Thank you. I'd heard good things about Fink but was debating between this book and the one with the lightning bolt on the cover (I think it was "Lacanian Subject" or something) - have you read both? Is this one better?
Oh man, I suggest avoid Fink, read this seminar 2 directly. Note: You yourself mentioned Finnegans Wake, and Lacan was friends and personal family physician of Joyce in Paris (20s), by the time he is in "aphoristic mode" as I call it, that is, 73 yo or something 1973(?), I think he hated the fact he got famous and those classrooms where packed with 1300 people in his last years, also to the conclusion he failed ("reason for a failure" is the name of a conference itself indeed. "I failed" too, a public letter iirc all found at staferla.free.fr) in his enterprise to reinvigorate the whole field and elevate it to the status of economics or linguistics as a science by overhauling almost any and every concept, epistemology, ethical practice, affiliation to different disciplines etc., that today it's lost, I escaped the lacanians who speak their own jargon, incredibly obnoxious smug.
But the explanatory power of Lacan is pretty big and can help so many in clinical settings practice; but not as long as it is coopted by his nephew and all this is shrouded in mystery and cultism. Also, I'm sorry, the Zizek, Zupancic & Dollar all are students of this already chewed Lacan, Miller was even Zizek's analyst during his stay as a graduate there in Paris in the 80s; So they draw on a not clinical Lacan, it's the film studies Lacan, although in the past decade or more Zizek has become critical of Miller for biologizing Lacan back into Freud. So You won't get much out Lacan to understand Zizek. My thesis is forget the style (syntax, prose) and previous knowledge (hinted by footnotes for example), or given it's given, what so difficult to understand? for me it's simple: it's unbelievable.
For example, regarding metaphor and metonym as the ways we make dreams and lapsus and symptoms and anything unconscious, he defines: the unconscious is structured as language. And language is a structure, so, the unconscious is structured how, through condensations and displacements, or metaphor and metonym, and specifically (here comes the bomb):
symptoms are metaphors and it is not a metaphor to say it. <--- swallow this. And so he goes one through many pages or hours trying to make and build around it. In history Aristotle had the same fate, de Saussure, etc., it might be we need another generation to die before he is "re-discovered"
> This was even more of a personal victory because it signalled the goal of my target of trying to figure out if there was anything of substance in Lacan following his rude and public flogging during the Sokal era (specifically I wanted to figure out the context for the 'penis is the square root of minus' one comment that drew so much laughter)).
So... did you find any substance? I've engaged with Lacan before on both the psychoanalytic and philosophical sides, and while I suppose I can't fault anyone who finds the former helpful (but definitely wouldn't actively recommend it!) I haven't pulled much from the latter. I think I have a grasp on the aesthetic appeal of where he's coming from, but when the best compliment I can give is "understandable aesthetic appeal" I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Mostly the core philosophy of language of his later work, intersubjectivity, the Real, etc. The concepts behind the obscurantism are all quite evocative, but there's still a general failure to attempt anything like predictive power - it's all competing explanatory narrative.
That's not nothing, especially if it can be backed by a solidly successful therapeutic record... but last I checked, psychoanalytics haven't managed any more success there than anyone else.
Unrelated but heads up that there's a newly published text (on Palgrave Lacan, which seems to be on the forefront) called "The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence" by Isabel Millar. It seems to apply Lacanian ideas to rationalist AI stuff -- the introduction is all about Roko's Basilisk -- and might be of interest if you already have a background in Lacan and are reading this blog. I haven't read it yet but I could be interested in gathering a group of like-minded to read it together and discuss, helping each other to work through the ideas.
Fink also cares about people. Leaving the apparent misanthropy of TLP aside, Fink is in a way a critique of the lack of caring in the current US mental health system. I'm not sure what your experience in reading him was, but for me, Fink really humanized the Lacan and Freud approach, ultimately making it all tools for greater empathy. I don't know if its correct, but at least in Fink's approach, the purpose of the Freud/Lacan work was to better understand people so he could help them.
hotelconcierge has been accused of that many times and AFAIK has always denied it and there's never been any evidence for it, even after TLP was doxed.
I find myself wondering this a lot too. Shame and Society in particular was so good that I go back and re-read it regularly. Hopefully he'll come back and write something again eventually.
I do the same thing with 'The Tower'. It's up there with 'Mediations on Moloch' ; blog posts that provided more value than most classic books I've read
Not the same guy. TLP inspired a lot of people to write in his style (just check out the subreddit), but the guys who floated to the to the top usually focused on subtly different subject matter or expertise.
So, you are saying that David Foster Wallace returned from the dead, this time without any empathy, now projecting all his self-doubt on to the world esp. his readers.
(Perhaps in our new alternate universe New Wallace simply stayed at Harvard, which would explain Teach/newWallace's baleful uncaringness and cold show-off-ey verbal tics.)
I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like. Teach sounds to me what people who hate DFW but have never managed to read snything of his THINK Wallace sounds like.
I will now play the audiobook of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" here in the shop at high volue and see how manypeople I can offend.
I think this Kanye take is dead wrong tbh, regardless of which era of Ye you mean. When I think of the racist rap-hater stereotype I'm imagining someone who is criticizing gangster rap for glorifying a life of crime and violence and such, and who thinks that it's narrow in instrumentation and musical themes and so in some way musically inferior.
And Ye has never been a big violence glorifier, and has always gone really hard to cross genre boundaries and try new things. I mean hell, the moment he could afford it (i.e. after his first big album blew up) he recorded the next one with a full string orchestra. That's not what rap haters think of.
I think a lot of hateful racists would have a big problem with New Slaves and other stuff like that. Even general rap haters can hate stuff that isn't Fuck The Police.
I'm sure they would. He's political, he talks race, and he would disagree with them to the extreme. But just being something they would hate is a far cry from being "what they THINK rap sounds like," that is a far stronger claim that I read in a much more specific way.
The first time I ever heard Kanye, I literally unplugged the amp, I was worried that one of the woofers had blown and shredded the cone. NOTHING could possibly sound THAT BAD. No way that professional musicians and recording engineers had deliberately made something that sounded like a massive electrical fire. Plus the lyrics were straight-up crazy racist.
"What the F*** was that?" I asked. "Kanye" "You have got to be shitting me! I know people who actually respect this guy, and THAT is what it sounds like? You be clowning me, dawg!"
I am pretty sure Kanye is semi-genius atist, who is so good he got bored, and maybe deliberately made albums that were 75% real work, and *possibly* 25% total bullshit, where that 25% was an easter egg where he made the most dumb pandering ear-candy stupid crap he could make in like 25 minutes, and put it out there as a "canary", where the un-hip would love it and play it and then the "real fans" would know they were otiose and un-hip and stupid and the real ppl would band togher more tightly and love KW even more.
But that is just speculation, KW don't return my calls, I called Hova but can't get through to that MFer, don't make me roll out to Calabasas, bitch....
I, for one, care a lot more about the insight than about the empathy.
And I suspect Teach would say your comment is exactly what's wrong with America today -- you prioritize empathy (the giving part of the giving tree) over achievement, meaning, insight, responsibility or anything else; ie the ethics of a perpetually 9-yr old girl.
Actually, I think the 'without empathy' thing is important as a distinguisher, while not being the priority. The narcissists and sociopaths I've known (and I've known some of them quite well, professionally and personally) think like this. Everything is about status/image, including the stuff they do when no one is watching, they envy anyone who has or accomplishes any thing, no matter how tiny, better than what they themselves have or accomplish, and anything anyone does (including themselves) is a manipulation and/or self-delusion. They're also often extremely passive, preferring that others come to them (except when they are extremely sure of succeeding, and can brush off the effort somehow), and the idea that they do this to avoid desiring and the responsibility to act on that desiring is a cool one.
And, quite logically, they assume that everyone else thinks the way they do. (As do people who are higher on the empathy side, of course. Until they run into enough narcissists and sociopaths .... And sometimes even then. See the 'there is a fragile, hurting child inside every narcissistic defensive shell!' theory.)
Narcissists and sociopaths also respect no one (except briefly a bully bigger than they are) and resent the hell out of everyone.
So, not all people who are low empathy are narcissists and sociopaths (seems they also have to be raised 'right' to achieve that), but it could be a good way to conceptualize these differences.
I've studied a decent amount of Lacan, and my general conclusion is that he'd also fit this way of thinking. And he must have LOVED making people work so hard to 'understand' his discourse/writing, while encouraging the doubt that those who tried to do so would always come short of understanding. Narc orgasm!
Also, at least when I lived there (now 25 ys ago), Brazilians (independent of age, gender or orientation) were mostly entirely unafraid of approaching an object of desire, in multiple fields of desire (sexual, romantic, friendship, food, all sorts of other pleasures....). Not sure what to attribute that to, although it seems to be (or have been, don't know if it still applies) coming from a fundamental security, that one can tolerate rejection just fine, especially when it's a) coming from someone you don't know that well, and b) on a matter so clearly one of individual taste, and one can tolerate disappointment and loss, without crumbling, at least not for long and not irremediably.
When I first moved back to Canada, I couldn't understand how people here manage to reproduce. Then I became convinced it mostly involved copious amounts of alcohol..... Very sad.
Thanks for reading the book, because I can't even begin to imagine how I could read something like that charitably. Methodologically, those excerpts remind me of Adorno (et al): take a text, free-associate yourself to a theory, and then claim it as a sociological/psychological truth.
It's not even possible, as far as I know. I'm not a great critic of art, but I can read pretty OK and I have no idea what this book is about. I feel like I read peyote.
I'm guessing the book would say you did figure it out, and just aren't acknowledging it to yourself, because it's that kind of book?
(Also I suspect it's right, in a sense. In something the same sense as enlightened people noting that enlightenment is mostly just realizing you were enlightened all along, actually. And I don't think that's an accident, but I'll maybe report back after actually reading it.)
Sort of? Not enlightenment, sort of adjacent. A lot of what it's doing is going to come across nonsensical, because a given reader is only the intended target of, like, 2% of it. I think that's it's biggest failure; it's trying to target everybody. It also makes it kind of fascinating to read, because it feels like somebody else's nightmare, at times.
The rough understandg i get, from your summary is: damn, people think about status a LOT, to the point where we sabotage ourselves to improve our perception of our own status, and it's kind of a bug, but i guess if you _can't_ get rid of that, maybe try to use the pursuit of status to actually become powerful, rather than just playing mind games with yourself.
That's the takeaway i get: see if i can catch myself either trying to get or maintain status, recognize how unhelpful that is, and see if i can't substitute something constructive in there instead
I agree that you didn't, but think there are way better uses of your time than figuring out what this rambling alcoholic misanthrope was trying to get at. If you want to read something weird, dense and dark and tell us what you think, how about some Wittgenstein?
I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept. I found it profoundly depressing, and I suppose I still do. But over time I guess I just "learned" not to think about it because it was depressing and there was nothing I could do about it anyway and it was all making me a little crazy.
Sometime in college I was introduced to a very low-level version of some of the ideas in this review. Namely, that everything is about status. I had another mini-crisis about this, which culminated in my writing a ponderous and indulgent column in my university newspaper, which received predictably vicious responses from my readers. Still, I was haunted by the idea that I didn't *really* like the things that I thought I liked, and was only concerned with raising my status -- whether in the eyes of others or in my own. And like the free will situation, I never came to a satisfactory conclusion to the question of whether I really liked what I thought I liked, because it was basically impossible to verify anything, and just decided it was probably best not to think about it too much because it was making me crazy.
But at the risk of making myself crazy, I'll say this: I think status-related considerations, in general, play a fairly big part in my life when it comes to explaining why I like certain things. I can recognize myself pretty clearly when I read descriptions, in this review, of status-motivated reasoning and preferences. But I do struggle with the leap that sometimes gets made which is that status and signaling are absolutely everything. That to me seems basically unverifiable. I can grant, without much argument, that part of why I enjoy having sex with my significant other has something to do with the feelings of status (of being worthy of said sex) that accompany it. But I'm not willing to say that my entire relationship is completely determined by this, and I think sometimes the misanthropic perspective can over-emphasize these seemingly unsavory aspects of "human nature."
Where there is no I there can be no She. But there's no need to posit the existence of a subjective conductor (homunculus), brains still do stuff. Hearts pump blood, kidneys filter toxins, lungs exchange oxygen, the motor cortex activates limbs - sometimes to pet a cat. Who needs contorted definitions of choice to explain that?
"I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept."
I would put a Teach-ian twist on it: the sort of free will that everyone says they need to believe in is an incoherent concept, which creates a lot of conflict and focus on that concept and draws attention away from the sort of free will that we definitely DO have which is incredibly powerful but people apparently think isn't good enough.
I like that spin. There's probably something to it. I certainly agree that the naive concept of free will that I wanted to be true at that time had some serious problems with it that probably render it incoherent. I think if Teach were to give their perspective on my high school philosophical crises, their take would be a lot less charitable to me :).
Totally agree: using a weird old definition of free will does produce an incoherent concept but most people do not use nor need this weird definition, and in a more usual and useful meaning of the terms, we definitely have free will.
As I have long put it, it doesn't matter if we "really have free will", because we have a radical and unavoidable constant* <I>experience of it</i>.
Even pure mechanists <I>always act like they think we have free will</i> except while <I>writing or talking about how we don't</i>, and they usually fail even then.
(Physically, of course we can't have "free will" in that sense, as you say.
Doesn't matter!)
* Most all of us, most all the time; people with various mental illnesses or trauma responses and such <I>experience lack of free will</i>, I'm led to believe. Never been there, myself.
People often mean two completely different things by "free will". One is the decision making ability and the other is some vague metaphysical freedom, which can include unpredictability, being the ultimate cause of ones action and existence of counterfactuals outside of ones mind. People usually claim that these two things are related or follows from one another: if there is no metaphysical freedom then we can't decide anything or, at least our decisions do not have some "special meaning".
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is completely wrong. Whether we have metaphysical freedom or not, doesn't affect our decision making at all. All the really interesting questions, related to the freedom of will, like agency or moral responsibility or futility of choice, require decision making and are irrelevant to metaphysics. Whether or not my decisions are determined I still have to make them, it is them that affect the future and that's what gives them meaning, not some metaphysics.
eventually you run out of things to claim 'aren't real'
if liking something 'for status' is the dominant reason we like things, then that's what it means to like. feels like this kinda book gets hyper focused on categorization
Well said. If we know how X works on a deeper level, it's an evidence in favour of X actually being real. And it's just the bug in our psyche: wanting everything important to be fundamental, which sometimes convinces us otherwise.
Agreed. If status chasing is what everyone is doing, then it is a bit much like semantic quibbling to act like desire is therefore not what we think it is.
Your pointing out the focus on categorization reminds me that I just recently read some papers, for unrelated reasons, by a few psychoanalysts and this particular idea came up a bit as a/the current conflict in the psychoanalytic community: categorical vs dimensional analysis.
Makes me wish I knew PS' author's real name so I could see whether they previously waded into that discussion as a professional. Might be illuminating.
No, that's no it. There are really interesting (and non-obvious) insights in the idea that most people have no idea what they do or don't like, they just copy people around them. This sort of thing, for example, shows why society has taken so many different forms over space and time.
(Which is not to say that human elasticity in infinite; but chances are the reason you think democracy is so awesome is because you were born in the US in the past 50 years, not in Rome 2000 years ago or Mongolia 1000 years ago, and not not because you've carefully analyzed all known historical social structures...
Or to put it differently, one month ago you couldn't have named the [Prime Minister? President? CEO?] of Ukraine. Today you're ranting to your friends about how the US should risk WW3 to do something. That's some pretty strong "I have no idea the reality of the situation, but I'll just do what every else around me is doing".)
I like keeping up with current events, ukraine became more prominent because of an invasion, so I learned more. Certainly this was to impress myself and my social group but humans are social animals-saying we only like things as a reaction to society just means that's what "liking" is, unless enlightenment is liking things somehow independently of the world we exist in.
I like eating chocolate. Could someone please explain to me how exactly this is related to status? (For the record, it is usually not one of those bitter 99% chocolates, but the regular kind that is made for plebs.)
I propose an alternative explanation where the so-called "lower" desires are genuine ones, and the "higher" ones are about status. (Because "higher" literally refers to higher status, duh.)
Also, if it helps, I'm reasonably certain that when he is talking about The Giving Tree, he is actually talking about the specific interpretation of The Giving Tree as a mother, not The Giving Tree as a book.
If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
> If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
How can he be saying basically the same thing in response to a completely different interpretation? Teach seems pretty interested in specifically talking about motherly love and obligation and independence, and I'm not sure how any of that comes about in response to someone whose takeaway from The Giving Tree was "the proper measure of Nature is in its service to human desire", or something even more esoteric.
Or did you mean that what he is saying is specifically centered on 'misinterpreting something as a fantastic version of motherly love'? If so, doesn't the whole thing fall flat to someone who isn't making that mistake?
I do not. To give the full version of the popular Tolkein quote: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
The Giving Tree is about a particularly generous tree, and its relationship with a particular boy. There are many metaphors than can be projected onto the story - and a multitude of readings for each interpretation - but any transposition will inherently inject some deviation. (To say nothing of inconsistency!) I do not "do violence to the text" by insisting on any particular interpretation, both as a point of critical analysis and because I authentically don't feel the need.
That's not to say there can't be value in those readings! But any argument that assumes I straightforwardly subscribed to what Wikipedia lists fourth in its catalogue of interpretations is... off-base doesn't feel like a strong enough condemnation.
Excellent. So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
Why would you write a cuckold porn, when you don't really care about cuckoldry porn, and freely admit it could as easily be about BDSM? (Also: It's not written for people who like cuckold porn, it's written for people who hate it.)
> So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
I'm torn between wondering what flavor of Voight Kompf test this is, and recommending the answer as "someone sent a little something to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and asked nicely". Works even better as a response to porn commissions!
More seriously, I'm assuming "write what was written" refers to Teach's stream of consciousness directed at the person who believed the tree-as-motherhood interpretation, and not the interpretation itself? The obvious response is that I *wouldn't* write something premised on such a weakman, and hanging so much text on thin premises would be the result of the ample contempt on display and not any particular deep insight. Blowhards raging at morons isn't novel, and isn't a signifier of much worth.
If instead you're claiming that Teach doesn't believe the tree-as-motherhood interpretation and *also* doesn't believe the reader believes it, you return to the original task of demonstrating any value in the first reading and not as a dialogue. Blowhards raging is even less novel than the subset.
I think the point is that the collective unconscious, if you will, affects both the writer and the reader, in the way they can communicate cultural assumptions without either being aware of what they're doing. So it is _an_ interpretation, but it is fundamentally true if the wider phenomena it references are true.
Still going through the book. And - yes? But also no.
The book vacillates wildly between what I am pretty sure are actual points, and what I am pretty sure are stories whose purpose is to get some percentage of the expected audience to feel and/or notice something (and whose factual accuracy I am pretty sure the author does not care about at all, because the factual accuracy isn't the point). For that passage, which I haven't reached yet, I think it literally doesn't matter whether or not it is true in any sense.
But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.
It's really weird reading; it's so close to what I do and how I write, and yet so different, focusing on different things. (Also, I find the book to frequently say outright what should be hinted at, and to hint at what should be said outright. Yes, masturbation is about satisfying yourself, and sex is about satisfying somebody else. Just freaking say this already, why the constant niggling hints over multiple chapters, using an encryption that nobody who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?)
Can confirm that this book will never be ruled out as a work of great genius, but that's because nobody will ever understand it, and that's probably because it's nonsense. I promised a part 3 review on this, and I've been avoiding it because it's actively painful to read this book.
I actually kind of like how this book reduced you to these enjoyable ramblings. But I do have to say I've always been confused by people who thought TLP was amazing and profound, and especially was surprised by your admiration. (I think I heard of TLP from a David Wong Cracked article on the Alec Baldwin monologue in Glengarry. It's been a decade but I had a sense that article was popular and captured something about the early 2010s lead up to todays Culture World War.)
I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse. When you cite him as an important influence in decoding scientific studies and psychopharmacology, I was very surprised -- that is not at all what I thought people admired about him, but maybe I've never gone far enough back into his archvies and that's what he used to do?
Yeah, exactly. It's a shame because he was really excellent at that, but his cultural critique fame overshadowed this both in terms of what he wrote and in terms of how people thought of him.
I think his fame corrupted him and he became a caricature of himself. That happens to some people. There's a wonderful anthology by Dwight MacDonald called *Parodies*. It has 2 sections, "Parodies" and "Self-parodies," and the latter section is subdivided into "Self-parodies, conscious" (did you know Graham Greene won second prize in a Graham Greene parody contest?) and "Self-parodies, unconscious." Many fine writers produced unconscious parodies of themselves in their later years -- Hemingway is one example.
Watch out, Scott -- don't let that happen to you. (I don't see any signs of it yet.)
I am not sure what you guys mean about TLP becoming corrupted by his own fame and his later posts becoming self-parodies. The last post up on his site is "Who Bullies the Bullies?" which, at least by my reading, is a pretty cogent analysis of why activists' calls to censor and regulate the internet will only be successful to the extent that they align with corporate and other institutional desires to monetize and control.
Perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the activists (ie all of us) believe that they are challenging the existing categories of control, they are mostly just reinforcing those categories.
> I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse.
Same. Whenever I try to read something he wrote, it just fails to connect in such an immediate and decisive fashion. Ex: "It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother." Well, no, *I* never thought that. And now the next pages of strung-together thoughts aren't even starting from any grounding at all. "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish." Haha, nope! *Definitely* falsifiable. And so on.
"Well, no, *I* never thought that." Yes, exactly. I read about 50 pp of Sadly Porn, first the opening 30 pages or so, then, in an effort to find my way in, random chunks from here and there, and my impression is that this guy keeps making the same move over an over: He presents some insulting caricature of what I, the reader, think, then scoots off towards the horizon cackling, apparently convinced that I'm willing to follow him to the ends of the earth in order to find a page where he shows a deeper understanding of me the reader, or to get a chance to argue with him, or to find out whether his insulting caricature was just a form of flirtation or . . . But I'm *not* willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, because I don't see enough evidence that he will have something big to give if he and I, the reader, reconcile. I followed him for 50 pages, saw the same move over and over, and left in search of greener pastures -- which are not all that hard to find, by the way.
"But it's not really falsified, since you're just in denial about how porn is your fetish, because it's a better power play and status move to claim you really have desires and fetishes!"
(That sort of argument is itself so deeply unfalsifiable and smug as to drive me to figurative rage.
Not literal, because it's not worth expending real emotion over.)
I found TLP to be around 50% interesting insights that I wasn't getting anywhere else and helped me see the world in a different way, and 50% pure unfettered bollocks. Luckily I have a pretty accurate algorithm for discerning the bollocks - it occurs primarily in passages containing the word "you"
That's very sensible and would probably work just fine in most cases. I think it might make sense though when reading this guy to have in the back of one's mind the idea that Teach is very very committed to a picture of himself as specialer and smarter than thou. Even when he's not raving on about "you" he seems to me like the kind of person who would pull away from saying the conventionally accepted truth about some subject *even when he thinks it's valid* because giving a conventional answer would interfere with his feeling special. There's mention of something like this somewhere in the comments here. Somebody quotes what he says about how the ancient Athenians handled something-or-other and says nope, he's wrong about that, and that the Athenians were way more interesting than that. I'm not terribly knowledgable about life in ancient Athens, but there was an era when I was interested in it, and when I read Teach's remark about Athenians I thought "wait -- really? -- that's not how I think of life in that era . . ." but I just skated over the comment, in the sort of irritated daze this guy's prose puts me into.
So much here but one part for me about why people like art and I guess why I read the whole thing and why I keep coming back to this substack:
I think, therefore I am.
Wtf? Therefore you exist.
To me, when I get to wrap my brain around someone’s ideas who is genuinely different from myself it gives me a much more visceral and immediate feeling that other people exist than in normal day to day interactions. My brain’s first thought is “what is this? Well, I didn’t make it.”
Re: "why write a book if you have contempt for the readership?" and "why repeatedly tell your readers they shouldn't be reading your book," I think it makes sense if you factor in opportunity costs and think counterfactually about what his readers would be doing with their time if he had not written it.
He may believe, "my readers are the kind of people who waste their lives reading insight porn and esoteric bullshit on the internet, when they should be putting their energy into real things like taking care of their families and advancing their careers. If I don't write this book, they'll waste their lives reading some other kind of esoteric internet bullshit instead. If I write something that will appeal to the kind of people who want to feel special by convincing themselves they understood and benefitted from some esoteric internet bullshit, maybe I can trick them into noticing that they're wasting their lives."
I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the weeks after.
Yes -- and he says in the "disclaimer" that this felt like a "duty" to him, or at least that he "fulfilled his duty in life" which is left kind of ambiguous but I take to mean that writing the book was the duty.
I'm not sure if I understood what you're writing about here much at all (was I meant to?) but one thing did resonate with me. I was once mildly addicted to porn, but could never understand what anyone saw in going to strip clubs. I just assumed that this giant nationwide phenomenon was fundamentally unexplainable, even as porn was completely different. But I take you to be saying that rather than look as its patrons as automaton dupes to some social programming, maybe I need to try and *understand* a little better.
Well, you could try, if you like, but you could also do something else. I’m generally on team curiosity, but I think you get to be selective about what you’re curious about.
Deciding not to be curious about something feels vaguely wrong if you’re the sort of person who thinks curiosity is a virtue. But half-hearted research of things you’re supposed to care about isn’t a good substitute for actively wanting to learn how something works.
Going along with the book I am going to horrifically reduce this style of thinking to just being entertainment for the bored well-read. That's not to say it isn't good do self reflections on your desires and status seeking behavior, but this book accomplishes its goals of making sure only those who spend time on such obscurities get barely anything out of it. Which for me, if I am to be spending an absorbent amount of time on something, there are better books that offer more enjoyment and life payouts for time inputted. This also sadly updates me in the direction that Teach has gone insane, based on the giving tree excerpt.
So basically Nietzsche with a side of Bismarck. "Wir sind nicht auf dieser Welt, um glücklich zu sein und zu genießen, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu thun."
