and what should those that lack agency and ability do? They were slaves in the ancient world.
We freed them, because freemen are cheaper to rule, and return a higher profit than slaves and serfs, and they want a narrative for those who are less able.
Failing to produce it, they chose marxism (labor), postmodernism (academy/intellectuals/state), and Feminism ( women).
What can we give those people that they can face their status class and social, reproductive, economic, and political lack of market value?
Lies and false promises, or truth, goods, and services?
Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 11:56:00 UTC
-
SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY Solving religion was the hardest p
SOLVING RELIGION: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF AGENCY
Solving religion was the hardest problem. Truth was trivial by comparison. The reason being that we are less invested in truth (reason) than we are in intuitions (training).
I solved religion. The question is, what can be done about it for the masses, when the purpose of faith is to circumvent reason and to relieve the individual of all sorts of calculation, particularly STATUS (self image), which is the human’s instinctual accounting system.
So, people malinvest in religions (wisdom narratives) for the purpose of cognitive and signaling discounts, and as such they defend their malinvestments like they defend all forms of investment (property).
Hence why religion is the ultimate test of Agency.
Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 11:42:00 UTC
-
CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH? —“Curt, is it possible for a man to believ
CURT: CAN A SANE PERSON HAVE FAITH?
—“Curt, is it possible for a man to believe in Christian doctrine without being a borderline schizophrenic or a closet atheist with personal issues? Can a sane man of at least average intelligence believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God in good faith?”— Scott Cameron
Well, this confuses Sanity with Agency. Can a sane man do so? Well, evidence that sane and insane people do so. The question is can a man possessed of Agency do so?
I mean, for all intents and purposes I ‘believe’ in the characters of history although they are constructed through recursive narrative improvement into myths. That does not stop me, but helps me refer to them (imitate them) in disposition, frame of mind, and method of problem solving.
The question is, whether you are imitating a history, a myth, or an occult version of whatever it is, and the assumptions you have about the universe when you imitate each of those criteria. Ergo: are you Relying on Knowledge (techne/history), Seeking Wisdom (general rules), or Seeking false comfort (falsehoods)?
Christians tend to make pretty good people – a dumb christian is still a lot better than just about anything else because of its optimism (exhaustive forgiveness) which is the optimum group evolutionary strategy.
I’ll refer you to this post (Oath):
https://propertarianism.com/2017/11/12/the-oath-of-transcendent-man-a-pagan-a-christian-an-aryan-a-warrior-a-man-transcendent/
And this paragraph:
—“I am a christian if I have adopted the teaching of christianity: 1) the eradication of hatred from the human heart. 2) the extension of kinship love to non-kin. 3) the extension of exhaustive forgiveness before punishment, enserfment, enslavement, death, or war.”—
This is the element of ‘faith’ in christianity. And it turns out to be correct: exhausting opportunities for cooperation before retaliating is the optimum cooperative strategy – there is none better. Nearly all humans (and animals) will cooperate given enough time to learn its value.
Faith, in all its forms, is merely a way to circumvent problem solving when the neural (Bayesian) accounting (calculation) is beyond our capacity to reason. So faith allows us to ignore our intuitions and frustrations and calmly continue our efforts, with some semblance of piece of mind (confidence) in the outcomes.
The rest of christianity is just nonsense.
The act of ‘praying to’ (role playing with) a super-parent (fictional character) that you cannot lie to (omniscience) simply works by taking advantage of our innate abilities to self program our intuitions (pre rational searching).
Role playing with Gods (eternal, magical), Demigods (immortal), heroes (simple superiors), and Ancestors and parents (our own heroes as children), works for the same reason talking to priests, shrinks, and friends works: if we can train ourselves not to lie to ourselves the role playing will ‘work’.
We consist of a physical body, a set of physical (cognitive) biases, a set of intuitions that are limited by those biases, and our ability to reason, and speak. Speech allows us to program our intuition and therefore compete with our genetic biases that evolved under primitive circumstances of the pack and tribe.