Yep, and Teach wouldn't believe the sweet words - Bismarck must have loved his work/duty/mission more (as Otto wrote). Teach would approve: making a feeble Prussian King of an outdated monarchy into the absolute Emperor of a modern nation industrialising on steroids - much more Lord Voldemort than Harry Potter. And to many words of love anyway - just trying Edward Teach's perspective. - btw: Nice translation! https://archive.org/details/frstbismarcksbr00bismgoog/page/n317/mode/2up
I'm about 15% in and I definitely get a "modern Nietzsche with a healthy dose of misanthropy whose rants aren't curtailed by illness" vibe. I'm actually enjoying it, quite a lot.
I'm not sure, his description of the tendency of inaction felt like a personal attack. Late in high school, I realized that I secretly enjoyed it and eventually decided it was because we were forced to be there and didn't have to play any popularity mind games in order to have fun with friends.
The only thing I dislike here is that the whole section on "purposefully misreading something as a defense" is something that could ironically paralyze you into never taking action.
Holy crap, The Last Psychiatrist book finally came out??? Why isn't this bigger news? This is my white whale. I'm buying it just because I feel like I owe him for TLP, which had more influence on my life than any other single piece of writing.
> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?
> "So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge."
You made me realize that this is exactly why I first hated, and then loved, his blog TheLastPsychiatrist. Reading this kind of stuff always leaves a kind of itch that won't go away, that demands I re-read and mull it over for days. There's an undeniable resentment as the mental worm works it way through me, but I come out the other side grateful for it.
1) This feels like you tried to write the most Scott-Alexander Book possible just to spite the people who say you suck and I'm loving the energy of it.
2) You really need to read René Girard's "Romantic lie & romanesque truth" and "Violence and the Sacred" (and probably one of his later books on christianity). They are about desires and mimetism for RLRT and primitive religions for Violence and the Sacred, and you will probably obscess about them for weeks, oscillating between "this is a whole lot of crap" and "this exactly describes the World as it is" (I've still not made my mind up).
I wanted to review one of those for the book review contest but I won't have time due to my dissertation...
I got the sense that Teach was drawing from Girard the way Jean-Michel Oughourlian uses mimetic desire to explain events like the mass "hysteria" among the nuns at Loudun. In any case, the relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation. I'm fond of Otto Rank and his explanation of the artist's creative personality as it both draws from, and changes, the dominant ideology which evolves according to whatever is the current soul belief.
"The first page has an eight-page long footnote at the bottom"
Gods damn it, stop recommending me books I will want to read because I've already got my reading slots stuffed full of "I bought this and haven't read it yet".
Especially as this seems the kind of book to make me have out-loud arguments with it as I'm reading it! Which is one of the best ways of reading!
As in for instance:
"You are the kind of open-minded replicant who will say, “I don’t have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written!”
Well, yeah, *and* it has to ring my bell. Some things just don't, no matter how well-written they are (e.g. spanking and a lot of BDSM type erotica. I do not get spanking, it does nothing for me, and even when it's presented and explained as to why the person in the story enjoys it, I'm still 'how nice for them' but you could equally be talking about how having your feet painted purple turns you on). But that *is* the crux of the moral problem: if it's not a temptation for me, there is no virtue in resisting it (any more than not painting my feet purple). And badly-written crap of the "Joe got out his [long description of the exact dimensions in every axis of his cock] and started fucking" sort just does not tempt me. So if I condemn it, it's not on moral grounds, it's on "ugh, this offends my aesthetic sensibilities" even if I dress it up as on moral grounds, and that's an entire other chicken to pluck.
And yes, I did wonder if anyone got the Blackbeard The Pirate reference in the nom-de-plume, I should not have doubted this readership 😁
"I cannot spite-read this book and nit-pick every semi-colon of the footnotes with gleeful enjoyment that this is precisely my cup of tea, I do not have the time right now!" 😂
I think Teach is still condemning you here, even for expressing your aesthetic objection to poorly-written porn. I believe the idea is, demanding any kind of merit or standard upon content you're consuming is just a cheap way to signal, for purposes of status.
The "I don't have a moral problem, it just has to be well-written" is just a maneuver to *look* open-minded while actively advertising your selectivity. I think Teach might say that your substitution of "it has to be well-written" for "it should actually do a good job of being tittilating" doesn't really change the fact of what's going on.
Well, trying to work out what his meaning is from a second-hand report of what the book said is really throwing the oracle bones, but my interpretation is that he's saying "yes you *do* have a moral problem with porn, you're just pretending to be open-minded and liberal".
But he could well be saying "your aesthetics are your morals" or something, and that "you really do get turned on by the cheap grubby stuff but you want to signal that you are classier".
To which all I can say is that I'm about as classy as a potato, and the cheap grubby stuff does not do it for me, even if it's dressed up like the new Amazon "Rings of Power" trailers (I don't care how much gold you scatter on the Dwarven princess, where is her beard, you cowards?)
I know nothing about Lacan or Lacanian psychology, but this guy sounds like straight-up old-school Freudian which is a delight and an amusement to me - like encountering a living fossil today 😁 Also, and again it's because I'm only going by the excerpts, I'm not as affected by his attempts at conviction of sin, because I'm used to this - Original Sin and Redemptorist sermons. I already know we have all fallen short, and all our righteousness is as filthy rags!
To offer a perhaps orthogonal viewpoint, I would suggest Teach's observation would perhaps be closer to saying "I don't have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written" is like sighing over the decline of "Playboy" magazine *not* because the women are now the same age as your daughter, but because the literary enfants terrible -- P. J. O'Rourke let's say -- aren't to be discovered therein any more. "They used to be bold, daring! Now it's just tedious ads for Old Spice and Courvoisier intermixed with photos of tits photoshopped to the same unimaginative ISO-36DD standard." Sure.
But that just means his idea's unfalsifiable "because I say so" bulldada.
(I also dislike boring or badly-written porn about things I don't find interesting.
Before this discussion I've never really mentioned that, so it's not signaling-to-others, and I <I>do not do</i> status games in my own head [being in the "half" of people Scott mentioned who respond to the entire framework with "what, people are actually like that? WHAT?"].
Smut works better when the writing doesn't piss me off. That simple.
"Everything is always about status for everyone" is, to use Twitter terms, "some neurotypical normie bullshit".
I would not be surprised if Teach also thought "everyone literally sees pictures in their head when thinking about things", but here I am, aphantasic - and I should relatedly note that the first time <I>I</i> realized "what, wait, for other people a mental picture <I>is not metaphor</i>???" was one of Scott's posts.
The difference being I don't try and convince other people that they <I>aren't REALLY doing that</i>.)
I think maybe several people are talking past Teach here. Here's what I imagine he means.
Sure, there's (1) porn that's just objectively not readable for titillation: "He put his thingy into my you know what and then we did it." There's also (1') porn that is otherwise fine, but has terrible spelling and grammar; if you're the sort of person who gets too distracted by those to absorb the content, I don't think Teach has a bone to pick with you. (Until we get to the next way in which you're an Athenian democrat.)
But then we get to the divide between (2) porn that has basic technical competence, versus (3) porn that has characterization, plot, and actual literary merit. I think Teach is saying that if you refuse to read (2) because you demand (3), then you're just signaling.
1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.
1. I used to have these fantasies even before I got to know about sex and that famous musicians did well in the sexual marketplace. Now it could be that evolution had designed me to fantasize about activities that would ultimately help me do well in the sexual marketplace....or perhaps I was just fantasizing about being high status.
Well, as a datapoint in favor of the former, I knew I liked boobs well before there was any practical use for this, um, predilection. But then again, maybe this is merely about status, also. As the great lyricists Trey Parker and Matt Stone phrased this very philosophical question:
Thank you for throwing yourself in that grenade. From what you said, I think Teach has been parasitization by what Sufis would call his nafs, his lower self. The rest seems mere justification for how wonderful Teach is, in ever more fractal and strange looping recursions.
I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness.
Based on his writing, TLP is perfectly aware of this trap, and freely admits he is in it. I don't have a direct quote because I can't be bothered, but I know they exist.
That's still a failing of self-awareness, and frankly a more SEVERE one. It's one thing for a repressed preacher to rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dwelling on the physicality of nubile, toned male bodies to a blatantly fetishistic degree. It's another to have a preacher rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dressed in a leather daddy outfit and openly admitting he has gay sex on the regular and has no plans to stop, but that YOU should stop or else you'll burn in Hell. Instead of narcissistic ignorance, he's acting out of megalomanic delusion.
The point is not that people are p-zombies, the point is that you can be an actual human with free will yet think and act in very schematic and counterproductive ways without being aware of it.
I view TLP's writings less like "look how clever I am, you sheep", more like "so I found I am sick and you're sick and everyone's sick, now I'm going to insult you into seeing how because it sometimes works and also is enjoyable".
I think is exactly right. Reading a tone of superiority into it seems like a projection, it's more like "I think we're all fucked, I shall now elaborate."
1. I assumed his thesis wasn't "humans self-sabotage sometimes" or even "humans self-sabotage more often than you think" because, frankly, I'm not sure how someone could get as deep into adulthood as him without realizing that and his assertions (so far as I can parse any assertions from his manic rambling) seem more abjectly totalizing, along the lines of "99% of humanity self-sabotages at every turn and nobody ever actually enjoys anything, hate and spite are the only real human emotions".
2. If everyone is sick and there's no cure (because EVERYTHING is actually about how you're a hollow shell that seeks status, wants to be enslaved, and hates every other human being, including you "wanting" to not be those things), then AT BEST he's just saying nothing. At worst, he's done exactly what the wokes he decries have done: reinvented the concept of Original Sin but removed the possibility of redemption from the equation. My interpretation of his work as mental masturbation is me being CHARITABLE; if I wanted to be UNcharitable, I'd have accused him of trying to push vulnerable people among his readership into suicide, given that the parts that aren't purely masturbatory read extremely close to what my internal monologue sounded like when I was deeply depressed.
This is closer to what I believe if I had to try and guess his own emotional state. In my experience, most people who are misanthropic are in fact self-loathing and are simply totalizing their thoughts about themselves to the human race. That's certainly how it was for me, at least (they also tend to be narcissistic, in the "so wrapped up in their own problems that everyone else's problems stop existing" sense).
Do you have a recommendation for someone who hasn't read any of them? I know of Zizek in passing and i've seen an interview of him, but I'd like to read him.
I was immediately turned off on him when he first gained prominence, by who his supporters were, and his intellectual heritage, and - and this is probably unfair to his thought, but that's life - the sort of smarmy, pithy crap he got *quoted for saying*.
(In fairness, you could do the same with quotes from philosophers I rather like, though their fans mostly don't seem to; with Zizek I think it's the intersection of a Marxian worldview on the economic/social and obscurantist pomo writing style; "sounds deep and attacks the Capitalist Other" is more than enough to make you "brilliant!" for a certain type of person.
It's that type of person that soured me on Zizek; if he doesn't deserve that himself, well ... such is life.)
(I say this not as an entire outsider going "Ewww, Postmodernists!", but as a philosopher by training who's *tried to read their obscurantist bullshit* and found it lacking.
Zizek may well be extremely clever, but I've never seen a reason to take him seriously as a thinker or analyst. This *may be* my fault, but equally I have better things to do with my time than read someone's catalogue to see if there's a hidden gem in the manure.)
I didn't like The Last Psychiatrist-- it seemed like he could invent reasons for just about anyone to be considered a narcissist, and I was never clear about what he meant by narcissist.
He was probably right about disability payments somewhat substituting for a more general social safety net.
My current theory about a lot that's hard to explain: a lot of people, at least some of the time, would rather have intensity than practicality. This doesn't explain little details like what *sort* of intensity different people want.
No, I'm talking about real pleasures, or at least compulsions, as far as I can tell.
To take a moderate example, there are people who like martial arts well beyond a practical interest in self-defense. They want that experience of attention to fighting. (I'm looking at this from the outside.)
It's possible that practicality is doing things for the sake of the parasympathetic nervous system, and intensity is letting the sympathetic nervous system out for a run.
Here's a mild example-- people who stay loyal to a losing sports team. If there was nothing but comfort and safety, no one would do it. Instead, there's not just the feeling of loyalty, there's the hope of winning some day-- a very intense experience which does happen occasionally.
"Signaling" implies not actually being virtuous, but that isn't it. The most addicted to intensity actually are virtuous, at least within the realm they're trying to be. Think of Michael Jordan being so competitive to the point of being an asshole to every single person he ever worked with, or Kobe Bryant being so obsessive about optimizing every single possible minute of practice that he couldn't stand to wait in traffic or miss a day due to bad weather, and he got himself and his daughter killed because of it, but in both cases, that level of dedication really did lead to being the best in the world at what they were doing, not just a hollow signal to convince others or themselves that were better than they really were. Or think of early alpine mountaineers. The first people to summit Everest had a greater than 50/50 chance they'd die trying, and they were guaranteed to be in pain every second of the attempt. Even when successful, it's likely to lead to permanent reduced capacity, possibly disability. But doing it still means you're the best there is at alpine mountaineering. For a sufficiently competitive or driven person, that's all that virtue means. They won, no matter the cost.
Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading ACT felt like a giant waste of time.
If the goal was to create an antimeme it was succesfull because midway my only though was "Thank god i have a marxist basic training against over-intellectualisation" but then shortly after Marx and socialists were mentioned for some reason so I kept on reading because that didnt seem like a conincidence.
But it still felt confusing and really like stuff for people who do a lot of second and third guessing and then for some reason woke people were kind of insulted because they dont like Elon Musk?
I didnt get much of this whole text, and if this was the intention of the book I feel that its probably a bad book. It reminded me of trying to keep track of the narrations of a disorganized shizophrenic or rather of trying to keep track of someone who tried to keep track of an disorganized shizophrenic. Or of that one time where someone who believed really strong in NLP told story after story without conclusion and claimed that if someone was feeling confused by that, this was how it is supposed to work with a mysterios smirk.
All in all I will never read this book and I guess thats at least something positive.
There's not much connection between Kenneth Burke and Lacan (I don't think) but I remember studying Burke and seeing a photo portrait of him screaming. I imagined him screaming because of his realization that there was no escape from one’s own lexical frame—every choice of frame makes some thoughts unthinkable.
Lacan, and perforce Teach, seem to be a pure rendition of the Burkean scream. One's thoughts are trying to deceive one, but thoughts are the only way to access truth, BUT their treachery puts any conclusion permanently out of reach—especially for questions of what one wants and what one ought to do. Every positive statement becomes a new enemy, a new guise of self-deception to be triumphantly, then despairingly, unmasked.
To apply Teach’s method to himself is trivial, inevitable—as the Joker would say: “I want you to do it.” What is the hidden content of a book like this? To cause intellectual suffering of the kind that Teach himself feels; to inflict on others the iron maiden of reflexive self-recrimination to which he himself is confined. But it is no victory to point that out; maybe Teach says it himself. I don’t know. All the act of unmasking does is add another level to an interminable game.
There is no personal growth in this direction, only a growing sediment of “surfaced” perversions, each one seemingly superseded only to reappear again and again.
The way out of this is somatic: spend some time in your body, get some information straight from the source! And when you experience thoughts, face them not with suspicion that they are agents of some hidden psychological complex, but with open curiosity and with trust—not faith, trust—because engaging sincerely with one’s own thoughts is where trust begins.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who does the "pretend that I'm performing music and am awesome at it" thing while listening to music. Congratulations on raising your status to your imaginary society while allowing me to take less of a hit from my own.
More generally I've always thought that TLP was genuinely insightful but also that his narcissism theory could explain literally any thought anyone has while being completely unfalsifiable.
"I'd like to provide money to this charity."
"Ah, yes, to signal to others (who don't even have to exist) that you are charitable."
"Uh, no, because I believe in the cause."
"Because you want to perceive yourself as the sort of person who believes in this sort of cause."
"...yes?"
"Your admission that you are intentionally sculpting your perception of yourself is just a defense mechanism to keep you from developing real values."
"...okay?"
TLP got me through some really tough times, and there's something true and real at the bottom of all the...whatever it is he's writing, but for me it really just boils down to: "Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job."
Given the content of this review, it seems eminently appropriate to miss the point here and get bogged down in a mere subpoint. Please consider this comment as if it were a five page irrelevant footnote.
... anyway, on Biblical depictions of angels, it's a bit more complicated than the prevalence of the "biblically-accurate-angels" meme (referenced here as an "antimeme", but I'd argue it's actually the regular sort) would suggest.
The "biblically accurate angels" memes are derived from how angels are sometimes described in symbolic prophetic visions, e.g. (and in particular) Ezekiel 10, which has angels ("cherubim") described as some eldritch combination of wings, eyeballs, and wheels. It's possible these are intended as symbolic, and not literal.
... but when angels appear in the less prophetic/symbolic parts of the text and play a role in the narrative, it's usually implied that they look human: much more like the "traditional" view of angels.
Daniel 10 explicitly describes an angel looking "like a man" (albeit with "eyes like flaming torches"), Hebrews 13 says "Do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.", and in a lot of places it's not remarked one way or the other, but I think if angels were always appearing in the form of reject Yu-Gi-Oh monsters, it would have been a relevant detail for the narration to have included.
It's possible that this is just how they choose to appear and maybe the crazy accounts are more of a "true form" but it's hard to say and it's not unreasonable to imagine them in the way they usually appeared. So, yeah, no halos or harps and clouds, and, like Balrogs, the wings are debatable, but the traditional view is probably more conventionally accurate than "biblically accurate angels" meme.
In one of the most famous angelic encounter in the Bible - when three mysterious strangers have dinner at Abraham's tent, they explictly looks like humans (so much so that the people of Gomorrhe then try to rape two of them).
However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
Anyway angels don't actually have bodys of course, so the aspect they take is necessarily an illusion, either caused by the expectations of the human being or by the choice of the angel.
> However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
I think it fits with something like Daniel's "human but with 'face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches'", fairly well.
Because, on the one hand, yes they said "do not fear", but on the other hand, it apparently *worked*. If they looked like Ezekiel describes, there's no amount of "do not fear" that you can tell me that's going to convince me to listen to what you're about to tell my about my pregnancy
There's nine orders of angels, starting with Sepaphim and Cherubim with many faces and unreasonable numbers of wings, and going right down to Archangels and Angels who might on occasion intercede in human affairs. Nobody seems too sure about the function of the "middle management" angels from Thrones to Principalities, but... well, as above, so below.
Luke seems to suggest that Mary was scared of the salutation of the angel, not his appearance. He said, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women."
While it happens "when she saw him" she was "troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be."
Good point. In fact if we are doing serious analysis angels are truly frightening, not because of the way they appear, but because they are a proxis for the presence of God, and no sinful human can see the face of God and live. That's why Moses only sees God's back and Eliah put on a veil before stepping out of the cave to see God. Similarly in Isaiah's vision the eldritch angels are not what he is afraid of, they appear mostly as a warning, like the colours of a poison dart frog.
Yes, a lot of times when angels are described interacting with people they're described as just "a man in shining white clothes" or similar. And never with wings except in the visions of heaven.
There's exactly one place the now-standard (outside of "biblically accurate angels" memes) winged humanoid angel appears in the Bible, and it's so obscure that I think it's probably a coincidence (standard attribution is that the classic winged humanoid comes from Classical depictions of Nike and other figures.) Zechariah 5:9, buried in the middle of an obscure apocalyptic vision.
They are talking about obviously *winged* humanoids angels, not just humanoid angels. Their example doesn't seem to necessarily be about angels though. In Zechariah 5:5-11 there are two winged women who fly down and then fly away with a basket that contains another woman who represents wickedness. They take it to Babylon to build a house/temple and a stand for it. Zechariah never calls the winged women angels.
Another issue is that he talks about the problem of Biblical Literalism vs. those pop-culture depictions.
But neglects that Biblical Literalism in that sense is very much a modern [19th century or so?] American invention, as I recall the history of Christianity - but our pop-culture conception of angels dates to at least the Renaissance, centuries earlier.
(Your argument *also* undermines the facial contradiction, since the Literally Perfect And Accurate Bible - as the straw-Literalist holds it - describes them as able to appear both ways...
Mostly his argument just irked me because it looks like the typical Internet Atheist Problem of conflating "a minority view even among American Weirdo Baptists" with "what All Christians Obviously Believe" - same mechanism by which we get people shocked that the Pope doesn't oppose teaching evolution, because they have *no idea at all* that Catholics aren't Young Earth Creationists.)
I'm a conservative Protestant and sort of agree with your point but think the "Biblical literalism was invented by 19th century Americans" line of argumentation is also overplayed. It seems that in the two main sections of the Bible where literalism is an issue -- Genesis 1-11 and eschatology -- there has long been a diversity of opinion. And my understanding is this is still true, even within the Catholic Church -- the church has never repudiated YEC, though in practice conservative Catholics, both laity and clergy, are more likely to stay away from it than conservative Protestants.
What does seem to have changed in the 19th-20th centuries is that Biblical literalism/inerrancy became something of a Schelling Point, as Protestant denominations that didn't hold to it have had a strong tendency to break from a lot of historical notions of orthodoxy, which has led to a doubling-down on YEC that I doubt any of the Church Fathers or Calvin or Luther would have pursued, if they had access to our scientific findings in their own time.
But all that said, even among those who hold to YEC, there is a diversity of interpretations of eschatology, and a fair number of people who throw up their hands and say Revelation cannot be fully understood.
Are there really people who enjoy the 'English prof sleeps with his grad student' genre of literary fiction? I didn't think people were even supposed to read them, tbh, I thought they were some weird in joke amongst literary scholars.
Neal Stephenson, cruelly but (IMHO) accurately describes the split as The Literature of Competence vs The Literature of Incompetence. (And hints at, but never goes so far as to say, how that relates to the people who read each.)
I'd agree the one has nothing to do with the other.
Holbo's point is, perhaps, relevant and interesting to those who like or care about their fictional hero's having some sort of (generally extremely obvious) flaw; I am not one of those people, and I don't think Neal Stephenson is either.
Mostly I consider that genre ("flawed hero", ie Noir and all that crap) to be a subgenre of The Literature of Incompetence.
(And honestly, while Marvel have done a pretty good job in the construction of the MCU, it becomes least interesting when it becomes most obvious and ham-fisted in it's "let's now roll out this character's flaw and make a big deal about it" moments.
In particular I think he gets Guardians of the Galaxy completely backwards. That's a comedy of bumbling twits who manage to do OK, but that's VERY different from The Literature of Incompetence. Few identify themselves as bumbling twits, but The Literature of Incompetence is all about creating excuses for why, sure, you the reader may be alcoholic abuser cheating on his wife, but hell, here's 800 pages (or three boring movie hours) of why you are justified in behaving that way; or it's envious cousin "Sure he may seem so great, Mr CEO/policeman/politician but I bet you if you looked closely he's just as fscked up as I am, more so in fact, he's just better at hiding it".)
One set of authors and fans comes from a position of admiring competence (even bumbling competence) and wanting to be better; the other comes from a position of hating competence and wanting everyone to be as incompetent as the reader/author at life in general, albeit perhaps not in the narrow domain of a particular art form.
Of course this is one of the way's where Teach is wrong. Both populations are large; it's just that the envious incompetents control most of the cultural discourse so they seem ubiquitous, but they aren't, not if you go to genre art, to much of STEM, to much of manual labor.
If one wanted to really go out on a limb, one might even say that the admiration of competence is mostly associated with the masculine professions...
Around the time I gave up on reading literary fiction, I mentally tagged these kind of novels as the Hampstead Adultery Novel, because so many of them were professor has affair with hot student due to mid-life crisis/wife of professor has mid-life crisis due to her husband having an affair. Pages of "whatever shall I do now that I am in my 40s-50s, the kids (if we had any) are grown and left the nest, and this is the most successful and happy I shall ever be, and from now on it's just another thirty years of the same until the grave?" Some of them had the wife leaving the husband and taking up with a lover of her own, but generally it was just - not very interesting, unless you were a part of that class of people and could recognise the characters in your own social circle.
The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book.
As a stylistic note, the closest comparison I can think of is Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. 1900 pages of madness, with a preface of "this is an experiment to see whether people are more or less likely to promote this work after an actual suicide".
Very smart, intense people either a) eventually realize the naive view of the world is largely correct, and chill out or b) repackage the naive view of the world in obscurantism to justify the sunk-cost of their intellectual investments.
My articulation: We can (mostly) trust our perceptions about reality, and our intuitions about ethics. Our desires are legitimate, and not implanted or manufactured. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there's a lot of joy in it, so enjoy the good times and help others who are going through the bad. People want to live happy and meaningful lives, and the best path to those kind of lives involves self-discipline and/or dedication to an entity outside the self (family, vocation, religion, art, community).
I.e., put a thousand mundane self-help books in a blender and season with a healthy sprinkling of cliches.
Obviously, this view can be nit-picked and edge-cased to death. And it doesn't mean there's not value in studying those exceptions and other quirks of human cognition. But I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of what comes from those deep dives (in literature, philosophy, and psychology) is "Huh, the human brain really does weird stuff when turned inward. Maybe just stop thinking about yourself so much and go engage with the external world."
Imagine that this bundle of naive / small-c conservative / common-sense conclusions happened to be mistaken, but someone had already tentatively accepted it as largely true. How would that person find their way out of this mistake? If the fruit of their experience is that reasoning and literary-type introspection are not reliable ways to reach true, non-obvious conclusions, what's left? Religious awakening?
Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.
I should add two other options: c) embrace extreme / bizarre theories that bear no resemblance to the lived experience of most human beings; d) generate useful +/- novel insights.
The aggregate societal benefits from d) makes it worth bearing the annoyance/costs of b) + c), but our pre-test probability that any individual piece of intellectual esoterica is d) should be quite low.
This is the second damn time I’ve made it through 2/3 of a review assuming that it was one of the ones from the competition, and thinking the exact same thoughts: “Wow this is good, but this person REALLY needs to read less Slate Star Codex and develop their own style”…
I have long believed that the reason PUA somewhat works (for a value of "works") has nothing to do with the techniques or the negging, and that's about teaching enough misogyny that it doesn't *matter* to you to get vast amounts of "no's" (because who cares what the bitches believe anyway?). This means that you can hit on them freely because rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you, and with enough attempts, *something* is likely to work out sooner or later.
Alternate theory from Claire Thorn ?)*-- a moderate dose of PUA is good for men who suffer from social anxiety. They wouldn't go to a therapist, but PUA calms them down enough so that they can approach women.
The crucial thing is that they stop with the PUA culture then rather than letting it become their major social group.
*this doesn't seem to be the right name, but I can't remember it. A woman who's also written about S&M and has a thing for men who like theories about gender.
Wow Clarisse Thorn, haven't heard that name in years. She was moderately big name on a subset of feminist blogs over a decade ago.
Her theory is basically in line with the common ideas around PUA. You can't win if you don't play.
Negging and peacocking actually do work, though. But only on a subset of women. Something to try if you aren't having much success otherwise. Of course unlike "just ask women out" they are not morally neutral.
I thought peacocking was just wearing some interesting item of clothing in order to possibly get compliments from women. This seems harmless to me. I don't mock men for wearing fedoras, though I suppose that if the fedora has become a cliche, it won't work as well.
Negging is another matter. If you misjudge how the woman will take it, you can make her life worse.
MODERATOR ACTION: Medium warning. Seems neither true nor kind, not sure about necessary either, refers to women as "bitches" (I understand this is in the process of claiming other people think that way, but to me that just adds an extra layer of hostility).
It absolutely wasn't kind, but do you rule out the interpretation? If PUA works at all (questionable), then surely it's significantly about making the practitioners try and try again, and to discount the mental cost of getting a "no"?
But Scott, *necessary* doesn't make sense as the third of the triumvirate: kind, true and [.third thing]. There are very few statements that is is necessary to make, other than "lookout!" as elephants began to stampede towards you and your companion. It seems like the 3rd criterion should be, *there's a point to saying this.* There's a point = it advances the argument, clarifies the writer's meaning, adds a relevant detail, or otherwise contributes to a worthwhiile conversational goal. "Necessary" is just the top end of the There's-a-point-to-saying-this scale. "Necessary" means that there's such a tremendously important point to saying this that it's just necessary to saying it.
I was looking at this because of Scott's moderator action. I suggest that your point would have seemed less offensive if you had not written it in the second person. For example, rather than “rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you”, you might have phrased this as “rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on them”. I hope this is helpful.
Yes, I got that. But the thing about the ‘generic you’ construction is that it still says “you“. So it's usually best avoided in cases like “if you're a child molester and you want to evade detection, then…”. I don't think your point had any logical or grammatical problems, just rhetorical ones. But rhetoric matters. Perhaps you can imagine why “If a child molester wanted to evade detection” might be easier for the reader to process.
I apologize if you reach this conclusion but I just wanted to say before I finisih the essay in case I forget:
This strikes me as yet another of the many many things where it's important to learn that something is possible, possibly even common, but equally important to remember it's NOT universal.
It's absolutely vital to survival in our society to learn that people can lie to you. But you can't assume everyone is always lying, or you wind up in an insane asylum. It's important to learn that people can steal, murder, or rape, but it's insane to assume that everyone wants to do those things all the time. It's important to learn that people frequently fail to do the things they claim they will do, even if they're not lying, but it's not the case that everyone who says they're going to be somewhere at 5 pm will show up at 6 or never.
It seems clear to me that some subset of people make decisions about some subset of things for status or mimetic reasons, and some people do not.
Agreed - as a total non-expert in psychoanalysis, that's always been one of the odd things about it to me - most theorists seem to believe they have a "theory of everything" that succinctly explains all human behavior. While not impossible, that certainly isn't how anything else which I have ever studied has worked; it would be weird if human psychology was less complex than the climate, financial markets, or ethics (especially given that human psychology is clearly influencing those things!). But I have gotten a lot out of ideas like this by re-mapping their theory from "an explanation of literally everything" to "an explanation that is true more than you expect if you look for it!"
This is literally the opposite of psychoanalysis -- the theories are really a set of meta-theories (Freud called his project "metapsychology") or formal patterns that help the analyst empirically understand the the one single person (analysand) in front of them, as they reveal themselves through free associative speech.
It is a theory about how to make theories for the most idiosyncratic objects of study known to man, the mind (or in Lacan's case, the "subject who speaks"), as it spans backwards through time via memory and contains associations in the present. It makes no claim to understanding everyone, because that's unrelated to (and literally impossible given) the epistemic basis, which is the unique space of analysis itself.
I will likely read this, but I strongly suspect he has wildly misinterpreted the Athenians and their actions. If nothing else, the Athenians were VERY OK with dragging everyone down to the same level. Suggesting otherwise is...odd.
Also, that Oscar Wilde quote isn't an Oscar Wilde quote. It appears to be from one psychologist writing to another, but was mentioned in the introduction of a book about Oscar Wilde. This makes sense, since Oscar Wilde predates the use of the term "sex" to refer to banging like monkeys (though, interestingly, I'm pretty sure I found an example of it from a few years before the supposed earliest one that can be found online. It is, unfortunately, somewhat ambiguous).
The really interesting part is how closely the "massively dependent on slaves" axis maps to the "historical societies most likely to be lionised as virtuous" axis.
This even holds up *within* ancient greece. A lot of ancient writers, from Plato to Xenophon, comsidered Sparta the most virtuous of greek polises. Sparta also happended to be the most slave-dependent of them all. Most of them where themselves Athenian.
I'm a bit skeptical that Athens would have collapsed with the abolition of slavery, but it definitely would've changed things. And Sparta definitely would've.
Also, if the Athenians had no distinction between public and private desires, there were a lot of traitors, rebels, and political changes. And a lot of pining for being more like Sparta amongst the elite.
There's an entire industry of people who speak very earnestly about historic peoples (especially in terms of their mindsets, virtues, vices etc) without knowing a damn thing about their history. It's no consolation to know that this goes all the way back to Herodotus.
This Ed Teach sounds like the kind of person whose defense mechanism against realizing how psychologically screwed-up he is, is to project his worst problems onto everybody else. (There are a lot of people like that.)
"But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it." -- This particular neurosis is not inborn human nature, but diagnostic of having been a teenager in the 1990s, when pop music became self-conscious and ironic for (I think) exactly this reason, to the point where singers couldn't even sing honestly, but used a kind of nasal throttling-back of their voice so everyone knew they weren't even /trying/ to sing beautifully.
"Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines." -- Platonism, Christianity, absolute monarchy, the French revolutionaries, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and Social Justice all deliberately united morality, religion, and politics. Other movements deliberately separated them. A big part of the history of Western civilization is the history of fighting over the very thing he says is obvious--whether these are two separate lines. And, yes; most Westerners /do/ think the answer is obvious--but they're split over which answer is obvious, which proves to any careful thinker that it isn't obvious at all.
"Greco-Roman traditions" isn't a coherent thing you can draw a straight line from, either. The three main strands of Greek thought represented by classical Sparta , classical Athens, and Hellenistic Greece, are all different, and all very different from Roman thought. And you CAN'T trace the correlation between the moral/religious and the political back to Greco-Roman times, 'coz there was no such thing as "moral/religious"--morality had nothing to do with religion to the Greeks.
His characterization of the Athenians as worshipping Lysander is bizarre. Lysander & Sparta set up 30 tyrants from the Athenian aristocracy (most of whom had conspired with Sparta against Athens during the war) to rule Athens, who immediately began slaughtering people who supported democracy. The Athenians rebelled and overthrew them just a few years later. Sure, some people welcomed Lysander when he came into the city--the aristocrats who'd conspired to bring him there. But that doesn't tell us anything about the psychology of most Athenians, and certainly not the thing he says it tells us.
My gripe isn't that any of these are important points. It's that it's easy to shoot down everything he says. Teach doesn't support anything he says well, and sometimes doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. His rhetorical strategy is to spew startling or offensive statements fast enough that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate them. It's basically continental philosophy, where by "continental philosophy" I mean substituting showmanship for epistemology.
definitely reading this book because it sounds like a trip but i have to say, the giving tree section rang extremely true to me.
as a kid we had these writing competitions in elementary school, or maybe it was 6th grade, where we had to do a book review. i didn't put a lot of thought into it - i've always been a procrastinator, and wrote mine the day it was due, maybe hours before. i so distinctly remember picking 'the giving tree' out of a vague sense that it was the kind of book the judges would love to see reviewed. i talked about how it's about parenting and about how it was so important to teaching me, jack, about how good my parents were and how i should be more humble and thankful.
but i remember knowing that the book had no importance to me, hadn't resonated at all, and was my parents favorite, not mine. my essay advanced a few rounds, but didn't win, but it was enough that my mom - a teacher in the school district, shared it around with her peers. i remember feeling guilty and not ever dwelling too much on it. i felt guilty because i felt like i'd hoodwinked everyone, but i maybe i was fulfilling some amazing fantasy: "finally, a child who gets what this book is about (to me) - how good a mother i am for being so self-sacrificing and kind".
now i live 1000s of miles from my parents, but these two things may not be connected.
Some of the quoted excerpts from the text are extremely evocative of Reddit comments made by people who admit to being on methamphetamine benders. Not to accuse Dr. Teach of anything, necessarily, but the wild psychological theorizing, misanthropy, hypersexuality, and the way that *it just keeps going like that forever and ever* really read like a text written under the influence of methamphetamine. (Or by someone otherwise having some kind of really intense manic episode.)
This captures my confused feelings about The Last Psychiatrist so well. Thank you for the work it took to articulate all this! It means a lot to know that I'm not the only person who wasn't sure whether to take him seriously.
This review either makes my want to buy "Sadly, Porn" or run the other way. Not yet sure which. I never felt like I understood anything after reading TLP, but man, the *feeling* of it.
Also: You devil! That link to "The Northern Caves" kept me up until almost midnight! A fictional story about bloggers analyzing a fictional story is exactly the sort of thing I can't look away from...and I suspect you knew what you were doing :P
I've now censored three different comments I was going to make after realizing that I had only written them for the purpose of feeling special and unique.
Really like this review, wasn't familiar with this guy, and I can see myself in several descriptions, though not all. Definitely going to try to get hold of a physical copy.
> “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”
My friend has played something like 5,000+ hours of a game that I tried for less than two before I put it down - just wasn't my cup of tea. I have *checks Steam* 1,762 hours logged in a game that he played for four. There is no "lack of understanding" to explain the difference there, beyond the observation that the investment of enormous amounts of time and energy sometimes hangs on essentially-random personal preference. Sometimes even on things that are trivial, by their own admission!
"Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership. It *would* be truly impressive if V could get arbitrary people to commit meaningful resources, but that isn't what's happening here - instead, you have recruitment from a population that's heavily-selected to be amenable for... recruitment. I have a lot more appreciation for charisma as a teachable skill than I used to, but even when I was (more) clueless it never struck me as odd that people who try to be leaders sometime succeed.
Dota patch notes won't really help you understand eSports as a general phenomenon, but they will give you insight into specific nuances that many people care strongly about. Lacan won't really help you understand cultishness, but it might help you understand the aesthetics of one particular cult. Those speak to things you might not know right now, but they aren't really "holes" in a map.
""Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership."
This is what I'm trying to argue against. Yes, it's just leadership, or just charisma, but those words themselves are well-known enough that they disguise mysterious concepts. It's like saying "it's not mysterious why there are flashes in the sky, it's just lightning" instead of trying to invent electrical theory and meteorology or whatever. How come somebody who isn't doing obvious things like offering people power or money can still become a leader?
I agree there's something like "you spend thousands of hours grinding leadership and eventually become good at it", but it still seems surprising that there is a thing to get good at; if I spend thousands of hours grinding ESP, I still won't be able to bend spoons.
> Yes, it's just leadership, or just charisma, but those words themselves are well-known enough that they disguise mysterious concepts. It's like saying "it's not mysterious why there are flashes in the sky, it's just lightning" instead of trying to invent electrical theory and meteorology or whatever.
Ok, I see what you're pointing at. For comparison though, do you consider being a football quarterback mysterious in a similar way? The rules of the game are well enough defined and while human biomechanics are fiendishly complicated, there's no secret sauce in how muscles work or why imparting spin on a throw is useful. Yet there *is* vicious disagreement over what nutrition strategies to pursue, practice regimens to follow, playbooks to follow etc. even among peer champions. And there's no expectation that any level of academic mastery of the techniques will translate to much field success, absent thousands of hours of training.
If football isn't mysterious, I don't think leadership is. If football is mysterious, it's a good sign that masters of mysterious crafts can nonetheless have an awful understanding of what it is they do!
(And if this is the part of leadership you want to understand more of, I'm going to strongly recommend *against* Lacan. Giving people a narrative that they can fit themselves to might win you followers, but it's not a mechanistic understanding. Lack of predictive power, and all that.)
>[I]t still seems surprising that there is a thing to get good at
Might just be conflicting intuitions here - I'd put "leadership" in the same bundle of distinctly human superpowers as throwing spears and distance running. It might be helpful to conceptualize it as part of the same ideaspace as "navigating bureaucracy", where it's an interpersonal skill with some anti-inductive properties but somewhat consistent core mechanics that generalize between scenarios.
> How come somebody who isn't doing obvious things like offering people power or money can still become a leader?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how many people filled out the last round of reader surveys? How many man-hours of effort did you marshal by asking politely? Humility is a virtue, but modesty is self-destructive - no need to be awed by lesser successes than your own!
Leadership is roughly like skateboarding or being able to read lots of big words really fast. Drive. You just have a compulsion to do it. I can theoretically be one of the people who makes obscenely detailed photorealistic pictures with colored pencils. But I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a reddit post saying "this took me 1000 hours" and a faceless shot of me holding a photorealistic dog.
I don't think that's true. The two most charismatic people I knew were in junior school (so maybe age 9..12) and high school, and neither seemed to especially care about this fact or be planning their long-term conquest of society.
Might I suggest that
- very few people ARE actually charismatic, and perhaps you've just never met one?
- maybe there is a reason Weber called it charisma? The word means gift (same root as charity), ie the exact opposite of the claim you are making that it's achieved by hard work.
You don't have to offer people power or money. If you provide (or project an image of providing) understanding of self, or psyche, or the universe, or truth, beauty and love, you'll find plenty of people willing to at least listen. And if you manage to write obtusely enough that they can't instantly dismiss it as bullshit, some of them will continue listening. That's a very effective form of leadership, even if it's not the "do this, and you will be rewarded" type.
As far as I can tell, being a leader is literally just putting in a modicum of effort into organizing people, and do it consistently.
Like, it isn't mysterious. You just ... do something, and people will go along with it, and be grateful that somebody else is doing the organizing, so then they don't have to.
Invite some people out to tea once a week, and you'll find yourself the leader of a group of people.
It's possibly being a leader is "in my personality". Certainly I'd like to think so; the discovery that I could enjoy leading people is part of my personal narrative.
However - I notice that when I want to organize something, I just organize it; I give people a date and a time, and maybe I change it if somebody isn't available. And when I don't want to organize something, I don't organize it; I ask everyone when they are available, and so avoid doing any work at all.
And the difference between those situations is entirely the difference between when I am leading, and when I am not.
It looks like a difference in personality. One kind of person does one thing, a different kind of person does the other. What kind of person am I?
Well, I don't really think I'm a kind of person at all, in those terms. What even are those terms? Those aren't kinds of people, those aren't parts of personality, those are roles we play.
I can be a leader in online activities but get me to in-person stuff and ask me to lead. Not a chance. You are mostly right about how leadership works. Most people hate being the leader for the same reason I do in real life so they want to follow someone and have someone else do the "work". Leadership is simple in the abstract but it quickly becomes difficult in practice.
To be honest, the friend as described comes of as something of a creep. But then, Scott's lusting after cult-like power over others (and imagining himself in front of the crowd when listening to songs) also comes of as kind of creepy, and very elite-American.
I'm not sure how to describe it as a cultural outsider, except to vaguely gesture at the concept of a group of the nerdiest kids in school obsessing over how to be cool.
>...why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?
I have in fact always preferred the latter to the former and never understood why this was unusual. (In fairness, my psyche seems atypical in other ways as well.)
> Envy is different from jealousy: jealousy is when you wish you too had something nice, envy is when you wish the other person would lose their nice thing.
This is the exact opposite of how I remember being taught the distinction! Nor can I immediately find a dictionary source that really justifies it either way… what gives? Anyone else remember this differently?
The way I was taught is that jealousy is wanting to keep something exclusive to yourself (thus the Lord is a jealous god, or a jealous husband is someone who is constantly watching for signs of potential infidelity), while envy is the desire for that which other people have.
But, firing up my copy of the OED-on-CD-ROM, I get several relevant definitions:
envy 3: The feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another.
envy 4a: Desire to equal another in achievement or excellence; emulation.
envy 4b: A longing for the advantages enjoyed by another person.
jealousy 3: Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage.
jealousy 4a: in love, etc.: Fear of being supplanted in the affection, or distrust of the fidelity, of a beloved person, esp. a wife, husband, or lover.
jealousy 4b: in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part;
This suggests that it is proper to call wanting someone else to lose their nice thing either envy (3) or jealousy (4b), and it proper to call wanting to have the equivalent of what another has envy (4a), but not proper to call wanting to have the equivalent of what someone else has jealousy.
Thus, yes, in this specific distinguished use, I think they've been done backwards. Jealousy of a billionaire could be wanting them to lose their wealth, while envy could be any of wanting to have as much wealth, wanting their wealth, or wanting them to lose their wealth.
Sorry, I am not going to pretend that fair use includes verbatim quoting of entirely irrelevant (and often archaic) definitions in order to assuage the desires of random people on the Internet.
Copying and posting large enough sections from a copyrighted work outside of fair use or fair dealing sorts of exemptions is generally a copyright violation. You are asking for “chill” from someone whom you have just casually asked to very likely break the law for you.
WOW guys it's possible that Marty, like myself and many others, would not even *think* to worry about copyright law when asking for a list of definitions from a dictionary. While your diligent concern for the OED's legal privileges is admirable, and I'm not saying that you should change anything about behavior here, perhaps you shouldn't be surprised when someone is bewildered by legal citations in the face of "cool, can I hear more?" A little compassion goes a long way!
Who gives a fuck, it's the internet, and the copyright holder would sell you for organs if they could. I assume you'd turn over your neighbors to the Gestapo because the law compelled it.
Everyone breaks three laws every day, minimum. If Paris Hilton's stupid fucking attempt to copyright the phrase "that's hot" went through, would you be calling the police on every valley girl who talked for more than five minutes in your presence?
+1 to this. I've always understood envy as 'wanting to have the thing someone else has' and jealousy as 'wanting to have the thing exclusively of the other'. It's clear that Scott has reversed these meanings.
The former doesn't exclude both of us having the thing, and the latter covers both guarding the thing (so that only I have it) and taking the thing away from another (so that only I have it).
Precisely. God is jealous, not envious. (Envy is a sin.) By definition, God can't wish He had something, since He's omnipotent. He jealously wants to prevent you from worshiping other gods.
He could of course stop you from worshipping other gods, by changing your brain state. But He sets Himself a challenge of being worshipped by you without changing your brain state and also without even giving any particularly compelling evidence that He actually exists.
I'm not sure whether this is self-sabotage or the exact opposite.
I was writing just the same comment. The word "jealous" is the one we use with excludable possessions - boyfriends and positions of power. Random Dictionary:
envious: "wishing you had what another person has"
jealous: "1. feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship: a jealous boyfriend. 2. fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions."
Had been meaning to task here: what if cognitive biases are actually instrumental?
As in, if most people don't actually have goals of doing things in the world, and just want to look higher status, then beliefs should be picked up or dropped in relationship to how trendy they are.
And this seems to be what your analysis of teach is saying points at.
I agree that if you want to gain cognitive status through pure mind games without changing anything else in the world, you have to be doing something non-perfect-Bayesian (there's some good discussion of this in the comments of the reinforcement learning post) and that makes understanding the deviations from Bayesian reasoning more interesting.
Or as Jukka Sarasti (a vampire in Peter Watts' novel Blindsight) says:
"Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default."
I don't agree that "truth never matters, only fitness", but it's an interesting take nonetheless.
If i'm honest with myself, i think i have goals around this space a bunch, but very rarely are they conscious. It's more like, anxiety around 'this will lower my status!' pops into my head and motivates some action. Trying to make these things conscious will hopefully have the effect of lessening their impact on me.
I'm guessing that our assessments of our own status are _so_ important to us, for evolutionary reasons that, in the absence of official "here is your status today!" metrics, we might have been 'overfit' on anything that gives us clues as to our own relative status. And in modernity, with all the gadgets at our disposal, it's easeir than ever to change your perception of your own status.
I like his rhetorical technique of "it is universally acknowledged that X, therefore you are wrong but I am not, so you should listen to me berate you about it".
I confess I'm a little confused; if he thinks that we're incapable of wanting things and only capable of playing this weird psychological status game, why do we play it? Do we want to play, or do we not realize we can opt out? Most of the quotes you chose feel like rhetorical sleight of hand.
Even more than this, he seems to be talking about this as though we should care about this, and as though we should want to get out of this incapability of wanting things and find the *real* wanting that we never had.
Why would I want that, if I'm the kind of creature that can't even want things? Why not just stick with what I got, because some madman says there's something different?
"Honing the pretense, and making sure everyone knows what the current standards are, are important goals in a community with goals that might be forgotten if we undervalue pretending to really try."
This seems like would be a great whole other topic for conversation. If honing shallow performance and insincerity is helpful for enforcing community norms to a kind of lowest common denominator -- at what cost does it do this? From my perspective, energy spent honing a pretense has all kinds of other costs to a community as well as to an individual's mental well-being. As a practice, it seems kinda toxic to me.
The layers of performative scrupulous second, third, and forth guessing I hear being encouraged by Teach and that blog post and is already perhaps too prevalent seems unwell to me. Isn't that part of what anti-wokism is railing against -- how destructive it is to demand that people be ever more self-consciously and self-mortifyingly performative in ever tighter circles of self-doubt and scrupulosity?
It sounds like you're asking two questions. One is about how to use the word "want" - I think it's fair to hypothesize we're bad at directly wanting specific external things (like sex or money) but can still "want" to win status mind-games.
The other is about why we don't opt out; I think the answer is something like "this would involve accepting you're not very special or high status in the grand scheme of things" which is hard for most people.
At some level the answer probably reduces to really basic things about what the human motivational system is.
But does he give evidence that and why these two kinds of wanting are different? Or just refuse to elaborate and leave?
It seems convoluted to imagine that we have two nearly-indistinguishable kinds of wanting. Do they occur in the same part in our brain? Which comes first in development? Why are we "better" at the internal, harder-to-observe kind?
Let me play devil's advocate: the internal wanting doesn't exist. Instead, we want big, abstract things in exactly the same way as small, tactile things. The self-defeating behavior he's trying to explain is just the accumulation of the pain-avoidance heuristic triumphing in small post-mortems in the face of vast uncertainty. We act, it sometimes doesn't work out, we sometimes overfit, and some people are wired to overfit more. And some people fit less; any success is theirs and any failure is someone else's. They have escaped the status mind-games by smugly playing without introspection. (Go ask a bunch of salesmen to rate their own importance!)
If you want to see self-improvement, ask someone to preemptively write two post-mortems (post-morti?), one conditioned on their success, one on their failure. It's an tactic I derived from the book Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick. One of their observations is that "everyone knows" about game-changing technologies and opportunities, but companies' heuristics prevent them from reorienting to capitalize on those game changers. But instead of supposing that companies want to fail, they suppose that companies just don't know how to pursue the things they want.
Perhaps because our wants are non-orthogonal and thus are in conflict?
Thought experiment (centered on my experience because I'm a narcissist (using an in-joke to be more likeable (calling out my self-awareness to seem sophisticated .....))):
When I was a little kid I loved rainbow-colored things. Indeed, I still like rainbow colored things. Rainbows are pretty.
Then I learned that rainbows are used as a symbol of being gay.
As I grew older, I concluded that I couldn't be seen with any rainbow stuff because people would think that I'm gay, and that's bad.
Then I decided that the only people who I cared about caring about my sexuality were the people I was interested in. So back to rainbows.
Except that it's also a symbol of supporting gay rights/gay everything. And because Culture War, I cannot give any suggestion of support of people who oppose things I care about, even though it's unrelated to this issue.
So I can't wear/use/whatever anything rainbow because it might provide support for people who hate me.
So my wants conflict and thus I cannot fulfill both of them at the same time. And one of these wants involves how other people perceive me.
That excerpt about The Giving Tree clicked perfectly in my mind and made so much sense that I have to read the entire thing now. I definitely do agree with him about the self-knowledge trap having experienced it firsthand. Although, I prefer imagining sex in my head as opposed to using porn and have always felt that this was more direct and enjoyable. Thanks for writing about this; not sure what it says about my thinking, that I find all of his explanations sensible but I'll have to explore more.
Are you by any chance a highly-driven highly-charismatic person, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout?
I don't know about highly driven but the rest would work for those that know me well. And though I am deeply misanthropic, I ultimately think humanity is what makes existence worth it and lovable so I don't know if I qualify fully.
Yah that part was well done but I feel like it wasn't that original. Hasn't Alice Miller been down that path before, or at least one fairly parallel? I liked the dream analysis bit better.
IIRC Infinite Jest had most of its long digressions in end-notes. These are literally footnotes - he'll split the page and have half of it be the main text and the other half footnote, for as long as it takes.
No, the film! "In the climax of the book, James admits that he made the fatally-entertaining Infinite Jest as an attempt to create something so emotionally overwhelming that it would break his son out of his shell."
IJ was darkly funny and interesting. The thermonuclear war games on the tennis court. The Jinn living on human sweat on the towel dispenser. The lovable little brother with a mouth full of bicuspids. The head in the oven suicide - a microwave oven.
Minor correction on Rev 22:18 - the books of the Bible were collected as a library and canonized as scripture long after the Book of Revelations itself was written. While it's true that many people retroactively apply the verse in question as applying to the book as a whole, it's also impossible to read the various surviving texts without concluding that more than a few words in the Biblical texts were altered long before the whole thing came together as the 'Bible'.
Sure, but adding the "plagues that are written in this book" seems a close enough approximation. I guess if you're already misinterpreting this one verse to be retroactively incorporating all of the Biblical texts (+/- the books the protestants call the Apocrypha?), you can get away with a claim of eternal torture, since I'm pretty sure it's mentioned at least once in the whole Bible.