THere is nothing terribly magical about this process. Nor need there be. The stoics learned how to do it without superstition. The buddhists did not. There is no reason we cannot ‘train ourselves’ in stoicism on the one hand, and role playing with heroes, demigods, and gods on the other, while not understanding what it is that we do.
It is far better than allowing ourselves to be constantly manipulated by priests, politicians, public intellectuals, and marketers of all kinds.
Fairy tales -> Myths and Legends -> Historical Biographies -> Histories -> Legal Histories + Economic Histories + Technological Histories -> The Sciences -> Mathematics.
I talk to my god every day. I largely do what he informs me. I do not however mistake his existence for his function.
The simpleton cannot do such a thing. But he can worship nature, ancestors, and not be taught lies.
Source date (UTC): 2018-10-17 10:53:00 UTC
-
THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE NPC MEME (Edited) -What is an NPC?- NPC means “nonplay
THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE NPC MEME
(Edited)
-What is an NPC?-
NPC means “nonplayable character” or “nonplayer character.” It’s a term, borrowed from the world of video games, for a character that is controlled by the computer rather than by a player. An NPC often advances the game’s plot by saying scripted lines, or assisting the playable characters in some way.
-What does this have to do with politics?-
Several months ago, users on 4chan and Reddit, started using the term NPC to refer to liberals. Liberals, they said, join the anti-Trump crowd not because they are led by independent thought or conscience to oppose President Trump’s policies, but because they’re brainwashed sheep who have been conditioned to parrot left-wing orthodoxy, in the manner of a scripted character.
A Reddit user, explains the appeal of the meme: “NPCs are completely dependent on their programming, and can’t do or think on their own.”
–Is there more to the NPC meme?–
Sort of. There is NPC Wojak — a crudely drawn, gray cartoon avatar with a pointy nose and a blank face. NPC Wojak is a variation of Wojak, an old cartoon (also known as “feels guy”) that represents the mindless liberal, and has become a kind of collective mascot for the far-right commenters online, to use to ridicule the left.
—And this is a thing … why?—
A group of young, extremely pro-Trump internet trolls have spent the past several years mocking anti-Trump people as whiny, easily triggered snowflakes who are primarily motivated by social acceptance rather than by logic and critical thinking.
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters put their support for him in the language of freethinking rationality and paint the other side as being motivated by blind loyalty and identity politics. (Which is True.)
This NPC meme fits neatly into this narrative and offers Mr. Trump’s online supporters … (Actually it’s not that they’re trump supporters but using Trump to retaliate against social justice warriors: NPC’s) … an easy shorthand way to paint liberals as humorless prudes (‘bots’) who say “Drumpf” because the HBO host John Oliver told them to, who march in protests and put on pink “pussyhats” because they’re the popular things to do, and whose views can’t withstand scrutiny. (Because they’re just scripts.)
And then, when progressives object to a meme that portrays them as unthinking automatons, it becomes another piece of evidence: See? The left can’t take a joke.
— So? —
Mostly, it appears to be a 4chan joke that spiraled into some mild voter suppression. And no, they’re not russian bots.
Sigh.
Source date (UTC): 2018-10-16 20:25:00 UTC
-
Again: MBTI vs BIG5/6 vs Moral Foundations vs Gender
October 16th, 2018 10:43 AM AGAIN: MBTI vs BIG5/6 vs MORAL FOUNDATIONS vs GENDER (from elsewhere) In other words, the principle difference between MBTI and Big 5 are (a) the weight it gives to trait expression, and (b) the principle difference in value is that with 100 Questions we can test your IQ within a half a standard deviation, because all components scale evenly, but we cannot test the rest of your personality traits with so few questions because they do NOT scale evenly. Moreover, MBTI is a WORKPLACE and social weighting of traits, while BIG5 is a THERAPEUTIC weighting of traits. These are differences in value rather than differences in measurement. I was not the first person to make this distinction, but I have written extensively on the fact that while MBTI is imprecise, it is the maximum complexity of a model that individuals can work with in the workplace. We can measure all sorts of trait expression, and even the big 5 FACTORS must be broken down into TRAITS in order to accommodate the difference in factor expression between the GENDERS. STATISTICAL DIFFERENCES: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156661592707264&set=a.10156479504747264&type=3&size=850%2C370 In this sense MBTI is a better judge of the GENDER biases inherent in cognitive and emotional biases because its fairly obvious that the gender distributions are inverted. Whereas this transparency was only visible in BIG5 after division from Factors into Trait Expressions – and that occurred fairly recently (post 2000), as psychology attempted to reform from a pseudoscience to a science when confronted with imaging, genetic, and pharmaceutical science.