It’s not called “insight porn” for nothing — though we could easily use the term “sage writing” a la Thomas Carlyle, which leads to an either interesting or disturbing comparison of TLP’s writing style and, say, Mencius Moldbug’s; both engage in a kind of speaking-at and speaking-for the reader, putting words (desires? other things?) in the reader’s mouth/mind, so that the particular *type* of insight porn is pretty clearly BDSM. As a commenter once suggested on TLP’s blog [paraphrasing] “you all visit this site as a comedown lecture after a fap.”
I think there is something in the principle of teaching by being deliberately obscure, though. I think that's one of the main understood reasons why Jesus used parables so often. If someone thinks they've understood you then they might go away and think about your point for a bit. If you say something memorable and people think they've not understood you, it'll niggle at them and they'll go on pondering what you said for longer.
Less cynically:it's easy to communicate, understand and argue about information that slots into a pre-existing, compared to challenging or amending the framework itself.
Do we have any Mormons reading? What's the "feel" of the Book of Mormon? Does it have parables and stories and random mishmash so there's something that appeals to everyone? Or one particular tone?
So many of the responses here come from precisely the sort of hyper-intellectualized place that Teach is talking about. I, personally, can't stand rituals or the vagueness of "traditional" religious literature. But I'd be a fool to assert that my tastes represent anything commonplace. The history of humanity shows us that most humans love, and always have loved, both ritual and the protean vagueness of mythical language.
One could even argue that the real flaw in Marxism (Russia and China) was their lack of ritual and mythical-language texts meant they never really burrowed all the way into their societies. The Nazis seemed to be a lot more in touch with this, and I expect they'd probably have come up with some mythical-language texts in time, if circumstances had worked out differently.
This seems to be an attempt to give some meaning to a rant by someone who tells us repeatedly that he's just trying to confuse us. Usually Scott seems to try to write about things that have some possible ways of making sense.
You could call it that. Or you could call it an attempt to extract ten thousand words of interesting insight out of two hundred thousand words of weird dreck to save me the trouble of reading the weird dreck for myself.
Or at the very least he's generated ten thousand words on the same theme.
Yes, I think he's done the main job of a book review, which is saving others from reading it who shouldn't, and encouraging others to read it who should. And there is some value in learning about what people in this community are talking about when they talk about this particular author. But if this becomes a larger percentage of what is going on, I'll lose interest.
"We don't really have desires. We only desire to desire something", where, as Yudkowsky would put it, desires are what push us to action to achieve real world goals. Regardless of whether you agree with all the implications of this, how does this not make sense?
It sounds like “you don’t really eat things. You only eat things that eat things.” It’s a blatant contradiction. Maybe it means we don’t desire external things, but do desire internal things, in ways that push us to achieve, and one of those internal things that we desire is to desire external things? But then why not just say that?
I think that's exactly what he meant, and I do find your phrasing to be clearer. But I didn't find his phrasing particularly hard to understand either.
Even then, that's either a truism (yes, our brains desire-mechanism has a lot of internalized bits that don't directly correspond to sense-input and we have a cloud of vague Cartesian doubt between us and reality- if you're the kind of person who reads weird niche rationalist blogs, you probably already know that), nonsense (When I want to eat something because I'm hungry, and feel satisfied when I'm full, am I supposed to believe my desire to eat had nothing to do with the external world at all?) or both.
Are the things you LIKE exactly the same as the things that you WANT?
Have you never felt a tension between liking vs wanting?
Or, to put it differently, 60 yr old man with 20 yr old girl. What's he after? It's not exactly desire, it's more the wish to desire like he did when he was 20, to care as much about sex, to see the world anew, as back then; it's not desire it's the desire for desire.
I'm not going to justify the writing style. But to simply dismiss the points (as summarized by Scott) as meaningless?
Well, that's the reason society is split into the few (who possess The True Knowledge) and the many (who do not). And it's not like the few have to jealously guard their knowledge; most people simply are not interested in how things really work.
Attempting to give meaning to confusing rants is one thing Scott is consistently drawn to and world-class at; I'm reminded of his steel-manning of the Time Cube for instance.
Did I say that it did? But I have to read it first, or at least much of it, to discover I don't like it. I read this, or more accurately skimmed it, with growing dismay, lack of interest, and most of all lack of belief in the validity of whatever either you or Teach were saying. That rarely happens here, and I try to give you the benefit of the doubt, or I would have quit earlier.
If EVERYTHING Scott writes becomes like this, then not reading things like this amounts to not reading the blog. But you said that if he merely writes SOME things like this you would completely quit. Why not just read the posts you like and not read the posts you don't like?
I already answered that question in the comment you're replying to. I have to read it in order to find out if I like it. And since posts sometimes start out rather chewy and then become really good, skimming the first paragraph isn't enough.
This isn't like a post headed "Austin Meetup Next Sunday," which I know I can ignore since I don't live in Austin. Scott's book reviews are normally some of his best stuff; that's why I was so disappointed in this one.
For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. It took a book that I would never read, and presented its deep and insightful findings in a thoroughly enjoyable manner.
For what it's worth, this was a book I was never going to read and I read your whole review and enjoyed it in much in the same way I enjoyed resident contrarian's (unfinished) review. What comes through of Teach's worldview I find repulsive, but then I find it kind of soothing to read you grappling with it. So as an aesthetic experience, it was rather nice.
Scott, since you said in a prior post that you, like most humans, can't help but let the naysayers prevent you from writing about things, PLEASE do not let naysayers narrow the scope of books you review. Your breadth of content is engaging and inspiring and I'm sure I speak for many long time readers when I say it's one of your blog's best features. Don't kill your golden geese cause one guy in the back wants you to cater to his every whim without a drop of energy investment on his part.
Yeah I sort of agree. I think that the books seems horrible to read, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the book review, but it was still something that I probably never would have considered (the tree should teach the kid math?), and I value that. But obviously if every post was this, I wouldn’t be thrilled
Wow, this is almost as belligerent as Teach himself. I didn't demand that Scott cater to my whim, I just said, in one line, what I don't care to spend my leisure time reading, and let him decide whether to do anything about that. I -love- the variety of Scott's book reviews (the Arabian Nights one was one of the greatest hoots ever), but not this one. Let others invest their energy in Teach; I tried but found it unrewarding.
What prevents you from eating something you find revolting every day?
I assume this was, like many of your book reviews, a one-off, but if you did, for whatever reason, start shifting your blogging towards trying to seriously engage with what I can only see as a mix of deranged ranting and vicious psychological attacks as if it had some heavyweight intellectual merit, I wouldn't be able to read your blog due to actual, visceral revulsion regarding the subject matter. I'm certain Teach would say something hateful and misanthropic about how that just proves his unfalsifiable and totalizing theory is right and I'm just coping (but in the form of a 10-page footnote), but I've dealt with enough psychological self-abuse to know what it looks like coming from someone else, and I have no desire to engage with it or with people who pretend that it's anything but what it is.
I read this review and I'm glad Scott wrote it but I also find "trying to seriously engage with ... psychological attacks as if it had some heavyweight intellectual merit" a bit triggering and unpleasant. So, maybe a content warning to allow people to more easily skip these?
FWIW I have little interest in TLP and no desire to actually read this crazy book but am entertained by ACX reviewing weird and out there stuff. There are many other places where I can get sober news commentary; This kind of post is more interesting.
But I will also probably keep reading no matter what.
I didn’t like this review and wouldn’t want more of it. But I do agree that it is the kind of thing I dislike that a site I find interesting might occasionally have. That is, it’s a mistake to do this, but at least it’s the right kind of mistake, ensuring he isn’t always erring on the boring side.
I'm an intermediate sort. I didn't love it, but it isn't driving me away.
I now believe that one of Scott's big drives is looking for places where there *might* be interesting patterns, and deducing and clarifying the patterns.
> The main message I get here is “Teach really likes talking about classical Athens”:
What a coincidence. So do I. The difference is that I also like reading about Classical Athens.
This is normally where I'd expound on how wrong he was. But chasing down this philosophy's points of fact is a waste of time. It is, at any rate, missing the point. Nothing so pedestrian as facts is relevant. I know what they found in the dark, what they mined out of ponderous tomes and dead languages. It's nothing more than a dark art. Useful but uninteresting.
An obituary for a certain experience of knowing and learning and for the self that creates. People get other things now. We will still be unable to satisfy the muse, but the right metaphor might not even be sex. I guess Teach is going down with the ship.
Edit: or, at least, is perhaps on the same wavelength as me regarding, shall we say, a perennially popular mode of using historical societies as idealised analogies rather than trying to, you know, understand them on their own terms at all.
I actually started yelling at my computer when I got to the quote about Athenian democracy, like the proverbial boomer yelling at the TV: "THERE IS A TENSION BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM" IS NOT A NEW IDEA ANY FRESHMAN TAKING WESTERN CIV COULD...
and then i realized from the Teach perspective this probably reveals something discreditable about me.
"Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them."
You just described my personal hell.
Realizing the horror and revulsion the above statement caused me, for the first time in my career, I'm thinking about quitting and starting a one-man business.
I think we are complicit in the actions in our government is true and the source of most false conspiracy theories. False conspiracy theories seek to explain why we are not complicit. For example sandy hook conspiracies seek to explain why supporters of gun rights arent complicit in the most shocking example of the harms that can be caused by guns being readily accessible in America. 9/11 conspiracies seek to explain why 9/11 was not a discernibly motivated response to American foreign policy but a secret conspiracy Americans are not responsible for.
I first heard about The Giving Tree being a metaphor for mothers when I found online a script for the original stage-play version of Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds (then titled "Thoroughbred"). It wasn't at all subtle in its repeated references to The Giving Tree, so the actual film was better off without it.
Spotted Toad claims the secret to Harry Potter's success is that it's from the viepoint of Harry mother, who loves him unconditionally:
This is a dense review, but my first and strongest thought was "if it's constantly telling you to lower your mental defense mechanisms to accept its truth, and you can't understand it but you get the feeling that if you did it would be some sort of massive revelation, and your definitely-not-a-cult-leader friend is a big fan of it... maybe it's a cult." Or at least, using the same tools as a cult.
Tell someone that you have rare and secret knowledge. Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth. Make your explanations deliberately a bit obscure, so that they feel invested in the work they put in to understanding it. If someone feels like they understand you a bit too well, tell them they're still wrong, they're falling for an antimeme, they need to study even harder. Keep them feeling like they're on the brink of a revelation without ever gaining the clarity that might allow them to notice that it makes no sense. Explain with wild free-association chains that give people the sense that everything is connected and so your ideas can explain *everything.* If they ever feel tempted to go with the normal, boring explanation that would connect them to broader reality, turn that temptation into a character flaw - the only reason they think that way is because they're giving in to their brain's defense mechanism and they can't handle the truth.
Defense mechanisms do exist, and sometimes it really is hard to explain a complicated concept without wrestling with various imprecise metaphors. But other times, it's hard to understand because it's not actually a good explanation and you're accurately noticing your confusion. And still other times, it's hard to understand because the simple explanation would sound something like "I want to sneak past your rational thought processes because I'm trying to manipulate you."
But.. a very bad one? He abandoned his followers for 18 years, didn't make any fuss about returning, and doesn't see to try to extract anything from them.
You left out one vital difference, which is that the zealot (or cultist) cares tremendously that you buy into his system. Teach could not care less whether or not you agree with him.
Hate to spam your comments section but I was thinking about your cult leader friend, the influential people I know, the general rise in conspiracy theories, and the way people talk about ostensible facts, and I'm wondering if any smart people know of resources on how symbolic thought works. In particular I'm wondering how fuzzy the line between concrete observation and metaphor actually is.
In my mind these are two distinct and complementary ways of thinking - It may get across the beauty and majesty of a sunset to describe it as gods spilling out paint onto the canvas of the sky or whatever but I didn't literally see any gods and I'm well aware of that fact.
If you talk to someone who believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya or whatever though...it seems like multiple things are happening:
1) The person says this in the same way that I said the sunrise thing: it's a story that explains all the things they dislike about Obama and why they think he's an illegitimate leader,
2) There's no correlation at all between whether they say this and their intelligence/curiosity/ability to observe the world and tell truth from fiction with less emotionally fraught topics, and
3) They appear to genuinely believe Obama was born in Kenya.
A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying - they don't actually believe Obama was born in Kenya, but they think they can say Obama was born in Kenya and that be taken as a fact mistake, where if they said "he has a funny name and is the wrong color" they'd have to own up to being racists. But this does not seem to be what's happening at all, and conspiracy theory experts seem to believe both the "it's a story that better explains their grievances than actual truth and that's why they say it" and the "but seriously they also believe it" idea.
Likewise, influential people often say things as though they are statements of fact when they're actually a simple opinion or obviously false. These are often statements that, if made metaphorically or more conservatively, would speak to very real problems that real people have. I've always assumed that their "followers" profess to believe this even though they don't actually because there was status to be gained in professing faith in an obviously untrue thing. But also it seems weird to just assume a bunch of folks are liars.
And then there's religion. Not to get into the weeds too much here, but my parents believe, truly, with all their hearts, that those who do not accept the existence of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be tortured for eternity in hell. They also are people of principle who would not let their son be tortured for eternity in hell for want of his company. But they do not bring up my atheism or lack of church attendance because it would make things awkward. That does not strike me as the behavior of someone for whom this fact, which I know they believe with all their hearts, is literally true.
My original question when starting this post was going to be "do y'all think other people might have a fuzzier distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation than I do?" but then it occurred to me that if I did this I'd have no idea I was doing it. So do y'all think people have a fuzzy distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation?
I don't know a thing about this so read this in that light.
It seems to me it's more like many people live bundled up in various fuzzy blankets of delusion that provide existential comfort by conferring a felt sense of belonging and meaning that is not available to them through other means.
So it's not so much that some people don't distinguish clearly between metaphor and literal objects, but that their self-protective delusions are fairly impervious to all kinds of contrary evidence. And maybe add to that that some people feel much more comfortable filling gaps in evidence with all kinds of unfalsifiable stories and mental fabrications. And some people feel more comfortable than others believing those fabrications if they are presented wholesale by a beloved authority figure.
I do this too. I can tell happy horseshit stories about things I want to believe are true about people and the universe and the nature of reality. My stories are pretty small and not very dramatic and I don't get a big sense of group affirmation from them, but I still do it. So it's a matter of degrees and I'm just somewhere on the human spectrum that way and I'm guessing you are too, even if neither of us are in the center of the bell curve.
I think people adopt a belief (and then consider it to be true) on the basis of many criteria, including the likelihood that it correctly describes the world and whether it is agreeable (is it consistent with my previous values, is it something my friends believe, etc.). For some people, probably most, the truth of a belief is not something that is very important during this adoption process.
> A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying
I've honestly never understood how people can honestly believe this conclusion. It's just a fantastic conspiracy. I mean they're *literally* saying that all of these people that claim Obama was born in Kenya don't actually believe what they're saying, but they're instead engaged in a grand conspiracy to just keep repeating that totally-true-thing, *wink*wink*nudge*nudge*, until Obama is declared an illegitimate president or something, but that nobody breaks character or slips and gives the game away, ever.
Believing that these people are lying strikes me as QAnon-level conspiracy nonsense.
Level 2:"I am saying there is a lion across the river because I do not want to cross the river. The existence of the lion is immaterial to me, but I'm assuming you believe me."
Level 3:"I am saying there is a lion across the river because I am part of an anti-river-crossing coalition who are lobbying not to cross the river, and we anticipate that the pro-river-crossing coalition will say that there is a lion whether there is or not, so we're just playing by the game's rules. Also we'd be better at the game if we all actually believed there was a lion."
Level 4:"I am able to gain support in the anti-river-crossing coalition by being anti-river-crossing, and anti-river-crossing people say there is a lion so I am also saying there is a lion. I literally do not know what truth or falsity is."
The statement "I don't want a black man with a funny name to be president" is socially indefensible, while "I genuinely believe this man was born in Kenya" is a statement that makes the outgroup think you're stupid but not evil/unemployable/ostracizable *as long as* it's believed that you genuinely believe it. Therefore people adopt that belief or at least the words about that belief just so they can express themselves while maintaining plausible deniability about being a racist.
The simulacrum idea obviously has some insights. But my issue with this whole theory, especially in this context, is that most people aren't just blatant liars, and have a hard time making a belief core to their identity while not genuinely believing it. My other issue with this belief is that such people are, at least on an explicit level, fine with black men being president, so long as they're the right kind of black men. They'd be thrilled to vote for Herman Cain, for instance. They therefore do not think of their problems with Obama as racism, but rather globalism, elitism, anti-American sentiment, etc. Things they'd think about a *white* president with Obama's beliefs.
With that said, it's clear they would not think or say that a white president with Obama's beliefs was a secret muslim, or that they were from Africa. Conspiracies around the white president's illegitimacy would also exist (see Biden and Clinton), but they wouldn't be based in such a weird and obviously falsifiable worldview. It's clear that the conspiracy theory's racial payload is a feature, but I don't think it exists because of Obama's race, and I don't think the underlying complaints would have led to ostracization (at least not in 2008/2012). So then what's the motive for lying? I think there's some signaling going on, but that these people actually do believe this on an object-level. I'm wondering how that is possible when many of these people are otherwise curious, thoughtful, intelligent, and reality oriented in other contexts.
> It's clear that the conspiracy theory's racial payload is a feature, but I don't think it exists because of Obama's race
I would speculate that it's just like any other physical feature that people exploit to make a viral meme, like Bernie's crazy hair. I think the main driver is the usual "sticking it to the other side" in whatever way they can.
People genuinely believe all sorts of incoherent things if its common in their social group (see religion), but this means that birthers are really not lying, they've adopted this belief as part of their identity.
I talked with a birther who seemed be pretty well-informed about birtherism. I asked him what would happen if it were proven that Obama wasn't a native-born American, and the birther had no idea. It looked like neither he nor his social circle had considered it.
I was shocked, but I didn't have any idea of how to pursue the topic. Does this prove that birtherism really is racism? Or what?
Does ignorance of civics imply racism in some obvious way that I'm just missing? The lack of drive to find out and the lack of curiosity about such questions isn't really all that uncommon. I don't really know what "well-informed about birtherism" really entails I guess. It could just mean he watched Tucker Carlson.
Are Christians straight out lying when they say Jesus was born of a virgin?
Do they genuinely believe it?
Do they believe in some kind of weird "it's truthy even if it's not true" way?
And of course there are woke equivalents for these sorts of statements, claims I won't write (because I have zero interest in being crucified) but which plenty of people with experience of the real world look at in disbelief as "how can you possibly claim to believe something so at variance with every day lived reality?"
"Belief" is more complicated than people make out.
In the millennial generation, doing things "to be ironic" has been huge. The "hipster" sub-culture is almost entirely constructed around irony.
Anyway, I suspect irony is primarily a defense mechanism, whereby people are too afraid to say they like something (for all the reasons floated in this post) and so instead they pretend they *don't* like the masculine lumberjack ethos with flannel shirts and Carhartt hats -- but they're doing it anyway because -- isn't that ironic and edgy!
And that's for the bravest users of irony, who are willing to *act* on what they like but only if they can *claim* that they aren't.
Others "ironically" adopt objectively-hideous fashions and ideas -- just ride the L train to Brooklyn for examples -- because they aren't brave enough to either speak or covertly act on real tastes and desires.
By the way, you can even see it in basic sarcastic quips. Saying sarcastically, "oh, do you have high enough ceilings here?" spares you for having to actually say "you have really impressively high ceilings in your home" and actually saying something you feel.
Anyway, that's no way to live.
My sense is there was less irony in history, and my experience is that people in developing countries are more comfortable with expressing actual desires. Is excessive introspection enabled by material wealth leading to too much fear of just doing and saying what you actually want? Or is something else going on?
My son gives fantastic dinner table lectures on this topic and says that we've moved on past irony to post-irony and into new sincerity (which sometimes horseshoes back to irony). And it does all seem like layers of defense mechanisms for a particular socioeconomic class of people under circumstances of increased threat (economic, social, etc) where the rules are shifting so fast and enforced so harshly that everyone is safer if no one can tell where you stand. I'm with you, that's no way to live.
It seems much akin to sarcasm in that tiny doses of it can be lively on occasion but is destructive to trust and relationships in larger amounts.
That's right, I think it is another layer of defense because it's where you intentionally befuddle people about whether you're doing irony or not. DFW was apparently the harbinger of this. There's a whole wikipedia entry (among other things): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-irony
If you're being ironic, there are ways that's usually signaled, so it's something one is generally owning up to while doing and whoever you're communicating it to is in on the joke, even if the joke is also giving you emotional cover. In post-irony, there's a perpetual plausible deniability and no need to own up to anything and no one gets to know what your intentions were. If the intentions in crafting irony are a kind of mocking social commentary or some kind of clever performative emotional distancing, then in post-irony the performer of it is saying "I have no duty to communicate anything to you -- take of it what you will but that has nothing to do with me." So it seems like the entire relational aspect of communication has more or less broken down so that it's pure performance simply making meta-commentary on how meaningless it all is.
(I bet there are people here who could add a lot more nuance to this and might disagree about my characterization. This is not like an area of expertise for me.)
Eh, I think collapsing everything into a single concept of "defense layer" actively impedes understanding of the cultural development of and past irony.
I don't mean there aren't defenses, or that they aren't layered, or that there's no point thinking in terms of those, but first: defenses against what? Your description suggests (assumes?) quantitative change in a single direction, from sincerity to greater emotional distancing, and that's not at all what's happening.
What's happening is irony having permeated our cultural consciousness and new developments positioning themselves in reaction to it. These can be, e.g.:
- reactionary: rejecting irony outright (new sincerity);
- accelerationist: layering irony upon irony until it's reduced to absurdity (meta-irony);
- adaptive: cloaking serious messages in irony-conscious delivery (post-irony).
Which is to say, post-irony proper is a defense giving you plausible deniability, yes. But the defense is, first and foremost, against ironic ridicule.
Or, to quote a classic: https://me.me/i/i-used-to-be-trolled-but-i-found-out-a-4270852 (Note how the picture is a ridiculous, badly-drawn panel of a cartoon character cropped out of an infamously crappy webcomic. Also note how what it's saying is meaningful, true to said character's background and, arguably, insightful and true.)
> This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.
I almost stopped reading here, in case the other antimemes were actually more powerful, or less powerful but be unsettling or have some other effect.
Like other commenter here, I was (and still am when I think about it too much) also deeply unsettled to discover that all my actions could be explained by some kind of status seeking or desire to project some image of myself, possibly to myself. It certainly makes me feel like a hypocrite at one level or another, at all times.
From the review, it seems the theory in this book makes the annoying jump from "this is one explanatory mechanism for some things you to" to "this is the only explanatory mechanism for everything you do"! Imagine if we did that, say, in physics. Even if there a single mechanism, there's no chance we'd happen on it without first discovering a number of apparently disconnected things.
That particular ancient Zen koan is great. Thanks for making me aware of it.
I've tried reading TLP. I feel about the guy the same way I feel about woke stuff -- I don't understand why I should listen to someone sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies that do not match my internal experience at all. Seems masochistic.
For a subset (to be clear, I don't believe the majority of people drawn to these ideas seriously believe this)- they like it because it gives them carte blanche to be an awful person. Everyone but the elect are awful scum, while the elect are good and pure- so whatever the elect does to anyone else, it's because the unelect deserve it. And if you don't have a category of "the elect"- well, if eveyrone's an irredeemable piece of shit, then it's not that YOU'RE awful- everyone's awful, you're just HONEST about it.
On the whole, "omniscience OR omnipotence, choose one" thing: I think about the tagline on Teach's old blog was also a Wittgenstein quote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." It reminds me of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao." Even speaking is a form of action which negates your knowledge, words are themselves limiters. They are defined by what they are not. So you can know, but you cannot act perfectly, or you can act perfectly, but only if you concede that you do not know everything.
...and yet billions of words have been written attempting to explain the nature of knowledge and wisdom and our existence. Why does Edward Teach? Because while your action is almost certainly going to end up wrong, not acting is 100% going to achieve even less.
A thought about the Elon Musk example: I suppose Elon Musk prefers to be viewed positively by the general public. I also suspect that he has a lot of control over his public persona and a bunch of smart people advising him in that regard. So why would Elon Musk present himself as someone who has gotten to where he is because of his strong desire/will/actions/accomplishments? You could make a reasonably convincing case that the important factors in his success were his very wealthy and extremely well-connected family. He could present himself as something like the Harry Potter Archetype. And if I understand your interpretation of the book correctly that would make him more popular/beloved? So is this a failure of Mr. Musks PR-Team or is something else going on?
Because Elon Musk's image of himself is more important to him than your image of him.
It's part of a broader question I think of sometimes. Why do we spend so much time and effort trying to impress others, when we know that others hate to be impressed? We just can't stop ourselves.
I don't think having a rich family satisfies the "chosen one" archetype in basically anyone's minds. To stick with the Potter allusions, I think coming from a rich family would make you the Malfoy of the group.
The fun thing about being a psychoanalyst, particularly of the 'you don't know your desires' school, is that the psychoanalyst is perfectly secure in their beliefs. If I say that I don't identify with the status games, then the psychoanalyst can simply say 'You see, you are simply double-plus-good at hiding your TRUE desires, which makes you feel smugly superior, so you ARE playing status games after all, ha-HA!', which is obviously a completely unrefutable type of argument that can be deployed against any criticism, whether from personal reflection or broader analysis.
Yuck, right? Who would want to subject themselves to that? It seems like before one gets to that type of psychoanalyst (and I don't know how common that type is anymore), one would have already heard amply from parents and teachers and other authority figures that they know better than you who you are and what you need and why. We have a surfeit of that by adulthood already, no? And what's needed is something more like the antidote to all that self-doubt.
The power imbalance built into the relationship between analyst and patient is enormous. Think of the asymmetry in degree of exposure -- or that fact that the analysand can ask a question like "what did your mean by that?" and it is perfectly acceptable in that context for the analyst to remain silent, or to answer that question with a question, or to respond with some statement about the analysand's thoughts or feelings or psychic structure (a statement which itself cannot be responded to with a question that will necessarily get an answer).
There's a description of psychoanalysis in _The Brain that Changes Itself_ by Doidge which is a careful, responsible search for subconscious patterns of thought. I have no idea whether this approach is at all common.
There are undoubtedly many smart, kind psychoanalysts who undertook the long, insanely expensive analytic training in hopes of learning to recognize something like subconscious patterns of thought. I know several. They way things play out in real life for many who got analytic training is that the training gives them some skills and schemas and forms of attunement that get tossed into the mix with all the other stuff they have learned or figured out or know instinctively about how to get people unstuck from various hells. Pure psychoanalysis is rarely practiced these days. Its glamor has faded and it is extremely expensive -- $450/ session in NYC, and patients come for 3-4 sessions/week - so there aren't a lot of customers.
I do think that of the various schools and styles of psychotherapy, unadulterated psychoanalysis is about the worst in terms of the power imbalance between patient and therapist. I would rather have some psychopharmacologist telling me I should take drug X in order to tame my attentional deficit, psychotic flares or whatnot than to have a psychoanalyst telling me he knows better than I do who I want to have sex with. The former would be giving me expert info about how to tame my brain with drugs -- the latter would be telling me he knows more than I do about who I am.
$450/hour is the going rate for psychiatrists in NYC, no matter what kind of treatment they are providing. Not everybody charges that much, of course. To become someone who can do that you have to chart a course in the direction of seeing wealthy patients -- network with other docs who see that crowd, get an office convenient for those folks, etc. It helps to have gotten your training in prestigious settings.
There are quite a few people for whom that sum of money is not a problem.
I know that New York City and a few other cities around the world still have lots of psychoanalysts working from variations on that tune and also that the vast majority of therapy has not worked that way for a long long time. Though there are of course other ways that therapists misuse their authority, which you and
Eremolalos point out can be considerable.
The more modern-day version of it might be all the various fads and dogmas around this or that modality -- CBT, IFS, EMDR, etc etc -- and people encountering therapists who talk about those modalities as if they have something like scientific ground beneath them, when they don't, not really. The phrase "evidence-based" carries a lot of water these days that it really shouldn't (in clinical psychology that is).
In the 1980s there was hubbub around buried memory retrieval. Through the 90s up to now there's abuse that's happened by therapists who guide clients through psychedelic trips. There are still therapists of course every year busted for having sex with their clients/patients. It's terrible that this happens. The egregious stuff is rare. And of course malpractice happens all through medicine and law and all the other places where professionals have lots of impact on other people's lives.
I think that the advantage of pornographic literature over fantasies is largely the same as that of any literature over fantasies. A story that has actually been written down is much more concrete, but an imaginary fantasy is very fluid and it's difficult to get a coherent sequence of plot beats out of it (unless I'm trying really hard).
Fantasizing well enough to replace reading would probably require a decent portion of the work required to write a good story.
Charisma is something one has or hasn't. It's like having a big dick. Has nothing to do with understanding concepts.
For examples, here are some highly-driven highly-charismatic people: John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, John Travolta, Muhammad Ali. I doubt any of these people have a mental map one could use to become more charismatic.
There's a good reason Charisma is an independent attribute in D&D.
I'm not saying I like all those people but, objectively speaking, all of them are highly charismatic. Box office receipts are an objective measure of charisma.
Maybe you can a little. All the PUA blogs argued you could do so, but most acknowledged the improvements one can make are modest. Charisma is more like IQ than it is like Strength.
The old PUA blogs like Roissy did a good job of analyzing the components of charisma. It's mostly about displaying confidence in an interpersonal, physical situation. But one can only fake confidence to a degree. Real confidence will always beat attempts at faking it.
People can and do become more confident, but someone with high charisma is like someone with high intelligence or high musical or athletic ability: you are born with that. You can hone or improve those skills, but you are not going to become a genius, a professional athlete, a top musician or actor unless you are born with a ton of raw talent in the respective field.
To believe otherwise is to be a Blank Slater.
I doubt there are many Blank Slaters here when the subject is intelligence or athletic ability; my point is that charisma is similar. That's obvious to most people, but I think some rationalists are oblivious to some things that are obvious to non-rationalists, because it is more of a Zen thing, taken in holistically, than something that is easily grasped by the intellect.
Eh, there's plenty of ways to lower your intelligence. And if you stop doing those things, you can become more intelligent.
That skills can be trained to a certain extent (and perhaps to different extents by different people) doesn't make one a blank slater.
Average untrained people can improve their strength at least two-fold pretty easily with a simple weightlifting routine. (Of course, that's far from competing at the olympics.)
I see no reason why most people couldn't get similar improvements to their charisma.
Sales people do get better with experience for example, too.
You can't practice it because real confidence isn't a simulacrum. It is simply the outcome of a number of components (some tangible, some intangible) plus experience.
The only way to become more confident in a real sense is to become a different person with the sorts of skills and experiences which promote confidence. Which is like saying that the only way to lose weight is to eat moderately, get lots of greens and vegetables in, and exercise - everyone agrees on it in principle, and then overweight people bend every faculty in themselves to deny it at every step.
Plenty of people become more or less confident over time. Depending on what happens to them, what they decide to do, general aging, genetic factors etc.
I don't want to say that managing your weight or increasing your charisma or confidence is easy nor straightforward nor that everyone who tries will be successful.
> Charisma is more like IQ than it is like Strength.
There is no intervention that can increase IQ the way that a single dose of MDMA can increase confidence and charisma; I'm talking an order of magnitude difference. Therefore I don't think your analogy is valid.
I've said it in another reply, but this sort of analytic approach to making oneself charismatic/successful is both quite creepy, and very... American. From the outside, it looks very much like a bunch of nerds discussing amongst themselves how to be cool.
Not a new theme at all for TLP. He was posting back in 2015, paraphrasing here ... "you only married her so that you could keep her away from other men. If they knew how much you refused to enjoy her on a daily basis- they'd knife you."
Response - reading suggestion - to the part about "want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them." you might enjoy this essay by an actual shepherd and his experience with his actual sheep falling into similar mental traps https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ .
1. Zizek: I don't have a high opinion of Zizek because he's a communist and seems like yet another fraudulent public intellectual, but I don't think about him much and haven't engaged with him in a really long time so my opinion is only weakly negative.
2. Zen: Holding in my mind simultaneously the entire spectrum of input from all five senses seems easy but I can't point to any benefit of doing it.
3. Envy: Teach's weird definition of Envy (but I don't know a better word: Schadenfreude is too narrow because it doesn't encompass desiring hypotheticals, and Sadism is too narrow because it requires being the one inflicting the pain) has only been felt by me against people I hate, and I spent 80% of my life not hating anyone, and even in the other 20% Envy was rare. I hated some bullies in elementary school, and I hated some SJWs in 2016-2020, but I got over it. I have been Jealous of my friends' hot wives, and Jealous of my cousin's hot wife, but at no point did I desire depriving my friends or my cousin of anything, so it wasn't Envy in the way Teach uses that word. If I had a magic button that would copy my cousin's wife and make the copy be in love with me, I would press the button. If I had another magic button that would make the original divorce him and marry me, I would never push that button. If I had a magic button that would zero out the wealth of any billionaire of my choice, I wouldn't use it.
4. If all all our desires were just faked for status purposes, no one would ever have a low-status kink. So Teach is wrong about that. I don't think I gain any status by being a 36yo dude binging on high school rom-com-dramas on Netflix and crushing on some of the characters, who are typically 25 year old actresses pretending to be 16. (Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, To All the Boys I Loved Before).
Wow, you were willing to share a 'low status' kink with us? You must not be ashamed of it, or yourself. If you reasonably believe you are secure enough in this context to risk withstanding a little status ding, you probably won't even get one. You also helpfully point out that the actors playing 16 year olds are in fact, over age and so carefully divide your (ooooh, a little embarrassing!) feelings towards them from those interpretable as being directed at actual 16 year olds (talk about a low-status kink!)
You were willing to conclude that he was wrong on the basis of this example, which I don't think is convincing. That is a different epistemic stance than eg asking if your situation was a valid counter-example. Why did you choose to reject it over being curious about how the theory applied to your situation?
There are obviously lots of other low status kinks that exist. e.g., homosexuality until recently. Mine may not be the best example, but it's the only one I can talk about from personal experience.
This seems to just completely discount the possibility of viscerally pleasurable physical experiences, if I am understanding it correctly.
As someone who largely (get it) buys into the palatability theory of obesity, I am not sure how to square these theories.
The only thing I can think of, is that I am trying to sublimate (well the opposite of sublimate really ... deposit??) my secret desire to be fit, by instead making myself unfit. That some 'thing' happened in the 1970s that radically changed the culture such that it became a lot more common for people to secretly desire being fit which then obviously led to a lot of obesity.
Of course, this makes it fully generalizable and totally unfalsifiable. I do the high status things because I want status and I do the low status things to hide my secret desire for high status things. I am not sure if it is even possible for this type of analysis to ever be helpful so I must be missing something.
Good point. (Although I see how TLP could twist that into his theory, it would be highly speculative and offer little insight.)
It might be helpful if writers who generalize about people would go through the following imaginary dialogue with a questioner to check if they actually mean 'all people':
Q: 'Are you including the brain-dead?'
W: 'Well, obviously no...'
Q: 'Are you including those with Down syndrome?'
W: 'I guess not...'
Q: 'Low-functioning autistic people?'
W: 'I hadn't thought about that. Probably not...'
Q: 'Infants?'
W: 'No!'
Q: 'Clearly you're not including everybody. Please go through this list of all (known) developmental stages, mental disorders, and personality types to indicate who you're *not* describing.'
-- 20 minutes later --
W: 'Wow, that was a long list. I ticked at least 1 out of 5 boxes. Thanks for helping me trade away my pseudo-profound generalization for the possibility of some degree of accuracy!'
It's not supposed to be helpful, it's psychological self-harm. You can explain away every good aspect of your personality and make your worst self the only "real" self you have. This is only useful if you want an excuse to be an absolute piece of shit to other human beings as it gives you total absolution from your conscience.
I know almost nothing about the Kabbalah, but I feel like Scott knows or people here might know. The one thing I picked up goes something like, when the sephiroth does the thing it does, quarks fly off into the past and future. And sometimes one of the bits is opposite in meaning or at an angle to the piece it came off of. I am sure that’s wrong, but I use it to tell myself “good things can have bad consequences” and similar wisdoms. When I read people reading Lacan - like now - or Freud (a few weeks ago for school), I come back to this idea. When a thing exists, it automatically starts firing off contradictory bits, and that’s true inside the psyche and everywhere else. In terms of “real desire,” it’s turtles all the way down. In terms of someone is telling me about their life and I should say something helpful, I don’t know how to tell if the quark went left or right. Guess I need to read more Lacan.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
I can do some mad libs with this to explain obscurantism in terms of cowardice.
"Intellectually unhealthy people, e.g. postmodernists, don't have beliefs, at least not in the normal sense. Believing things is scary and might obligate you to have evidence to support those beliefs lest you look like a crank. Your belief might be wrong, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who is forced to update his map. Better to just avoid committing to saying anything unambiguous."
Great review. I think I'll probably read this under the Julian Jaynes exception, by which weirdo polymaths interpreting all of history and art through their insanely particular theory can be compelling as fiction if they're sufficiently good at writing prose.
Personally—and you can accept this and Teach can dismiss it—I read the old 800-page classics of western literature because they're really fun to read. They're also very insightful and profound sometimes, but something like "Anna Karenina" or "David Copperfield" is a page-turner in addition to all those artistic features.
My impression is that the naturalists and modernists of the late 19th/early 20th century got more into doomed professorial affairs and interpretational difficulty, but they made things easier on their readers by mostly making the novels much shorter. The Victorians (and their contemporaries) were writing sentimental barnburners that also just happened to be profound.
You certainly have to give Jaynes points for intellectual creativity and lovely writing. His theory, while unlikely to be true, has the virtue of demanding of the reader the ability to seriously imagine a very different world than the one we live in now. Most books that intend to do that (usually science fiction or fantasy) are far less demanding because the people they describe aren't really any different than the people all around us today. Heinlein wrote about characters who lived for thousands of years yet seemed to have gained nothing from all that experience (admittedly, it's tricky to describe someone like that when you've lived less than a century yourself). Or characters might have some sort of psychic or magical powers, yet those powers rarely seem to have any deep effect on them -- telepathy (or whatever) is basically treated as another tool in the box. Jaynes, on the other hand, really wants you to imagine people who are fundamentally different from us. (Another thing I love about his book is its influence on the recent Westworld TV series.)
Arguably, Lazarus Long changed in his thousands of years, but it was more like getting depressed rather than learning things. Alternatively, in Methuselah's Children, he was in a situation perfectly suited to his talents and temperament, and that never happened again.
Where can/should I go to learn more about antimemes? I followed the link to the SCP Foundation and read the first entry. I'll probably go back there and read more later, but after a first impression I'm worried that that website is itself an antimeme.
Antimemes are not just "ideas that are hard to spread". (I have to be vague about this next part:)
You, yourself, have powerful, mostly subconscious mental shields you built when you were very young. The shields protect you from very bad things. Those shields, by their very nature, also distort your personal reality and make it almost impossible for you to understand or even perceive / remember certain ideas, even if they are directly explained to you. These ideas are antimemes. Technically antimemes are relative to an individual mind; some minds can have different antimemes. The human condition tends to be such that there are some near-universal antimemes. {This part censored after some thought as it would have messed up this post, sorry but I did try}. Antimemes are VERY powerful, and very real things. They are like inferential black holes that you can see out of the corner of your eye if you know how to look, and they are everywhere. {I had to remove this part as well on further consideration. This is very frustrating!} Unfortunately explaining antimemes in any medium is almost impossible.
The literal definition would be just "an idea that's hard to spread." A long stream of random numbers would be probably the best antimeme you can make.
But Scott is using it as an analogy to the SCP Foundation stories, where it's more about ideas that are *supernaturally* hard to spread. Entities that destroy all knowledge of their existence, facts that you can't know because knowing them drives you mad, etc. The central idea of the Antimemetics Division stories is basically "how do you fight something when merely knowing what you're fighting against will destroy you?"
Antimemes are an analogy for your brain's defense mechanisms since, while they're not supernatural, they're still a mysterious force that keeps you from really understanding things.
If you haven't read any other SCP Foundation articles, I wouldn't pick the Antimemetics Division as your first one, because its whole gimmick is flipping the Foundation's concept on its head. Every article on the website is a small horror story built around "here is a supernatural threat that we've carefully studied and documented how to contain," and then the Antimemetics Division comes in with "this is a threat that's literally impossible to study, that we only know exists by the conspicuous gaps where our scientists got killed trying. How do we contain it?"
It's a very twisty sort of story. Fascinating and incredibly creative, but not really a straightforward introduction to the Foundation.
There’s actual, literal facts that you can try to explain to people, they will realize they are deeply confused about the issue, and then their mind just “bounces off” the idea, they sort of stare into space, and later they misremember what you said and are right back to where they started. I’ve personally seen this many times for many different facts. It’s not SUPERNATURAL, it doesn’t need to be. But antimemes are very real.
Can you give some examples of those facts? I definitely know what you mean and have seen it before myself. I'm interested in what sorts of facts you've noticed this happen with.
I find the idea of two people sincerely trying to share the antimemes they've discovered to each other, each with an open mind, to be both fascinating and terrifying. I don't feel comfortable doing it in public, but I have to admit I'm intrigued.
How many such facts do you know? I just made a list for 20 minutes and I came up with around 30 discrete things.
I'm curious as to what aspect of this conversation you would find terrifying? Personally, I'm not very interested in antimemes themselves, just interested in better understanding the concept of them, which an exposure to a variety of examples will presumably help facilitate. If you're willing to share some of your examples in private, my email address is emwjazz@gmail.com
I can't say I can pull many examples off the top of my head. One thing that could potentially fit your description above is certain basic aspects of quantum mechanics. Entanglement is highly unintuitive, very difficult to understand, and easy to misinterpret. In that respect, it seems like a perfect antimeme for most people (myself included). However the idea is nonetheless very interesting and therefore not a perfect antimeme. Particularly for physicists, I imagine that its unintuitive nature contributes to fueling a desire to think about and propogate it, and for that reason (plus the fact that it's something I've thought about myself), I lean heavily towards not viewing it as an antimeme, although I still think it fits your description above.
It's terrifying because the consequence of actually truly hearing / seeing a real anitmeme and then failing to integrate that knowledge properly has extremely severe consequences, including inverting some of your values, permanently experiencing less happiness for the rest of your life, or death.
Of course, people are mostly fine because they don't really hear or understand when they hear an antimeme, and then misremember what they heard later, making it safe.
maybe something like the inevitability of death, or Scott's post "By very slow Deacy" we can intellectually understand these things, but to really be consciously aware that is our inevitable future is not something we can hold on to for long.
Or perhas the idea that for any married couple, one wil die before the other, likely leaving the surviving one alone for years.
Or maybe an awareness of the capaicty of evil in the people all around us, and how we're subject to random prejudices or people who would literally see us dead if they were capable iof it- or the actual fact of how of something like that, for example how deeply irrational most people are. These are things we recognize intellectually, but to really be aware of them is terifying.
Or- certain conversations about say, the complex realities of how asocial use of alcohol facilitates human mating.
Something people are aware of and can talk about in private, but which no one wil ever acknowledge publicly.
Or in a similar example- with all the shaming and cancel culture, its interesting that people porn habits are never brought up (witht eh exception of pedophilic pornograpghy) as a way to shame them. One might assume this would have happened by now.
The reason I suspect it hasnt is that is "mutually assured destruction"
So that's sort of an antimeme- everyone knows men (and a great many women) regularly look at pornogrpahy and often have specific interests that would be embrassing. But if one goes the route of exposing someone else's porjn interests, THERE porn interests are then fair game. This is a sort of anti-meme. Nobody wants this, so it doesnt happen.
There are a lot of these sorts of things that people know and will discuss in private but never in public.
Historically this was even more so the case. What as acceptable as maters of public discussioj versus private was even more radically "we dont publicly acknowledge such things"
Not him, but I will say, without a trace of irony, that UFOs are an antimeme. We have nearly a century of documented encounters with aerial objects that defy our understanding of areospace engineering and physics. These encounters are publicly acknowledged by the US government, and in their original research into these events, the genuinely unknown events were described as most likely being extraterrestrial in origin (Project SIGN). Another pile of documents showing that these encounters continue well into the present day dropped just a year or two ago and made a lot of news.
And the public's continued attitude, even among those who boast of their skepticism towards established narratives and willingness to engage in open-minded rationality? To summarize the most popular arguments in one sentence:
"It's all a bunch of attention-seeking hillbillies on crank hallucinating weather balloons and having schizophrenic episodes."
Quoting the actual government documents produced by very sane people about these phenomena gets you treated like you're ranting about demons from Hell crawling out from behind a painting in your bedroom and sodomizing your dog.
But everybody knows about UFOs, and many people talk about them openly. I've talked to someone who said he genuinely saw a UFO, and I don't know that many people. I've talked to plenty of others who fell on both sides of the issue. Shouldn't the fact that it is so commonly discussed disqualify it from being an antimeme?
If you want to be technical, the antimeme is "UFOs are real phenomena verified by credible organizations, who themselves admit they're probably extraterrestrial and defy known physics (meaning, by implication, that our understanding of physics is probably wrong)". This is papered over in most of the public consciousness with "UFOs are some vague phenomena that's probably fake and which science either sees as beneath its dignity about or has successfully disproven", and in a small minority with "UFOs are holy chariots carrying my fringe religion's chosen demons or angels". When most "normal" people do discuss it, it's almost always couched in defensive irony, making jokes about LGMs and with a thousand conditionals of "I'm not crazy, I don't believe in the supernatural or Bigfoot or any of that, BUT-", and even then their accounts are rationalized away, with "you genuinely encountered something beyond the realm of our scientific understanding" not even on the table.
REAL antimemes are a fictional concept- and if they weren't, they wouldn't be capable of being discussed by definition. But given the weak, real-world definition of "information that is unusually resistant to being spread", the scientific fact of UFOs definitely fits that category. Mulder was right: it's not that people CAN'T believe in UFOS, it's that they don't WANT to, because that information would force them to update their entire worldview due to the implications and knock-ons. So, they simply reject the information without even processing it.
sure. Most people have a very hard time intuitevly understanding the lack of a true mind/brain dicohotomy. Like, if someone experiences depression, other people who may haerd and accepted that someone's brain is a sate where they can expereince happiness or pleasure will keep reverting to "it's such a nice day, a walk will cheer you up."
I think for many people, the idea that the mind/being is not some thing separte from the body just doesnt "click" and can only be temporarily held on to untill they are either educated enough or have direct experience.
(was trying to respond to @Argentus but the reply went to the wrong comment for some reason).
You've really never seen an antimeme in action? I guess that has to make sense... But there is very strong evidence for them! One such example out of many that's easy to see because it's caused by an injury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia
Clearly it's possible for the brain to elaborately screen off reality in a way that's not obvious. Suppose that there's things like that, but for everyone.
> Most of my behavior for the next 15ish years could be described through the lens of "trying vainly to recreate my childhood."
There is something similar in Buddha's biography, sadly I can't find the right link. Short story is that he tried all forms of extreme asceticism (the traditional way to achieving supernatural happiness), and then he was like "actually, this doesn't make me happy at all -- the only true happiness I remember was when I was a kid", then he gave up asceticism and ate some good food (which made his fellow wannabe gurus abandon him as a loser), sat under a tree and started meditating... and became the Buddha.
Which might suggest that this antimeme is the very thing that prevents us from being enlightened.
>And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test.
I'm not sure anyone has done a direct replication, but looking at the PubMed page you linked (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/650387/), there are plenty of similar studies about self-handicapping. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15130190/ which claimed that "Following noncontingent success, high self-handicappers reported greater anxiety, more unproductive attributions and claimed more handicaps than low self-handicappers." (It seems that this study divided people into high and low self-handicappers.)
Everything is about power, except power. Power is about sex. - Hitler such an epic fail compared to Dschinghis Khan. - And pathetic me: afraid to win the jackpot, as it would leave me no excuse but to DO ... err ... not-Scott-like-stuff. Which some guys with much less dough DO. Edward seems to be right in parts, at least. We do excel in excuses. - Is the porn part any good? Elfriede Jelinek did some awesome porn (Nobel in 2004).
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.
Scott, you seem to miss the context when he addresses the reader. He doesn't just say, "This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." He says, "You're stumped by the layout? This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." The context indicates that "This book isn't for you" is a response to those who are "stumped by the layout." "You" isn't you, personally (at least not necessarily); it's the kind of reader who would only misunderstand the book, and Teach does all these things (and tells you he's doing them!) to try to get them not to read it in the first place. When you say you had to replace "you" with "a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person", I think you're close, but kind of overdoing it. The readers in question are hardly "maximally unvirtuous" (whatever that means; it sounds a bit like Caligula), they're just ordinary people who think the ordinary thoughts they were taught to think, who don't really want to be challenged, and wouldn't know what to do with this kind of challenge anyway because it's completely beyond their capabilities to seriously consider that the world might not be what they've been taught to believe it is. So when Teach says he's trying to drive readers away, I think you can take him literally. The thing is, it's not ALL readers, just the ones who are wasting their time reading a book that's beyond them (and they self-select by being put off by these tricks). The question is which type of reader you are.
You seem to be trying to look for some hidden meaning in Teach's writing when he seems, as far as I can tell from the quotes you've provided, to be laying it all out in plain view. Your response to the book reminds me of a quote I came across once, I forget who from (Mencken, maybe?) to the effect that if you want people to laugh and think you're joking, just tell them the plain truth.
Having read your review and the two you linked to, in the end I find that I don't really trust any of the three of you to tell me what this book is about. The self-styled Contrarian starts off by sneering that Teach's old blog was popular with "pseudo-intellectuals" (which we may take as an implicit claim that the Contrarian is a real intellectual, or at least able to tell the difference, which I am not sure I believe) and reviews the book after reading only about 20% of it; he also tells us that Teach's style is "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic," which is a fairly lame attempt at wit and, based on your quotes, seems to me rather exaggerated. Teach does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, but try Henry James or A.E. Waite if you want something that's "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic."
Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms.
I wonder Teach is really quite as condescending as he seems. At the very least, he apparently likes playing that part (and it surely helps to drive away the wrong kind of reader, so it counts as another tactic of that sort, along with the long footnotes, etc.), but he seems too perceptive. The best psychologists, in my experience, are good because they actually have a deep understanding of human nature and know that that understanding applies to themselves as much as to everyone else. I suppose he really could have a huge blind spot in that regard, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Anyway, I've ordered the book, so at some point in the future I'll have my own more fully-formed opinion of it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I agree with your approving comments about Teach's read of The Giving Tree. But Teach could have made those same great points in a single Scott-length post. Instead, he embeds them in a monstrous saggy monument to his own discontent, sort of the book version of Miss Havisham's wedding cake in Great Expectations.
Thank you, Essex. But I don't think I can elaborate on it. I found the book so profoundly irritating that I bailed after about 50 pages, and so am not in a position to back up my judgments with text analysis etc. When I wrote that Miss Havisham comment I had a strong experience of felt truth, but can't tell whether a little lightening bolt of validity shot through my head at that moment or, alternatively, that I'd just hit on a phrase that discharged my irritation in a very satisfying way.
Yes, it’s that, but more than that. My impression is not exactly that his only pleasure is to inflict his brand of misery on others, but more that he feels *entitled* to do that. So you’ve made me think about what constellation of traits led me to match him to Miss Havisham, & here they are. You should know, though, that all I know about this man is miscellaneous second-hand info, most of it picked up here. I think of him as nearing retirement age (because he seemed to have been around for a long time) and alcoholic (several people have mentioned that). OK, so the traits the Edward Teach in my mind shares with Miss Havisham and her wedding cake are:
old
good years are in the past
feels wronged
miserable
entitlement about own misery (thinks of it as more important, deeper, more complicated, worthy of being inflicted on others)
effort to inflict it on others (Ms H: on Estella & Pip. Teach: on his readers)
disarray,, rot and corruption (my picture of him, sort of disheveled and grubby — and also his prose and his train of thought)
But I do have a feeling that there's something else besides pattern-matching contributing to my take on him as Miss Havisham, but truly cannot put that into words, and recognize that it may just be an illusion. Was he left at the altar in some sense?
I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self.