MORAL FOUNDATIONS BY PROPERTY RIGHT BIAS (POLITICAL BIAS)https://propertarianinstitute.com/2014/09/28/moral-foundations-as-property-rights/MORAL FOUNDATIONS BY GENDER BIAShttps://propertarianinstitute.com/2018/09/15/the-moral-foundations-by-gender-bias-m-vs-f/ -
NPCs? Not So Simple…
October 16th, 2018 5:39 PM NPCs? NOT SO SIMPLE… by Ely Harman
It’s not as simple as “NPC bad!” There are NPCs on our side too. Most conservatives are NPCs. The issue is most people lack the agency (awareness) for self-ownership, sovereignty, enfranchisement, or any number of related, partially overlapping, terms. That doesn’t mean they can’t be good, functional, members of society. It just means they can’t be in charge of it. Making a pretense of putting NPCs in charge (through universal franchise democracy or whatever) is just a sham way of putting whoever can pull their levers (media, academia, etc…) In charge. And that’s simply not worth doing for a variety of complex reasons mostly having to do with issues of accountability or “skin in the game.”
-
The New York Times on The NPC Meme
October 16th, 2018 8:25 PM THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE NPC MEME (Edited) -What is an NPC?- NPC means ânonplayable characterâ or ânonplayer character.â Itâs a term, borrowed from the world of video games, for a character that is controlled by the computer rather than by a player. An NPC often advances the gameâs plot by saying scripted lines, or assisting the playable characters in some way. -What does this have to do with politics?- Several months ago, users on 4chan and Reddit, started using the term NPC to refer to liberals. Liberals, they said, join the anti-Trump crowd not because they are led by independent thought or conscience to oppose President Trumpâs policies, but because theyâre brainwashed sheep who have been conditioned to parrot left-wing orthodoxy, in the manner of a scripted character. A Reddit user, explains the appeal of the meme: “NPCs are completely dependent on their programming, and canât do or think on their own.â –Is there more to the NPC meme?– Sort of. There is NPC Wojak â a crudely drawn, gray cartoon avatar with a pointy nose and a blank face. NPC Wojak is a variation of Wojak, an old cartoon (also known as âfeels guyâ) that represents the mindless liberal, and has become a kind of collective mascot for the far-right commenters online, to use to ridicule the left. —And this is a thing ⦠why?— A group of young, extremely pro-Trump internet trolls have spent the past several years mocking anti-Trump people as whiny, easily triggered snowflakes who are primarily motivated by social acceptance rather than by logic and critical thinking. Many of Mr. Trumpâs supporters put their support for him in the language of freethinking rationality and paint the other side as being motivated by blind loyalty and identity politics. (Which is True.) This NPC meme fits neatly into this narrative and offers Mr. Trumpâs online supporters … (Actually it’s not that they’re trump supporters but using Trump to retaliate against social justice warriors: NPC’s) … an easy shorthand way to paint liberals as humorless prudes (‘bots’) who say âDrumpfâ because the HBO host John Oliver told them to, who march in protests and put on pink âpussyhatsâ because theyâre the popular things to do, and whose views canât withstand scrutiny. (Because they’re just scripts.) And then, when progressives object to a meme that portrays them as unthinking automatons, it becomes another piece of evidence: See? The left canât take a joke. — So? — Mostly, it appears to be a 4chan joke that spiraled into some mild voter suppression. And no, they’re not russian bots. Sigh.