There's a new strain of neuropsychoanalysis from the last decade that you might find interesting, haven't read it but this 3 part series of papers relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas comes highly recommended: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/
For a text that self-confesses to be obscurantist, I was nodding my head in agreement an awful lot, both in terms of Scott's interpretation of what it's trying to say, but also the direct quotes. Whether that's because I've willfully misunderstood everything and am now patting myself on the back for these "insights", because I've converged on to something truth-adjacent, or because I've converged on to some Schelling point of crackpottery, is anyone's guess.
For a while now I've been drawn into thinking that humans aren't agents. And by that I don't mean the weak notion that humans don't exactly match the mathematical formalism for agents as that statement is pretty much trivially true (due to bounded computational resources imposed by laws of physics) - this is what the idea of boundedly rational agents is for. For me it's the stronger notion that claims it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences. There are some trivial examples like observing that humans tend to claim to want money, and indeed they're likely to cash in winning lottery tickets or pick up hundred dollar bills from the ground (citation needed), but once you get into more complex behaviors, such as Scott's example of not asking people on a date despite yearning for a partner every single day, where exactly is the preference-satisficing behavior? One could argue that having a partner isn't people's true preference, that they actually prefer to be forever alone, or that being rejected hurts so much that even a perfectly rational agent would not risk it, but when people (I'm thinking about philosophers arguing for compatibilism in particular) talk about humans showing agenthood, they're explicitly giving some reality to people's preferences. On the other hand, to deny the reality of these preferences would seem like equating humans to rocks, that rocks have a preference to stay immobile because that's what we observe them doing, which I think is an even more radical view than my own.
My view is that the preferences people see themselves as having are real, but that accurate model of human behavior rarely invokes them and uses other concepts instead. These concepts are still endogenous (nobody's being puppeteered by an evil demon) but are often of the nature being talked about here. For example, I draw a juxtaposition from the story of the tree to ideas presented in HPMOR's chapter involving the troll attack: people often act out roles. The tree acts out the role of a mother, McGonagall a strict disciplinarian, and that way of modelling behavior might actually get you somewhere. Ditto for behaviors like virtue-signalling, or any of the other social games people unconsciously play that end up dictating their behavior.
Similarly, the idea that people want their freedoms curtailed speaks to me because I've also thought about that a lot. It seems to me that humans would indeed be the happiest in a state of "choicelessness" (I believe there's some Eastern philosophical concept for it, but if I've known one, I've since forgotten about it), always living in the moment because there's no other option. The extreme example of this would be monasticism, but this has to large extent been the general experience for most of human existence: you could in principle do something else than forage or work the fields, but then you'd starve so you don't actually have much choice now do you. Even in today's environment a lot of people seem to find the idea of not /having/ to go to work every morning abhorrent: what would they do with themselves? I've never drawn a connection between historical forms of choicelessness and modern forms like "domination by corporate HR departments", but now that the idea has been presented to me, it does seem to make sense.
(For the record, this does in no way excuse slavery: you can experience choicelessness without also being subjected to misery)
(Also for the record, I'm claiming no superiority here. In fact, I'm uncharacteristically incapable of acting on my claimed preferences)
I'm not an expert, though I might be able to get help from experts.
Have a story about how Gurdijeff convinced Oaspensky (his chief follower) that people are mechanical
Once upon a time, they were standing on a hill above where a battle over Crimea was about to take place. Gurdijeff had been claiming that people mechanical (when pressed, he would admit that, with effort, people could become less mechanical), and Oaspensky ddin't agree.
Gurdijeff pointed out that trains full of artificial arms and legs were coming in-- they'd be needed once the battle started, and said that if people weren't mechanical, they wouldn't be attacking each other. And Oaspenky was convinced.
I don't know if Gurdijeff got into how much people do to keep each other mechanical.
I'd add that Ouspensky only got a genuine taste of mechanicalness when he was able to see it in himself. And that took hundreds of hours of patient and very skillful 'pointing' by Gurdjieff.
This isnt that hard. Models of humans as agents absolutely rationally maximizing choice are wrong.
We are shaped by evolution. In social heirarchies, if one was a low status male, the best survivial strategy may nit have been trying to maximize sexual partners as presumably this could lower one's status furtrher or perhaps lead to explusion from the group.
Of course the psychologt of evolution doent translate to the modern wiorld, but we're still governed by those heuristics.
Asking "are we agents?"- its like the "free will" question. For practical purposes, our neural architecture forces us to assume agency and the agency of others, so there's a utility territory where that is the right map.
For other purposes, like understanding why humans do things that in modern contextxs seem against their best interests, there are other maps that are more useful.
it's all stil the territory- but for certain purposes, a political map may be more useful, whereas in other cases, a map of ocean currents may be the thing to navigate. They describe differenrt aspects of the territory for different purposes, but the seeming contradiction is illusory based in cinfusing useful categorizations as the whole of the territory.
Its like saying which map is the right one, the one with geographic features of political boundaries? they dont actuall contardict, you're looking at it wrong. ( not "you" personally. speaking in the general sense)
Is there a word for this kind of "unassailable truth" writing ("condescending" doesn't seem to cover it), where the writer basically says a) you're too stupid to understand this, go away, and b) if by some miracle you're smart enough to understand this, you'll know just how brilliant it is? It basically screams "I won't take any criticism seriously, because if you disagree you're either the kind of terrible person I'm describing or just too dumb to understand what I'm saying."
Section 2: I read a chunk of it, and I have to admit it's not entirely wrong. The feeling of helping without taking responsibility is definitely a thing. Consider charities which don't track whether they're actually helpful. I'm not even talking about detailed EA levels of tracking.
This is also an example of what annoys me about TLP, and also possibly why he has a powerful hook for some people, though perhaps this book is worse than his blog. He's got an actual insight there, but he's not very clear about what responsibility covers.
What's clear is that he's saying he's so very right and a huge number of people are so very wrong. At least he admits that there are people getting responsibility more or less right, he's just not very interested in them.
In agree there are some valid and interesting points, but he totally loses me with the "everything is abourt status" and "everything is you tricking yourself out of your actual desires because that would require you act."
It's such a simplistic one size fits all explanation for human behavior- I suppose he could just be talking to the "certain people" who arent supposed to be reading the book, but he makes it sound like he means almost everyone one.
That's just... not true. Human beings are psychlogically more complex then "one idea explains everything."
And its just so obviosuly not true that nearly everyone who is in a relationship actualy wants other people to not have access to their partner, but doesnt enjoy the relationship themselves.
There's definitely a feeling of someone who maybe had some very clever insights who is sort of sad and incredibly cynical whose mental faculties are dergrading maybe due to alcoholism.
> I suppose he could just be talking to the "certain people" who arent supposed to be reading the book, but he makes it sound like he means almost everyone one.
Actually, I think he IS talking about the people reading the book. That would explain why he spent the first 50 pages driving away all other types of readers, so he could talk directly to his real audience for this book: the group of people for whom status really is very important, even if only subconsciously, and these explanations could be very insightful for them.
Alright Scott, you're making me make a throwaway account for this. CW: frank and gross discussion of bizarre porn.
> Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.
It is not insane. I've spent way too fucking long looking at online hentai communities for this to sound insane.
It's probably true of me: at some point I realized that the thing that makes my dick most hard isn't when I'm diving into a cool-looking hentai comic. It's when I'm scrolling through the grid of covers looking through to FIND some that I might like. The search, the potential for a nice surprise, is what kicks a part of my brain into gear. The diving into it is just the follow-through. You could literally describe that as having a fetish for nhentai's search page and you wouldn't be too far off.
And among the general populace of these communities, there's an oft-running "haha only serious" meme of 2D women being better than 3D women. I don't think everybody falls into that trap, but there are people that do, and it gets really sad really quickly: https://www.reddit.com/r/waifuism/
I'd say these people would sooner admit to the thought behind Teach's quote than most porn consumers, but that's probably just me falling into the same status-raising trap that's talked about in this entire review by trying to say "at least they're honest about it".
The "porn is your fetish" thing is even more true the more "extreme" or "weird" the fetishes get, particularly in hentai communities. You get people that fetishize shit that's illegal or immoral, sure, but then there are people that fetishize shit that isn't physically possible. You can't have that in the real world. Porn is literally the only outlet.
There are things like roleplay. And in any case that does not make porn your fetish, any more so than being a fantasy fan actually makes you a fan of the mental process of converting symbols into language.
Yes, agree wholeheartedly. “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish” is an excellent example of what's wrong with Teach-think. He wants you to feel intellectually one-upped by this idea. He wants you to think he's seen right through your simple conception of porn as a depiction of things that some but not all find hot --as though he's sort of broken on through to the other side intellectually, and shown you the *real* structure of things as regards porn. But he hasn't. He's just sort of arbitrarily arranged some words and produced a sentence expressing an idea that is novel but not valid. He's like someone taking a glove and turning it partially inside out and claiming to have invented a remarkable new form of outerwear. Problem is, it does not fit the human hand.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Porn is a depiction of arousing actions. But I believe what he means when he says porn is your fetish is that a fetish is some (presumably unusual) action which you find arousing. However, action =/= representation of action. If you are aroused by porn, the porn must be arousing for you, however, if you claim that you have a sexual fetish which porn can fulfill, the only thing porn can do is be porn, which suggests that the porn is your fetish.
To me it seems like you sort of took the glove that Teach had turned partially inside-out, tied it in a knot, then said, "see, that's how it works." But really what I mean by that is that I just don't understand your argument. It's not that I disagree, it's that I just don't understand what you're saying.
A fetish is an act or an object that most people don’t find sexually arousing, but that a few people do, right? So how can porn be a fetish? It is neither an act nor an object, and many many people find it sexually arousing.
I think I get the phenom you're talking about, but I don't think "porn is your fetish" is the best way to capture it. It seems like what gets your dick hard is shifting into anything-goes mode: I'm gonna scroll until I find the hottest possible thing and I give myself permission to find absolutely *anything* hot.
A fetish is a *thing* -- an act, a look, a kind of person -- that turns you on. In the situation you're describing, the essence of your turn-on is the "anything goes" mindset you allow yourself to have. The hentai search page isn't the *thing* that turns you on, it's just an ideal setting for your anything goes mindset to play.
yeah... no. Without going into specifics, i have a real life kink that i also look at pron of. I dont see how the porn is my fetish is I also like this thing in real life.
Can't resist saying that "Zen story" is fucking horrible. It isn't a passable Zen story at all because most of the real ones from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones" are tremendously great stories that send chills down your spine, if nothing else.
No way it gave you a better understanding of Zen, rather it gave you a defense against pursuing a real grasping of Zen. Zen is not "understandable". It is, however, graspable. In a similar way that music or poetry is.
That said, keep writing more posts like this. Your book reviews are great. I think some who disliked this post can't separate the review from the book. The book sounds horrible, but I appreciate the post.
We need more negative book reviews. The writers are becoming soft.
That zen koan is perfect for some people, because it tells them to stop reaching for an understanding that will not come, searching for a form of meaning that is not there.
I can only point to the actual Zen Stories. Maybe I don't understand them-- I certainly can't explain them without destroying them -- but they send a chill down my spine and I feel a flash of what they mean, or I feel like I do.
Words like "stop reaching for a form of meaning that is not there" is an attempt to rationalize Zen, but it destroys Zen in the process. It's like reducing music to an explanation.
Not that it isn't correct to say "is not there" but saying "that's not it" doesn't tell you what it is at all. There *is* an it to Zen. It is inexplicable but not incomprehensible. Like music.
but not a necessary part of experiencing music. I made a purposeful decisiion not to "learn" music, because it's impact on me was so powerful, and I didnt want to risk intellectualizing it in a way that might make me perceive it differently and lose some of that effect.
That's maybe comparable to zen. Or perhaps like how one might enjoy stage illusions but not really want to know how an effect is done and it would ruin the "fun"
Of course you can give an explanation of of music itself, as a pattern of sounds -- you can talk about keys, chords, rhythm, sound waves etc. But I think what Jack means is that you can't give an explanation of the experience of being moved by music. You can't explain or demonstrate to someone that they should weep when you hear this piece, dance with mad elation to this other one.
It's explicitly telling you to -stop- rationalizing Zen, that that entire framework and approach cannot possibly work, and you take it as a form of rationalization?
Here's the problem with this. One has to already assume zen has some inherent value.
If I am someone who is agnostic as to the benefits of zen, and I try to ask what the benefit would be in doing the work, and someone tells me they cant explain it to me.. well, how would I know if the work was actually worth doing?
I think for many people outsidr of buddhisms, there is a skepticism that there actually is such a thing as enlightenment, and it sjust people who believe enlightenment is a thing in the same sense christians beieve heaven is a thing, and the "i cant explain it" thing is just a tautological defense for practices that are faith based.
I dont believe this, based on some of my own experiences and neuroscience related to this- but I dont think zen or any other system is a unique sacred path to certain states.
I think the explnation Scott give is pretty close. There are things in buddhiskm and other similar practices that will help acheive those states, but the specific dogmas dont really matter.
This explains a mjor problem of buddhism for me- that various teachers claim to be englightend or say they reperesent the correct understanding whereas everyone else is getting it wrong.
Or how there literal succession wars inside chinese budhist monasteries.
Fighting and killing other buddhists so that your guru can be the top guy instead of theres seems pretty antithetical to the spirit of buddhism.
Or How in Tibet, the monks did in fact live in relative opulence at the expense of the very poor peasants. When there was a peasant rebelliong to stop the heavy taxation from the capital. the capital forces, supported by the monks, used violent campaigns inculding torture of dissidents to acheive their aims.
Those things dont really jive with the whole enlightment thing.
Again my hunch is that yogic prsacties can make these states accessivle, but they arent necessarily permemannet or make one immune to all the other things like lust for power and status.
the site was from a "broken koans" website. Scott took a very literal one but they are "joke" koans. They arent intended as actual koans, but parodies of the style of koans.
example-"Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy would raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away."
What I don't understand about this "desire for desire" idea is I spent all of middle-school and high-school with a hard-on looking around at the girls in my classroom, imagining the terrible, beautiful things I wanted to do with them. As a Gen-X-er, talking to others in my generation, that's how we all experienced it. You'd spend all day in class imagining fucking the girl who sat in front of you in English class, then go home and jack off thinking about her the moment you got home. You couldn't wait to get home to jack off. It was torture.
But was everyone in my generation experiencing some memetic desire, something different from today because we consumed different porn? I grew up when porn meant Penthouse and Hustler magazines. You spent a lot of time looking at a picture of a hairy pussy. Did that create the desire I felt for my female classmates? It seems implausible, yet I don't know how to rule it out.
If that's the case, then it seems like magazine porn was the good porn, because it was just pictures of tits and cunts and made you want to experience them in the flesh. It wasn't a substitution, maybe it was a catalyst.
It strikes me as crazy that most young men haven't always spent most of their time fantasizing about exploring women's pussies. After all, aren't we here because that's what every generation before us did? It seems nutty to think porn is a driver of desire as opposed to a pacifier of it.
But maybe internet porn is different? Perhaps, but any "This time it's different" claim needs to make a strong, clear case.
That'd be more applicable to older, 25+ men who suddenly find they can think clearly again once they're not a walking bag of hormones, and sex is pretty neat, but orienting your entire life around pursuing it seems weird. That creates some serious dissonance between you and everything you see in the surrounding society, and there is no straightforward non-disgusting way to pursue status and social approval anymore because fuck virtue and being useful there's just consumption and instagram.
So you want to be that tinder gigachad anyway because apparently that'll make you happy, and if that's not happening organically then something's wrong with you.
Any resemblance to real-life real dogs is purely coincidental, and I think a good 60-70% of the publicly broadcasted hypersexuality is performative, perhaps fooling even the performer.
I dont think the desire in and of itself is "socially consturcted" but the standards of what one is attracted to definitely are.
"Flappers" of the twenties who were the sex icons of the day look nothing like the early 90s "tranny" look of pamela anderson.
There have been studies on this sort of thing.
Male libido may actually be lower on average now then it was due to synthetic endocrine disruptors, but I dont doubt WHAT turns one on is socially relative. When we see tribal people, we generally dont perceive the naked women to be attractive in the same way as women form on our own cultures.
Things like that show that the specifics of what is attractice are in fact culturally relative, although the basic desire it, and there are things that tend to be universal like relative facial symmetry.
This is very different from what Teach is saying though.
On a bit of a side note I do think proliferation of certain types of porn can be harmful.
For reasons that no one is super clear on, "incest" porn has absolutely exploded over the past few years, one is exposed to it even if one isnt looking for it.
This could lead to people who otherwise wouldnt have developing an interest in incest, which could obviously have very negative social consequences.
Is it possible that much of this can be nested in the framework of competing desires? For example, the lady with the submissive fetish could be considered as finding a compromise between her desire to have sex and her desire to be a good moral person; it just happens that her understanding of ‘good moral person’ does not include asking for sex, hence the fantasy.
Likewise, people that don’t act on their desires are simply balancing their desire for 'safety' with their desire for other things that require action with non-zero risk.
I think that you are right about competing desires, but it does not quite resolve the puzzle. Humans are very good at defense mechanisms, so the lady could probably convince herself that sexual desire is compatible with being a good moral person. But would the sex still be as pleasurable? Sexual submission strikes me as being way more about getting permission to enjoy the sex than about permission to merely have sex. Folks with fetishes probably just don't get the same thrill from vanilla sex.
Put another way, it would be very easy to convince myself that a diet of grilled chicken breast and steamed broccoli is the healthiest and, therefore, best way to live. I might even be able to force myself to stick to such a diet. But it would be much more difficult for me to convince myself that I really enjoy eating chicken and broccoli more than bacon and chocolate cake. It's probably impossible. The best I could do is to develop some sort of weird relationship with unhealthy foods where I fetishize the act of denying them to myself.
So maybe for people with submission fantasies, they feel that the best way to enjoy consensual sex is to deny themselves the consent, or at least to immerse themselves in an experience that simulates the denial of consent.
"Don't get the same thrill" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your theory. In my experience, which is both personal and based on the behavior of my friends, there are multiple forms of fetish-havers. There are those who need fetishistic sex to the point where they can't get aroused without the trappings of it; there are those who prefer fetishistic sex to "vanilla"; and there are those who are, point in fact, fine with either and don't NEED to have fetishistic sex, but do so because it spices things up. To use your metaphor: there are people who have some kind of eating disorder that makes them binge on chocolate, there are people who are sweet-tooths who prefer chocolate over a salad, and there are people who enjoy chocolate, but, without some gargantuan effort of the will, reserve it as an occasional treat instead of a major element of their diet.
Funny enough, I had this exact set of thoughts after posting my comment. As you say, there are fetish situations where the person needs the fetish just to get off and situations where the person merely finds the fetish more pleasurable. Is this a difference of degree or is it a categorical difference? I don't know. I don't claim to have any special insight.
What I was trying to speak to is the question of why people develop kinks to regulate their pleasure instead of just giving themselves permission to like what they like. I think the answer is that we simply cannot directly manipulate what we find pleasurable. Perhaps kinks are the mind using desire to try to solve an optimization problem between pleasure and pain, attraction and disgust.
It's like the wires transmitting the experiences of pleasure, disgust, cruelty, domination, humiliation, adoration -- like they're really close together, and for many people some wires have little areas where there's no insulation, and if the wire next to it has a gap in a nearby spot the electrical charge just crosses over.
My guess: Sex is very pleasurable, but it's also simple and predictable. If it didn't inherently feel good, it would be boring as hell. So what "kinks" do is make it interesting in ways that appeal to parts of your brain that care about things other than friction on genitals.
‘the unmediated experience of the world’ quoted in that Zen section…… Scott and everyone else, what is your response to this possibility of a way of experiencing life?
I've experienced it a couple of times- once through meditation, and once spontaneously. I cannot describe what it feels like beyond the cliche metaphor of "Seeing the world for the first time" (except even that's not really accurate), so I know it's really possible. If you want me to explain some rationalist benefit to it: there is none, it's nothing but a stupid trick, I discourage in the strongest terms any rationalists from trying to seek this state unless they're willing to commit to the framework around it, leave it to us stupid, gullible, demented spiritualists who don't think you need reams of equations to be a good person.
I also think it's possible. I don't think it should be done without the spiritual framework, and in fact will cause grave spiritual and psychological harm without the framework- I am talking about a significant risk of someone actually having a psychotic breakdown here. To that end, in my day-to-day life, if someone who's an avowed materialist asks me about such things, I will first lie and say that such a state is impossible to actually attain and is just a metaphor for sorting out your mental baggage. If they continue to press, I'll claim that such a state DOES exist but that it has no practical value and is just a weird mental trick that takes far too much time to actually learn. If they continue to press, I will tell them what I am telling you, and then say "Begin by reading the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra. Then, read the Golden Lotus Sutra. If neither of these contain the truth to you, then you should just smoke cannabis instead."
So, this Teach says that just about everybody is sick. But does he have anything to say about whether there's a cure? Is becoming an obscurantist-psychoanalysis-conscious misanthrope good enough? Or it's good enough merely to became aware that everything is horrible and to derive pseudo-high-status from this understanding? Then I guess I'm there already, if having taken a somewhat different path.
As for porn, I always though that its main purpose (for males) was ersatz variety, which makes evo-psych sense. The same story/comic/video on repeated exposure do still arouse me, but less and less with each instance.
"Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese!"
I can see why people [can't remember who or where, off the top of my head] would hypothesize The Last Psychiatrist is C-rt-s Y-rv-n... except this is way worse than UR ever was.
"a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about [...] playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me"
TIL Scott is mad jealous (though Teach might instead claim envious) of his little brother ;)
I remember, but can't find, a blog post on TLP is as an example of gaslighting. His writing is good at vaguely evoking bad feelings about yourself while never being concrete enough for you to critically evaluate.
His notion of 'narcissism' did seem to frame common features of the human experience as unusual pathology in 'you'.
I have to think if "Teach" read this essay he would be tickled, because (1) you seem frustrated by being not entirely sure you weren't just the victim of a truly moby prank, and yet (2) your writing style distinctly changed and it seems in a few places like your usual train of thought was derailed a bit and went off in a few novel directions.
Which means it *worked* and was well worth the $500. It does seem weirdly Zen, which is strange because I don't like Zen -- at least I think I don't -- but I find this highly amusing. Maybe actual Zen just suffers in translation and I need to learn Chinese.
What if the main theme in the book is some kind of intellectual cuckoldry analogue? "I, the author, have read all these hot sexy books, and you, pathetic reader with your limp and tiny below average IQ, has probably tried to read some of them, but did not achieve the understanding to satisfy the texts properly. Indeed, you'll never be able to do so, you weak-minded wage-slave! Let me proceed by explaining why your interpretation (and anyone else, in case you think this somehow doesn't apply to you) is WRONG while I insult and otherwise belittle you, you imbecile." This does appear to have decent anti-memetical potential, in the sense that I believe this is a very novel and rare kind of fetish.
Regarding "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.", I think I agree, if we allow that the two usages of fetish have a different meaning here. The first meaning is the now most common meaning of "paraphilia", while the second is sacred/magical idol, totem or focus. At the least, it seems there is some property of porn that is more than the titillating information it contains, why else would people commission pornographic artwork that depicts a (highly unique) scene entirely designed by the commissioner? Why would they do more of the same, to the point of obsession? Maybe it's a simple trick for the senses, who are probably evolved to assume purely mental constructs are of limited use in procreation. Similar to a prayer bead for meditation, perhaps.
Sounds like this is well and truly intertwined with our old friend, The Transgender Lobster, and I mean that in a good way for both of them.
Incidentally, I go to an ex-marine therapist who has never heard of either of them, and doesn't know quite what an odd duck he is, but does tell me it's best to [metaphorically] clean my room and [literally] sit up straight.
Biblical angels are a poor example of an anitmeme.
Most people who read the relevant parts of the bible can picture one. They might not get the one the author intended, but they'll picture something. They show up in various pieces of popular media like Kill Six Billion Demons or Bayonetta, and while they're not exactly as depicted in the bible fantasy fans have no trouble recognising the concept of Bible-style angels.
Basically, biblical angels are a regular meme outcompeted by a much stronger meme, not an antimeme.
This post was an excellent reminder to me that every writing style has a different intended audience, as well as some kind of payoff for the author based on their original intention.
I would be curious to hear from more people who are excited to read the book after reading this review. What is attractive to you about it? What's the expected value here? I'm experiencing such a strong negative reaction to the snippets that I don't think I can be at all objective and would like any experiential counter evidence you were maybe hesitating to share in the comments (which I'm also reading).
My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here. Choosing to put time into a work that forces me to take the risk that it might be a narcissistic mind game, or just generally a flop, isn't really high on my own priority list.
I'm also curious to consider the argument that it promotes critical thinking further, but my gut response isn't so much that it promotes it, more that it limits your audience to people who have a predisposition to enjoy intellectual masturbation of some kind. You're more likely to enjoy or get something out of a deliberately complex work if you're predisposed to enjoying challenge, study, etc. If anyone can point me directly to extra studies or writing on the subject of priming audiences to manipulate (assess, analyze, debate, etc.) input I'd be grateful. Search engines will get me there eventually.
I'm not attributing any value judgment to this confrontational author stance by the way. I think it's a valid choice, if made with a particular audience in mind - if it's an unintended side effect, then another editor experienced in your chosen target audience could be helpful. This audience can also be the author, who has their own relationship with the work, and by extension with their imagined audience. The adversorial tone of the writing is so pronounced that it's a great signal to the reader. In that sense, I'd consider the writing extremely efficient: the author immediately defines the audience as readers who are willing to submit themselves to the writing, and who are therefore either open to the message or stubborn enough to stay until the very end without any guarantee they'll have a workable way to process the information (see Scott's experience).
It seems there's a conscious framing of the author-reader relationship that lies in the hands of the author, and that leaves me feeling uneasy. There's a lot of trust involved in this process, and I'm personally not open to someone who outright challenges that trust and frames it as a power dynamic, where they are automatically on top. But the author isn't either, so win-win?
Because of this interpretation, reading the book would be tantamount to me consenting to a relationship with someone who seeks only to challenge me, compare me to them, and measure my value entirely against their own sense of self worth (not positive in my book). The latter is already established in the author's mind, and because they are removed from the process, unless I email them or they read my comments somewhere, etc. It's a dynamic that ironically reminds me of red flags in BDSM relationships: the person submitting has no option for aftercare, no avenue to have a discussion about consent on equal grounds. You take it or leave it, without any knowledge up front of what effect the experience will have on you. Perhaps this mindset is exactly what the author intends to challenge. But if you hold a particular disdain for a way of thinking/being/perceiving, and you consciously use tools that are NOT efficient in engaging the audience you'd like to affect, then what's your goal? Intellectual/experiential segregation?
Anyway this is a very emotional rather than evidence driven reaction to a review of a book I don't intend to read. But it's amusing to me that this kind of loose analysis is exactly what the excerpts trigerred in me, while a quick look at TLP's blog seems to indicate they'd find this kind of thinking lazy or that I'm someone who goes to a therapist for the type of psychoanalysis that is preventing any growth/change.
As someone who is interested in reading the book after reading this review, I think of it as a sort of drug—Teach’s writing style gives me a continual feeling of revelation or near-revelation, and even if I know in the back of my mind it’s all nonsense or useless, it still *feels* like I’ve gained profound insights into the world, which is a sort of “high” to me.
That definitely sounds like a great experience! Much more attractive than my gut reaction, haha.
I'm curious to hear more thoughts on how the feeling of insight registers even if in the back of your mind it's "nonsense"? I'm interpreting that as a contradiction and struggling to understand why you'd want to feel something that isn't "real" (real here meaning a definition you apply to the word profound, for example).
As in, somewhere you have a measure that helps you equate insight=profound, which results in a good feeling. So there's something about Teach's work that allows you to get the same reaction from insight=nonsense as insight=profound. That sounds dangerous to me and as if it might open you up to be receptive to nonsense, where you'd otherwise be more critical of it? Is it easy for you to differentiate between the nonsense and profound scenarios even with the good feeling present?
Thanks for indulging me if you care to extrapolate :)
To answer both you and Emma, I’d think of it in a similar manner to that “aha!” moment you sometimes get while reading well-written fiction during a satisfying plot twist (Brandon Sanderson is great at that, and Scott Alexander pulls it off multiple times in Unsong as well). The twist takes place in a totally fabricated world of the author’s imagining, but it still feels great to have that sense of the plot falling into place, of something that once didn’t make sense suddenly becoming clear. There’s a similar feeling obtained when solving a good puzzle/riddle/game, of course. The difference here is that the fictional world is one very closely resembling our own, with the slight difference that human beings act for different (and vastly simplified) reasons than they actually do, and that history and literature have been deformed a bit to fit the author’s “narrative”.
At the same time, I probably am more susceptible to infohazards and misinformation than the average person here, considering that I’m finding myself drawn “by logical necessity” towards some philosophies which I’m pretty sure are very dangerous, and which I haven’t seen discussed seriously within rationalist groups. Feel free to email me at yitzilitt (in the great land of gmail.com) if you want to discuss this particular aspect further, as I could honestly use someone to talk to about some of those thoughts (and don’t want to spread potential infohazards in a public forum).
How are you able to both feel that "I know in the back of my mind it’s all nonsense or useless" and "it still *feels* like I’ve gained profound insights into the world,". I find that totally perplexing!
I started reading the book after finishing the review. I have fond, but very vague memories of TLP's blog, which I'm sure played a part in my enthusiasm. I'm a little way into the book now and am finding it quite enjoyable.
I find Teach's acerbic style down-right hilarious at times, and I'm frequenting stopping and thinking about the ideas he's proposing. He has insights that ring true that I haven't come across elsewhere (thought that likely says more about me than him).
I find it a lot like reading Nietzsche, where one minute I'm laughing at the way he's flaying the Stoics (who I'm quite fond of) and the next minute wondering if all philosophy really does recast the world in its own image.
> My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here.
I may be misinterpreting you here, but personally I don't seek "value" when reading philosophy. For me it's about the experience of the reading, and any subsequent thoughts it might inspire. It feels good to have an idea up-end me momentarily, while I scramble to either integrate into my conception of the world or reject it.
Even if I think the idea is wrong, the process of working out why is worthwhile. As an example. I despise anitnatalism on a visceral level, but articulating to myself why (which took me quite a while to puzzle through) really clarified my thinking on a bunch of tangentially related areas.
For what it's worth, I don't think the book is particularly complex or obscurantist (at least not so far), nor do I get the feeling that Teach is being overly condescending. It's long and full of digressions, but some of those digressions are my favorite parts to date.
"So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves? I don’t really have an answer for this."
I do! Teach clearly hates himself, and is looking to share that pain and self-loathing with others.
It seems to be the polar opposite of *Sadly, Porn* in terms of (anti-)misanthropy. The internal conflicts of the characters are laid bare. Desire is of course addressed. What at first looks like superficial shallowness reveals exponential depths. I'm still reeling from the experience. As weird as it might sound, this feels to be the best piece of fiction that I have ever experienced. (And I'm not a teenager reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. Although I'm ashamed to admit that my fictional reading is probably lacking... *eyes the still unopened War and Peace on the bedside table*)
Oh, and it of course has plenty of hot sex, though YMMV in terms of specific kinks.
The Erogamer is indeed a brilliant piece of fiction that's impossible to discuss without admitting you read online erotica, but I'm not sure how it's related to this, except that I could see myself struggling to understand both of them on a deeper level for hours. Or I could, if I wasn't repelled by the way this book seems to hate me and everything I stand for.
This sort of reminds me how I defected from academic lit crit after tearing a Lyotard book in twain in the midst of reading it. I remember thinking -- enough is enough, I don't need this bullshit.
At the same time, some of the quotes (from Sadly, Porn; not that Lyotard book) were intriguing, if not exactly enjoyable. I haven't read anything lit crit adjacent for a while, I'm sort of curious how I'd react as a more mature person, and this sounds like a fun book to try on. If only to see whether my book-tearing skills are still sharp.
The story I'm using to wall off the part of myself with lit crit inclinations (so that I can productively focus on other things instead of agonizing over whether it was the right decision) runs something like this: French people like intellectual games. Sophisticated conversation, sleight of hand essays, it's all part of the culture. It's fashionable, it's social currency, it's a way of displaying that you are à la hauteur.
But it's still mainly a game. Think La Septième Fonction du langage -- you can imagine how reading that felt cathartic to me. This means you don't necessarily say things you believe to be true, but rather things that maximize your score, or at least compromise in that direction. Because unlike e.g. in the rationalist community (which is -- hopefully -- playing a different kind of game), just being right won't get you (as m)any points.
The trouble starts when all this theory is taken up by Anglo-Saxon literary departments, which put a Protestant, literal-minded twist on it, and with their unimpeachable work ethic, build an entire industry predicated upon the belief that all of this French intellectual frolicking was meant in earnest.
Forgive me if I sound facetious, I realize it's a caricature, as sweeping narratives tend to be. My own mindset is much closer to what I labeled Anglo-Saxon in the previous paragraph -- which is partly why I tore that Lyotard book in half. I'd finally had enough of trying to understand this stuff for real, wasting precious brain cycles on it. I'm still interested in how language works, I just switched to linguistics, where I found questions and approaches which are a better fit for me -- typically less frustrating, occasionally truly enlightening.
But the point is -- this story I'm telling myself means I've largely written off learning more about these French intellectuals at the source of it, Lacan included. And while it's helpful in practice (I'm free to think about other matters), it's also somewhat unsatisfactory, for someone who generally gets a kick out of understanding things. So if you ever dig deeper into Lacan, I'm genuinely curious to hear what you find there!
Also, looking forward to highlights from comments. If anyone has any useful Lacan resources, I hope they'll turn up!
Thats literally why the aliens are coming to destroy us in Watts' "Blightsight", that all of consciousness is just pointless baroque bit twiddling who's only function is to waste compute cycles of anything listening to it. Talking to a sophont being is literally a infohazard DOS attack.
Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! I STRONGLY suggest you seek out interminable, inscrutable, possibly-nonsensical stream-of-consciousness miasma manifestos, read them carefully, and then post interpretations.
We may want to page Robert Wright, whose "Why Buddhism Is True" has obviously absolutely nothing to do with anything mentioned here.
I love (in a terrified sort of way) the insight that where status-seeking behavior is concerned, all that matters is the chemical response in the brain. Your anonymous philanthropic donation (or my slightly pseudonymous comment) is still a bid for status because all it has to do is please the audience in our minds. I mean ... now Twitter makes sense. This is the great hack of our technological era. "likes" turn out to be an in-kind substitute for resources and access to mates. This is way better than "42". Now I can enjoy the apocalypse.
I remember the Last Psychiatrist from Metafilter days. You take a very charitable view of him. Allow me to present a much less charitable view:
1. ‘Teach’ is a narcissist. Not in the bullshit cultural critique redefinition he constantly sort-of-half-gives-half-alludes-to but the more boring dark triad kind. He wants to feel intellectually powerful, dominant, the centre of attention. He wants people to see him as the smartest guy in any room. He wants your attention. It makes him feel good.
2. Everything he writes is a manipulative strategy designed to garner him this narcissistic supply. This explains everything about his prose style and ‘insights’. He makes sweeping Barnum statements that enough of his readers will agree with that some come away seeing him as insightful. He makes cultural references*, so his readers see him as well-read and intelligent. He associates himself with the high-status utopia of classical Athens. He actually is intelligent, at least enough to successfully pull off this strategy (unlike a less intelligent narcissist).
3. His writing has an unintended by-product: intelligent people who read it come up with intelligent interpretations, some of which have real value.
4. This is because his writing exploits the deep human desire to make sense of things. It does this in the same way as a cold-reading psychic - gaps, allusions, ambiguities, provocations. His writing certainly reveals a keen awareness of when people assume other people know what they are talking about.
5. He also uses highly impactful concepts (‘you know, like rape’, references to sex/death/parenthood). This serves to (a) get attention and (b) throw his readers emotionally off balance, so they are less likely to realise they are being played.
6. He may or may not realise he is doing this. He may think his pathological search for narcissistic supply is actually real reflection and insight. Nothing of his I have ever read betrays any real self-reflection, but not many people openly do that in writing and self-reflection =/= self-awareness.
7. The psychology he is describing is, fundamentally, his own: in playing his game he can only build his model of the other players out of the material to hand. This rule applies to him the same as it does to everyone.
8. Why do it anonymously? Because he suspects, probably correctly, that the sorts of things he knows will get him the results he wants will have bad consequences for him if he does them in real life, including possibly colleagues realising that he is a narcissist who should probably be kept away from vulnerable people. But online has the advantage of intimacy, and he doesn’t want political or physical power and attention, he wants interpersonal status and admiration.
Also, if you are using “800-page novels about English professors who have affairs and then feel guilty about it” as your definition of “Classical Literature” then it is hardly surprising that it baffles you that people like it. Tolstoy is “Classical Literature” and an awful lot happens in the 1200+ pages of War and Peace. So much so that it isn’t hard at all to see why people like it. The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”. I don’t much like that kind of book myself, but placed in historical context it again isn’t very hard to see why people read those kind of books, and unsurprisingly some of the ‘why’ is because they were frank about sexual experiences in an unprecedented or interesting way.
Some possibly presumptuous advice: if your map has a hole in it, don't waste time theorising about what *must* be over there or asking others what they think about it and trying to infer the hole's contents from their observations (they may be as ignorant as you or tell you lies). Don't put off action. Just go there any look for yourself.
Also, I’m more interested to know what you make of Lacan than I am in Lacan.
* TLA/‘Teach’’s cultural references are flashy bunk: for example the statement “This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves” is simplistic tosh. Even just for Athens, it doesn’t map on to any of the major classical thinkers, any account of Athenian life as we can reconstruct it (given the turbulent history of Athens) and that was just one city-state. He’s making Barnum statements trading on people’s vague awareness of the classics and a few Great Books, and constructing a fantasised pre-historic Athens corrupted by ‘Sophists’. This is not real expertise. Go and look at the things themselves - they are much more interesting to an intelligent person than anything a right-wing populariser or a narcissist with fascist sensibilities has pre-chewed for you.
Thank you for expressing a critique of TLP here- I'm a bit too ticked off by his writing for personal reasons to articulate my own feelings about him with this level of precision, so I'm glad SOMEONE is.
Perhaps this is the insight that Scott’s cult-leader friend has reached from the book—a reliable method to create Barnum statements which even very intelligent and self-aware people can fall for.
"The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”."
Philip Roth is the poster boy for this, and the first name brought to mind by Scott's description. DeLillo. Occasionally Bellow. The theme is... not uncommon in the post-war American novel. I think the jibe lands, but it could easily be recast to refer to any other kind of literature with meta-aesthetic appeal, where you might be bored by the subject but excited by the language and method.
Anyway, Teach extracting some narcissistic supply or ego feathering for himself just seems transactionally fair if the insight porn (or koan-esque rumination porn) he provides is otherwise worthwhile.
The whole "Dragon Tattoo" series is about a newspaper editor instead of an english professor, with a girl who walked right out of the Matrix. Completely by coincidence, the author is a newspaper editor...
Well done! The Athen quotes gave him away: "it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions" - pardon? No, no "fact" at all. If "lines", then both are a very, very crooked and interwoven with other "lines". The rest of "Athen": his fantasy-world. 3.: Yes, his writing does shake one's thinking up. Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” Actually, that sounds like a much better comment, than anything I could do. Will post it as a stand-alone. ;) https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
"But I agree with 3. -his writing does shake one's thinking up."
For me, it just makes me shrug at the absurdity of what is being said, without prompting me in the least to look for interpretations that would eventually make sense of the nonsense. There are so many great writers who are able to express complex ideas so clearly, Scott being an excellent example, that I don't see the point of reading texts that may be great but are much more likely to be nonsense.
" But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
What a sad quote. Why on earth should life-changing books be similar to grief or suicide? New ideas are often pure joy!
> Why on earth should life-changing books be similar to grief or suicide?
Presumably because you're no longer the same person afterwards; your previous, more innocent self is dead. Melodramatic, but some people are into that kind of thing.
Thank you very much! The passages in the book quoted by Scott do sound like the ravings of a narcissist pretending to have genius ideas. And while they are quite fun to read, in moderate doses - I'm surprised anyone is able or willing to read the entire book - I'm not sure if it has any value other than entertainment, or indeed a kind of I Ching into which anyone can project their interpretations.
As far as classic literature is concerned, the absurdly long footnotes are strongly reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, whose story is told entirely in huge footnotes, written by a madman who makes a completely nonsensical (but wonderful!) interpretation of the main text. A great book!
I'm reminded of Karen Horney's ideas about impossible standards. As I recall, she was writing about setting impossible standards for oneself rather than about setting impossible standards for other people.
In any case, she wrote about how children who've been neglected, abused, or pushed faster than they actually develop will decide that just being a human being isn't good enough, and set impossible standards for themselves.
In this case, the impossible standard is being authentic enough to satisfy TLP.
Quite simply, I think you're wrong. At this point if I have a complaint about the book, it's that it is rather repetitive of the same thematic point, which is also advice, and the advice is fairly good. You've heard the advice, a thousand times before; it's still good advice, because somehow almost nobody ever actually hears it.
Condensing the basic point down to a simple statement which has been robbed of all value: "You" don't make choices, you run on autopilot, you leave choices for other people to make. Mostly it frames this in terms of sex, and how society thinks about sex, possibly because questions of agency in and around sex tend to be the areas people have the strongest opinions.
This takes the form, largely, of spending large parts of your life waiting for an excuse to act. Suppose you have trouble getting things done at work; you get put on medications. You start working. The medications might help, but the more important part is that it isn't you who chose to start working harder, it was the doctor who prescribed the medications.
Or - you haven't had sex in a while. Someone invites you to a party, you attend and drink copious amounts of alcohol somebody else provides, and have sex. "You" didn't choose to have sex; you safely avoided making any choices at all. Why are you reading this, instead of acting? Because reading this is a valid form of not making a choice; it's part of the autopilot.
Notice the passive voice, the absence of a goal or desire in the above; this is, Teach argues, the root cause of the absence of action, which is an absence of desire. In the second example, we might think of the person as a woman - she drinks because it's socially unacceptable to desire sex, but it's socially acceptable for her to have sex while drunk. She is trying to avoid agency. But to gender the problem is to misidentify it: Everybody is trying to avoid agency.
Something something repression, desire transforms into envy, and everybody is low-key angry that anybody else gets to exercise agency, gets to desire things, gets to be happy and fulfilled. This part is ... odd. It's correctly describing something, but in a strange uncanny valley kind of way. The ledger version is better.
The gist of it is broadly correct; it's also not a new philosophy, once you get what it is gesturing at. Moloch keeps eating it.
I really don't get it. Yes, it's trivially true that people sometimes avoid action and don't always admit their desire, even if it's a gross oversimplification to insist that this is the primary cause of everyone's actions.
It seems to me that this book is a kind of Jordan Peterson thing with a different wrapper: charismatically delivering an exaggerated and obvious message, with relative clarity in the case of Peterson and wrapped in manic rants for Teach. This could be very useful for confused youth, but more generally, it does not seem to me to be interesting.
It ultimately depends on what you find interesting; I find the style itself interesting. But also, any simple explanation of what the book is actually about will reduce down to something that sounds trivially true; oh, yeah, duh. Atlas Shrugged takes on the same basic problem; it's also insanely long, and has a not-at-all-accidental tendency to be misunderstood to be about how rich people are better than everybody else and we should just let them do what they want, which is almost exactly the opposite of the point of the book, in much the way that the Soviet Union is almost exactly the opposite of the point of communism. The trivial truth it is talking about can be found in Ayn Rand's work; Marx's work; Nietzsche's work. The author argues it can be found in the bible, as well; I'm not well placed to evaluate that claim.
At least one of the other reviews main comment is how it convinces you of something without having any factual basis; they see this as a problem. However, I'm somewhat more familiar with the basic kind of style here, and - this is entirely accurate, and also entirely missing the point. There's a certain kind of person who won't ever get the point; okay, it's not based on facts, it's not real. What kind of argument doesn't depend on the things it is saying being actually factually true?
An argument that isn't actually about the things it is saying, because what it is saying isn't about the literal things being discussed, it's about how the things being discussed would be understood in our shared cultural context. It's about how you react to them, how you imagine other people reacting to them.
SMBC has a comic in which the author responds to something like visceral horror to an argument the author of the comic encountered: A speaker, upon discovering that the factual basis of their argument is false, instead shifts to the argument that "It says something that I could believe that this false thing is true." To the author of SMBC, this argument is insane; what the fuck even is that?
If you understand what the actual argument is behind "It says something that I could believe that this false thing is true", if you understand what it means to say, about a false thing, that it is the sort of thing which could be true - then you'll find the book easy reading. If you can't, it will come across as impenetrable and insane, alternate between finding yourself convinced of something, and then realizing that you weren't convinced based on any actual facts or arguments.
That's not to say, if you understand it, that you will agree with it. Personally I find it to be slightly off; consistently almost hitting its mark, but missing a tiny bit of understanding. Like the cuckold porn - the husband needed to be awake for the sex scene, for the same reason, if the husband isn't there, the wife has to call him during the sex. That's not a small detail, it undercuts both the fantasy, and the point that the author is trying to make. Hell, it changes the genre of the porn into something else. The point still works, but it's a significantly weaker version of the point. (The husband must be awake, for the point to really work, in order to not act.)
"It ultimately depends on what you find interesting; I find the style itself interesting."
Indeed! I think both E Teach and A rand deliver questionable messages in a relatively unreadable style. For my taste, Teach's message is somewhat true but so over the top that it becomes a caricature, and his style is ridiculously long and uncomfortable to read for me, as he seems to have some sort of painful mental disorder. Also for my taste, A Raynd makes little attempt to describe the world but gives prescriptions that are childish (all this fanning over übermensch!) and morally questionnable. And I find her style, or in fact her characters, quite bland and off-putting.
In both cases, I find the ratio of interestingness or enjoyment to length abysmally low!
I've always been very skeptical of these theories that claim to explain that all of human behavior emerges from a very small number of root causes. It feels like the creator found a few behaviors in a smattering of people that they could explain and then handwaved it over the rest of humanity.
My intuition is that humans are just way too dang complex for any single motivating factor to explain why we do what we do. So much goes into shaping a person, from their genetics, the culture they live in, their particular set of experiences, their peers, and on and on. Saying "well it's all just repressed desires" or whatever seems immensely simplistic.
Maybe I don't understand what these theories are actually saying. They've never seemed particularly interesting to me, so I've never had the curiosity to learn more about them.
Teach seems to be making a criticism of modern culture (and if I may, looking more towards elite culture such that Woke/SJ and iterated irony are heavily included), rather than a criticism of all societies except Athens. It wouldn't even make sense to say that all cultures other than Athens failed to Act, as there have been many Active cultures. The inclusion of only Full Democracies seems contrived, as many societies have had partial or significant Active populations, even if not everyone was. I happen to think that there are conservative cultures in the US that are very Active and specifically reject the psychological defenses Teach is talking about. Christianity teaches humility and a denial of self with an imperative to Act, such that many Christians have a memetic defense against the things Teach is worried about. Many "Christians" are also just floating along with elite culture and don't necessarily live life any different from what we might call "standard US culture" or on the opposite end "Right Wing culture warriors" so just name-dropping Christianity certainly wouldn't be enough.
Jordan Peterson comes to mind as someone trying to fight against the same target as Teach, and with a moderate level of success. Telling someone to clean their room is enforcing Action. Take Responsibility. Take Ownership of your life and your choices. Peterson's target audience is pretty clear - disaffected young men. I'm not sure who Teach is trying to reach, but it sounds like Western cultural elites who are in or near the Woke bubble.
Excellent post. The Zen comparison and the 'possibility of map-hole' thing are eye-openingly instructive about my enjoyment of The Last Psychiatrist's blog. I disagreed with Alone (or Teach, I guess - he always did claim to like his rum) on just about everything social and political, but it was always fun to think it through and reestablish why, and he always did seem to be driving at the Real.
Oddly, I rarely got the feeling of being berated and patronised by someone with superior insight or self-knowledge. It was more of a wistful 'we are all in this together, only I can see a bit further in the fog, and I'm by parts cranky about what I see and frustrated that you don't see it' kind of tone.
Plus, his diversions into psychiatry shop-talk were always cool, and his illustrations of narcissism, borderline, and other personality and mood disorders made good internal sense to me as a layman. But that could be just because I am a layman.
Might get the book. Probably won't read it through, but it'll sit there burnishing my self-image as someone who would read that kind of book, which is all that matters.
It seems rather in your benefit to understate the main theses of the book, which, are in no particular order: inability to fantasize, knowledge as a defense against impotence, lack of secondary source reading, envy and ledgers.
The audience you write for is the exact audience this is intended for. They will be happy to accept your secondary report, feel knowledgeable and give their power to you instead of wielding it themselves.
Your example on envy is a clear case. How many of us, consciously, believe we are envious and would think “I wish my friend didn’t have a hot wife” — we say to ourselves exactly as the pirate describes, “My wife isn’t hot because I’m ugly” — which means, “in [not] my fantasy of the world, I am ugly and that’s why I have an ugly wife [therefore in reality, my bitch wife is with an ugly guy and never will be satisfied, the “ledger” is even].
Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher.
On antimemes and Marx being insightful, but interpreted in a way useful as a defense: I get the same sense about Nietzsche, and he evidently got the same sense about himself. There's a passage - which I can't find but know exists - where Nietzsche is talking about his contempt for people who are joyfully enthusiastic about his work. He says something along the lines of "rather than showing you have understood my work, your exuberance shows precisely that you have not understood it at all. If you had, it would hurt you too much."
For all the merit of secondary literature it is either for advanced use (like you really read Lacan before), or is just not anti-meme enough, so you would just learn watered-down version of concepts (all these Big Other, small a, the Real, and so on) without comprehending the logic and method behind it.
I don't know if there's anything here, but this review reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. One reason is the footnotes. Another is the non-linear storytelling and out-of-left-field detours into unrelated subjects. But the biggest reason is just the novelty. The main thing that interested me about House of Leaves is that it is so utterly weird and so different from everything else that it is fascinating for that alone. (It's the fictional product of people writing about a documentary about a movie that doesn't exist in-universe. It's got multiple narrators, about half of the text consists of footnotes, and it has pages that look like this https://i.ibb.co/w7JcTJX/xx.webp)
Given that I still like this book even though I ultimately found it disappointing as a horror story, I have to wonder to what extent Sadly, Porn is weird because TLP wanted to make something weird, for the sake of itself.
I immediately thought of HoL at the line “this book is not for you,” as that’s a direct quote from the book. HoL also has the actual (as opposed to merely possible) quality of requiring an understanding of the whole before being able to fully appreciate any individual part of the book, and the insights ultimately imparted seems (to me at least) to be vastly more powerful for that. I think HoL is an excellent case study of how to actually pull off what Teach seems to have been aiming for, albeit in a very different genre.
Can you briefly explain how understanding the whole of HoL made you appreciate parts better? (because I didn't have that experience, really.) I got that P. probably wrote TNR, that J.T. probably died in a miscarriage, and that the old man was P's husband; is this all you mean?
Sure! I wasn’t really talking about the *plot* of House of Leaves to be honest, though it is worth taking a moment to try to describe the interconnectedness there. For a simple example, the Whalestoe letters (in the appendix) dramatically influence how I read J.T.’s character, and almost all of the moments where he initially reads as rambling nonsensically (to the point that my eyes glazed over reading it for the first time), as well as his fantastical stories, can be understood very clearly in the second read. Within TNR, Navidson’s strange side comments require the (later) Delial story to understand, and that story itself requires the (earlier and later) understanding of Zampano’s blindness and history as a (probable) veteran to be able to understand how the story fits into Zampano’s understanding of conflict! (This in turn influences how the noted references to “basecamp” in the Great Hall are interpreted, etc….)
The central idea which requires the entire book to understand, however, is, imo, the Minotaur. Speaking outside the confines of the plot itself, (and here this won’t make much sense without having read through both the book and having some background on the actual author’s life), the Minotaur is Redwood is family is the house on Ash Tree Lane is Yggdrasil is the concept of Myth (as understood by Zampano) is the reader’s (optimal) reaction to HoL (it could also *possibly* be a number of other different things as well, including God/the universe, the author, and/or the reader, etc.). I know that last sentence didn’t clear much up, but that’s why the entire book is necessary as it is lol.
"Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
It seems like both Teach and your cult-leader friend are utilizing a similar strategy of appearing misanthropic, but at the same time seemingly giving attention and respect to *you*. In Teach’s case, this is done through using sayings like “this book is not for” (a direct quote from the opening of House of Leaves, btw, another book I’d love to hear your thoughts on), while strongly implying that the “you” he is talking to is not *you*, the “true follower” of his work.
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, ..., like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Young Kafka to a friend - translation check: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
I'm pretty skeptical that antimemes are unknowable; it's a lot easier to believe that they're tawdry and sordid. "So and so from my tribe did the bad" is more recognizably an antimeme than whatever eldritch spookiness Teach is peddling; it's not just an idea you don't want to spread, it makes you less interested in talking about the whole category i.e. your tribe's moral fiber. Many people learn such antimemes without spreading them. Many more people suspect them or have heard a rumor of them based on the details of their non-spread. Most people would only reveal them reluctantly, and especially prefer to not actually say them but non-confirm them in a revealing manner when explicitly prompted. And we have memes reinforcing antimemes ("snitches get stitches", "loose lips sink ships").
I suspect "unknowable antimemes" are just a trap for very empathetic or curious people. They're baited with an interesting question and the parsimonious feeling of revelation while filtering out people who see intellectual abuse coming. You want me to subject myself to your haranguing for, <checks notes> zero or even negative return on investment? I bet you have a bridge to sell me too. But the reason the trap works is that you wouldn't dare subject yourself to the loss of perceived status of having wasted your time.
About 10 minutes after clicking away I got that kind of stiff back feeling as if someone kind of challenged you to a fight and you didn't flinch. A small rush of endorphins I think and a sense of proud resoluteness
He seems like someone who is gravely disappointed with being a human being and wants others to be even more disappointed while according him the status of Disappointed in Chief of a small elite band who are the least disappointing as a result of their self awareness of it
The theory of all things as preventative measures to the risk of actually trying to succeed is well represented in the form of the book itself. I can certainly think of examples in my own life. I choose no career partly because it represents a potential failure without sufficient reward. But most people aren't really usually like this. I feel pretty confident in saying I don't ask people out in person because I don't like the high probability of unhappy intermediate events rather than actually don't genuinely want happy eventual events
1. Someone doesn't have to appeal to everyone to be a cult leader. If Lacan's pscyhoanalysis applies to 1% of people, then there are 3 million Americans who would potentially be attracted to a would-be cult leader who relies on Lacan's theories.
2. I also have long agonized over difficulty with relationships and asking girls out. But I think I can point to exactly why I did it--involvement in activities that were male-dominated, general social anxiety, etc. Sure, I didn't want to be rejected--but that seems like a totally normal and surface level response, not something deep and hidden. I'm not saying I behaved optimally, but it doesn't feel mysterious, it doesn't feel like it needs to be explained.
3. There is something more "real" about a video than a story or a fantasy in your head. This is important if part of the porn or porn-substitute is the other person being "into" whatever you're imagining. Obviously if you're watching a video, then they don't care about *you*. But "the other person is enjoying this" seems to be a common aspect or requirement, and I think there is something different about an actual person enjoying a thing (or appearing/claiming to).
There's alot of comments, but i did a search and see no one quoted the Zero HP Lovecraft Review. His answer to your question "Why did Teach write this book?" and the related question, "who is Teach talking to" is correct. This interpretation further helps clarify what the purpose of his methods are. The "you" in the book is Teach himself. TLP is doing Lacanian analysis on his (and his class's) own failings to act in the world.
"I mentioned already that psychoanalysis is geared towards women, but the book is written as if it’s addressing men, and that the venn diagram overlap of that is men who think like women. The way that cashes out is that the book assumes you have progressive (normie) politics, even though I suspect anyone online enough to read this book probably does not have normie politics, though it’s hard to be sure. One theory is that it’s written to normie because the dissident can handle normie content, but not the other way around, another theory is that if the writer and the reader both pretend we’re talking about a normie then it gives us a certain kind of breathing room to maintain a critical distance while assessing the ideas. You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, you aren’t a normie, it’s OK, we’re both just talking about an object that’s far away. But if you’re reading it, it’s for you. TLP pretends to assume the reader will have normal, progressive-ish opinions like "I believe people are inherently good." The third theory is that he himself holds these opinions (and I think he does), and that anyone who writes about “you” or “we” is writing about himself. And that’s how he comes to write the following..."
I hope you write a follow up after reading 0hp's review.
ZeroHP's review seems to be trying to out-Teach Teach, and in doing so neatly reveals that the last psychiatrist schtick isn't so easy to pull off.
The bit you refer to is a fine example:
Psychoanalysis isn't real. It's a scam targeted at women (weak, subconscious-buffeted women...), like fortune-telling. But Teach has the temerity to try to scam men (men! strong and sovereign!) with psychoanalysis. How do we resolve this troubling contradiction? Clearly there must be a category of girly men who are somehow susceptible. Who are they? Perhaps the psychiatrist himself belongs?
Come on. You wouldn't find TLP slinging something this primitive on his worst day.
Agreed: this is just projective abuse being applied to projective abuse, and the fact this poster is trying to preach an incoherent interpretation of an incoherent work as the One True Meaning is... really something.
"The interesting part of this deliberate self-deception is that he thinks that telling her they only wanted her body is going to turn her off. He hopes the lies he has heard from four generations of women and the current generation of men are true: that women don't like being objectified, that women really only want to be liked for their mind or personality. The result is he spends a giant amount of energy hiding the fact that all he sees of any woman is her sex; he is overly respectful, overly polite, hyper-cautious. So it is enragingly confusing to him when other men are able to objectify them right to their big ass boobies, and the women don't seem to mind. They giggle."
"…the primary problem is the inability to act on a desire. It doesn't matter what her desire is. For her, acts have to be impulsive, compelled, or for some other reason, other than desire. If the pre-modern problem was guilt, and the modern problem was the inability to feel guilt, then she exhibits the post-modern problem: the inability to act. “Because I would feel guilty.” Keep telling yourself that.
You might criticize not her but the movie’s script, the writing, it doesn’t allow its lead character to make her own choices but instead has her pulled along by the plot. That is a common critique of female lead movies, but it is absolutely also a defense. The aspirational quality of the story and her character is precisely that she does not act towards goals. She reacts to situations."
Surprisingly, TLP does use the (traditional) rhetorical device to associate the womanly with the passive and the masculine with the active. I think this rhetorical move is hard to deploy these days, as can be seen in your response and others. But you are focusing on the (tasteless, distracting) analogy rather than the underlying message.
Yeah. Maybe I should have skipped the sarcasm in brackets. It managed to distract from my point.
When I say primitive, I'm not referring to expressing the notion of the active masculine and the passive feminine, although (since we're doing Lacan today) I disagree with that notion as anything other than a signifier. I'm even okay with people using scandalous expressions like 'big ass boobies', if they really must.
The primitive part is the attempt to identify the writer's target and intent based on the reviewer's own unsubstantiated preconception ('psychoanalysis is meant for women/feminine thought patterns') about the writer's chosen method.
This reads like abuse, because it is. I guess I get to thank an abusive ex-friend for inoculating me against this particular kind of anti-thought. If the author expresses contempt and hate for the reader, I'm inclined to believe them and steer clear.
There's a blatant attempt to undermine your ability to take your own thoughts seriously here, and it's apparent in the passage where the author accuses literally everybody of not having desires (at least not of the sort he thinks are good) and only being interested in "status" (which is subtly being shifted around with "identity" or "self-image", but not the same thing). Boy, when you redefine words like that, you can make anything mean anything!
This book is weaponized gaslighting. The fact that Scott wrote an interesting review and drew useful insights is pretty much separate from that.
Consider that the "you" Teach uses is in fact "me" or "us" and then update your conclusion on whether Teach is acting in bad faith. Perhaps Teach truly is contemptuous of himself and all moderns. Perhaps there are reasons to be contemptuous of "our" (Teach = educated managerial class) inability to effectuate independent desires.
Let me step back here a bit: Teach is contemptuous of desires he doesn't consider valid. Whether or not they're valid has no bearing on what he says. "Independent Desires" is a smoke screen.
No. I disagree with that statement, philosophically speaking.
If I did agree, there's a vast difference between the claim that "Desires can get hacked" which I agree is true, and "All modern humans desire is winning a status game, which is not a valid desire" which is provably false. Consider heroin.
you truly believe all desires are of equal moral and practical worth? How do you choose what desires to desire? Fascinating.
I disagree that SA's TLP or TLP himself would say the only desire modern humans have is winning status games. But he would say that "our" (i.e. Teach himself or the modern educated managerial class) desires are materially mediated ("hacked") to be status oriented. I dont know if that's true, but its an interesting explanation of the growth of social movements that explicitly advocate for the shackling of almost all human activity in bureaucracy that functionally prevents new things from occurring. I suspect the inverse, something is causing the bureaucratization of society which generates justifications for their existence and Teach has it backwards.
Ultimately framing TLP as "abuse" is a way to stop thinking about the above, which is unhelpful.
Choose desires to desire? The active choice component there is a little overestimated. We could ask a gay man why he chooses to desire men in a repressive homophobic regime. There IS an active choice component, but desires themselves aren't of any moral or practical worth other than as predictive mechanisms, by my estimation.
I call TLP's writing abuse because it literally is the form of abuse known as gaslighting. There's a big difference between the kind of healthy self-doubt that allows you to second guess your own thoughts, beliefs, and choices and the kind of self-doubt TLP seeks to induce, which is that everything you do is wrong and your mechanisms for finding out what are wrong will be more wrong.
Good philosophy presents new ideas and frameworks that may be sturdier or more reliable than the ones we previously held, supplanting those. Crucially, it doesn't undermine, or seek to undermine our ability to make decisions. Good philosophy may point out the holes in your own understanding, not throw you in an epistemic black hole. If good philosophy helps tear out a rotting foundation, this tears out perfectly functional structure because the author doesn't find it aesthetically pleasing.
I think your interpretation is more valid than what I think Teach is actually saying. Saying "The process by which we come to desire things is subject to hacking and in put in pursuit of things that leave us with nothing we would consider worthwhile", while debatable, is a far more coherent thought than whatever Teach wrote.
At least the title “Sadly, Porn” serves as a funny reply to “What are you reading?” Scott is consistently more broad minded than I’ll ever be, and that’s one of the things I like about this blog: it’s interesting to see him engaging in good faith, though not uncritically, with ideas I’d reject out of hand (Teach, Lacan, Marx, Moldbug, etc.)
Your description brought to mind: "Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire
Nabokov went several layers of meta deep in the novel. Not only that, but in its afterlife as the object of literary critical attention, the critics and literary people have continued the process. “Pale Fire,” the Poem: Does It Stand Alone as a Masterpiece?" By Giles Harvey | December 2, 2011
So has Teach, whomever he she or it might be, decided to be an artist like Nabokov -- a not insubstantial goal -- or has his mind, such as it is, simply slipped the surly bonds of sanity?
I ask the question, but I am not sufficiently interested in the subject to try to answer it
You use a metaphor of puzzle pieces to understand an antimeme. I think that the “MVP Pyramid” makes more sense. This is a classic image used in business world, and while it’s aesthetically LinkedIn-y it’s useful.
The relevant axes here are “Finished” and “Complete”. Something is finished if it has some shading on every level of the pyramid. Something is complete if the whole pyramid is filled in.
An MVP is finished but it is not complete. So, a meme is like an MVP. A classic meme in my world is “the administration doesn’t care about the students.” This is a meme that is so common that it seems to predict the world as much as describe it. However, it is not finished. It is a vast oversimplification, it’s only one sentence!
An antimeme is an idea that cannot be finished unless it is complete. It deliberately obscures itself so as to minimize simplification into an MVP. Therefore the pyramid must be filled from bottom to top, and it is not useful until it is finished.
"(people criticized the rationalists for a long time for using “status” as a generic term without specifying “status among who” or “status about what”, but I get the impression that this is the exact right way to use status if you want to understand Edward Teach’s school of psychoanalysis)"
That's exactly what I get stuck on. Sometimes people like things and hide the fact that they like that thing from others. You can only claim that they do so for "status" if status is divorced from other people, but I don't think that's possible. To have status is to gain social clout by doing the done thing. You can't gain status in your own eyes, without linking that concept of status to how others measure it. If some nerd (from the 70s before Marvel movies let's say) is ashamed they like comic books and they hide it from everyone else, they probably just really like comic books, and status has very little to do with it.
I'm confused. If you can predict that you would lose status by publicly liking (say) furries, why can't you avoid publicly endorsing furries in order to not lose the status?
Right, but that's the regular understanding of status, as in "status in the eyes of others". Status only makes sense when it's contextualized, whereas I'm getting the impression from your article that Teach is saying something more esoteric than that, which is harder to understand. He seems to be saying that people only like things for status reasons, but then this doesn't explain why people like low status things. Status (in the eyes of others) explains why they won't publicly endorse that thing, but it seemed like his argument is that status is why people are attracted to things in the first place. If so, why would people gravitate to low status things they are embarrassed about? Wouldn't they seek higher status things to like instead?
I suspect Teach thinks that people only like low-status things because they think they'll turn into high-status things later, or else that they can use the low-status thing to make themselves feel hated and persecuted, which gives them status through victim mentality.
"The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
Sometimes the 'low-status' thing is what you genuinely like and enjoy. Depending on how successful the appeal to turning you into a hag-ridden anxious heap about your perceived status is, the low-status thing may win out because you like tripe and onions even better than you like climbing the greasy pole.
Sorry, "openly" to the viewers, not to the characters. The idea is that the Oedipus play can't be pleasing to viewers as some wish-fulfillment about repressed incest, because it's not repressing the incest.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense."
Strong echo from existentialism here. As I understand it, existentialism says that most of us live "unauthentic" lives where we constantly distract ourselves to avoid facing Reality. The distractions are not just stuff like TV or porn, they might be quite elevated and demanding. Proust wrote something on the lines of: some talented writers will rather go to war and die there than sit at the writing table and dig through their feelings.
But as far as I know, existentialists would not point to status games as a primary cause; they would probably see them as yet another distraction. The primary cause would be the fact that Reality is intrinsically alien and terrifying and we feel that we don't have any place or purpose in it, which is why, after Pascal, most of us cannot "sit quietly in a room alone". And that facing Reality means facing Death and what it says about us (we have an angel's mind, but we shit and die like worms). It's less a risk of failure than its absolute certainty.
In other words, carving our "authentic" purpose in this alien reality is a titanic task, beyond the means of most people; but as humans with a neocortex that demands meaning, we still have to justify our existence and give it some purpose. Hence the distractions.
This perspective resonates more with me because I find it really hard to do "actual stuff" in Reality, i.e. stuff that should be done because it's intrinsically valuable but does not have any immediate points attached to it and can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality.
As I see it, there's two ways out of this: the humorous, easy-going, dropping-all-pretense, relatively carefree attitude of some "enlightened ones" (mystics, daoist sages, zen masters), who seem to have found a sort of joyful nihilism in their appraisal of reality, or the titanism of individuals who manage to manifest their desires and their will-to-power in the world (I think of people like Napoleon, Musk and yes, even Kanye). Maybe their power and charisma, like your friend's aptitude to be a cult leader, comes from their ability to own and manifest actual desires, achieve individuation, and become a true personality, while their followers get to at least experience it vicariously and partially appropriate their personality through identification, like children who play at being adults.
But then again, can you tell if enlightenment is "the real deal" and not just another pretense? Is Musk manifesting his individuality, or is he running away like everyone else? It doesn't matter: it doesn't concern _you_, so asking these questions is just another distraction.
Categorizing zen masters as "joyfully nihilistic", "easy-going" or "humorous" shows a misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism so complete that it casts your entire summary into question. As someone who's had personal interaction with them, Zen monks are some of the most intense human beings you'll ever meet in your life. The air is on fire in the presence of a Zen master.
I qualified that I was referring to "some" of the people we usually see as enlightened; I did not mean to categorize all of them.
I have studied Buddhism and practiced meditation on my own, but I've never interacted with Zen monks. My personal impression is that wisdom (however you define it) tends to give people an aura of serenity and detachment, a "lightness" of being, and that many wise people are humorous. And meditative joy would go in that direction as well. That does not mean that they are frivolous or they lack compassion or intensity, quite the contrary. Does this not correspond at all with your experience?
That being said, I would love for somebody who knows more about existentialism to criticize my summary.
Maybe half of that corresponds to my experience. I wouldn't call a zen master "light".
In my case, *I* was the one who felt light. I distinctly felt less *real* in contrast to him.
This isn't something that reading sutras independently or trying to practice meditation on your own can convey. Some wise people are humorous, like Hotei. Others aren't, like Daruma. Since all people can attain enlightenment, it should not be surprising that there is no one "enlightened personality".
"Joyful nihilism" is the primary thing I object to in your description. It creates this insinuation that enlightened religious people don't ACTUALLY believe in their religion, they're ACTUALLY materialist nihilists like Existentialists are and their whole spiritualist framework is basically an elaborate practical joke. This is not only false, but intellectual arrogance at its finest.
> It creates this insinuation that enlightened religious people don't ACTUALLY believe in their religion, they're ACTUALLY materialist nihilists like Existentialists are and their whole spiritualist framework is basically an elaborate practical joke.
That's a pretty big, and uncharitable, inferential jump you did there. By the way, nihilism is not a dirty word in my book.
Large? Yes. Uncharitable? I'd strongly disagree. Words mean things, and being nihilistic means you don't have spiritual or moral beliefs (and in fact categorically reject the validity of the same). If you didn't mean this, I don't think it's particularly fair to expect me to guess you didn't mean nihilism when you said nihilism. Perhaps you meant fatalism in the sense of the acceptance of one's uncontrollable circumstances?
When it comes to what nihilism means, I don't care whether your opinion on nihilism is positive or negative. It still creates the implication that enlightenment involves discarding the spiritual framework that values it.
Okaaaay, so I came back to this comment more than once at this point; thank you for putting these thoughts out there! I really -REALLLY- liked this part:
> 'This perspective resonates more with me because I find it really hard to do "actual stuff" in Reality, i.e. stuff that should be done because it's intrinsically valuable but does not have any immediate points attached to it and can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality.'
No reason for you expect it to be useful to be asked this by a rando on the internet (me), but... if you're up for it, what are some examples? Of stuff like this which you tend to get discouraged away from? (or intrinsincally-valuable-but-not-automatically-having-points-attached-to-doing-it things that you somehow were able to "push forward" with!) Feel free to not answer, because... internet + somewhat-personal-question!
(Also, fwiw, the part about how it "can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality" really sounds like the path of a leader.)
This whole "fantasize that I'm famous". while I know it's common, is nowhere near universal.
I've been paid to do public speaking, enough that I got competently better than most people at it, even I few times I'm been able to pull with it, but it was never something to fantasize about, it was just a skill I practiced and did to do my job. If I could have shoved the world the directions I wanted to while completely off stage and known to only 3 people, I would have.
I know some people who have done musical performance and athletic performance as paid performance, and got some amount of fame for it, but being on stage for status was never the terminal goal, nor was it an instrumental goal to have sex with starfuckers. They instead worked on stage an an instrumental goal to made enough money to be able to practice their craft in private for their own enjoyment.
Starfuckers have something deeply wrong with their brains. Don't stick it in crazy, right?!
Going back to "dont assume fame desire is universal", one of the tools I learned long ago for understanding humans is "Everyone is driven by two of the Fs: force (the power to cause change), fame, fortune, family, fun, faith, fucking. Figure out each person's two, and you have their handle." Everyone has a major and a minor "F" terminal goal, and all the rest are just instrumental goals towards those two. They also change over time for each person.
Horny groupies today, who will trip over themselves in 20 years to cry #metoo. There are lots of people who do have standing to assert #metoo, but those groupies are the opposite of helpful. The attraction to fame is a mental illness, and it's really shitty that our society has entire industries that accelerate it.
I am actually famous, and fantasize about being famous in completely different ways; the fantasy seems to scratch a different itch than the reality. I agree that actually being famous in those ways would be terrible, in much the same way that actually dating most of the people you have sexual fantasies about would be terrible.
Why would people be driven by two of those? Wouldn't you expect everyone to be driven by all of them in some ratio?
I'm sure that everyone is driven by them all, but my observation and practical experience is that people have two that are primary, or are at least structured such that two of them are the key metrics to predict then, andor are the key handles to manipulate them. Maybe in their inner self, they think they have different drivers, but, does that really matter?
"But it’s more than this. It’s an obsession with what kind of person you are. Brand loyalty becomes a way to signal that you’re the kind of kid who buys their clothes at Hot Topic/Abercrombie & Fitch, not at Abercrombie & Fitch / Hot Topic. It’s not that one of these stores is more prestigious (= signals class) better than the other. It’s that they signal what makes you, you. If you shopped just the right combination of brands, you would really capture your uniqueness, and everyone would like you for being you, ie not for boring regressive contigent things like your job or your family (ie your accomplishments and social roles). Result: nobody respects anyone for their accomplishments, nobody wants to fulfill their social roles or do their duties, and everyone wants to be unique and individual = not buy store-brand."
This is a pretty awful description of most people in general, but a pretty good description of most adolescents. And I feel like to the extent that Edward Teach is trying to argue that this is a good description of everyone (allowing for all of Scott's caveats about his takeaways here), it tells you a hell of a lot about Edward Teach - but probably not so much about other people over the age of, say, 25ish.
At this point, the book is repeating itself a lot. I'll continue to read it, but I think I've gotten everything I'm going to get out of it.
So, I'd say my biggest argument about the book is that it feels like it is seeking to pathologize laziness. It's telling me my problem isn't that I'm lazy, my problem is that I don't know what I want, I won't admit to myself what I want, and if only I could admit to myself what I want, I'd stop being lazy and start pursuing that.
And, like. Sure, if there was something I wanted, I'd probably be more motivated to pursue it. But, like ... when I want something, I just get it. It's not a super-complicated process; I've set up my life so that I can satisfy my desires, and none of my desires are very complicated. Which is frequently unsatisfying, if I'm brutally honest, but I don't think I could hook my motivational drive to a hedonistic treadmill that I can just keep grinding at. If I was starving, that would be one hell of a motivation, one hell of a desire, one hell of a thing to want. If this phenomenon is a pathology, it already has a name - affluenza. And if the book is talking about how ill-prepared we as a species are for prosperity, well, yeah. I agree.
Also - the entire book is, basically, Atlas Shrugged. You're not pursuing what makes you happy. You want to tear down the happiness of others. But where Atlas Shrugged is aimed at "heroes", this is aimed at "villains".
Rand's heros were unrealistic and boring. However, her villains were utterly true to life and remain depressingly common. One of Rand's many mistakes was trying to valorize her heros, when the world is better served trying to trick Randian villains into being less Randian villain like.
Personally, I found Rand's heroes depressingly realistic, at least at first; the aspirational stuff as the story went on less so, but that was kind of the point, I think: The mundane worker, unshackled from the parasitic rentier class and their manipulations, becomes heroic.
As for tricking the villains, that's the thematic arc of the journalist CEO in The Fountainhead; it didn't end up working out for him.
Francisco (I think?) D'Latinoname being immediately and effortlessly good at everything, including casually deriving rudimentary Calculus as a 12 year old (or smth) to construct some pulley system or smth?
Who becomes a true believing follower of Galt because *that guy* is just EVEN MORE AMAZING and good at everything?
Or do you classify those not as "heroes" here? I mean, Galt seems clearly intended as an aspirational example of The Perfect Man, not really a person; Francisco to a lesser extent (to kick-start the "Why would someone with this level of ability all of a audden decide to destroy all of his (including inherited) accomplishments?!!!" mystery.
I could see what you mean when understanding "heroes" more closely as "protagonists", ie Dagny and Rearden. Probably a lot more realistic, as an example of 3> sigma driven and also gifted entrepreneur-types, which clearly exist irl, including the presence of psychopathy traits channeled into economic (& productive) achievement.
Is that more what you mean by calling the "heroes" realistic, wrt Atlas?
Thanks for reading it. I for one would never have made it through. This is an essay I’ll have to read a couple of times and ponder.
The status seeking archetype reminds me of the do-gooder characters in Ayn Rand novels. Barely anyone in real life is actually like that, and it seems like a terrible caricature (as I’m actually bad and painful to read). But if you do meet one of them, hopefully you can just run away. And it is a universal element of our psyches, and it’s worth remembering to check whether you’re going astray. I wonder, I sn’t it a lot like the idea of memetic desire?
As for the contempt for self-knowledge, it seems like Teach is performing a baroque version of reverse psychology. He can’t tell us the answer, but maybe if he ridicules us for looking for it, we’ll react against that and try to actually figure things out. When somehow telling us to figure ourselves out would just go horribly wrong, for not entirely clear reasons.
Ohh, the warm feeeliiingsss... I always felt like the worst possible version of myself when I helped my kid with his math homework... and my father was a regular dragon when he helped me with mine... But now I know it's love! Pure love! Whew, thanks so much, TLP.
Could it be that he is doing exactly what he says people wants done to them and then tries to use that to get you to understand the thing he wants you to understand?
(From the review, haven't read the book)
He sets himself up as an authority, and makes it a status mind game to understand what he has to say (using the methods/mechanisms he describes) and this seems to work! You want to figure out what he has to say (which is entirely an action-less status mind game).
Also, anecdotally, (and this would be hard to believe, status mind games, etc) my mental model of how I work is pretty close to what he describes, and I am spending lots of effort recently to break out of it. I hit on this mental model when I was trying to figure out and track what I want, and realized that in many cases, at some level, all I'm trying to do is win a status mind game with myself. The only solution I've found is to just try and not think or think less in general, which is actually pretty amazing and I recommend it.
But don't people realize they used to have a desire if some specific thing they had expected didn't happen, causing them to feel regret? (Which is when they decide it wasn't worth it, anyway.)
The problem with worshippers of Lacan and “irrational psyches” is that everything looks like a nail. (True of most groups, but anyways…) Some parts of the psyche are pretty straightforward. Other parts are riddled with one or more PARADOXes. If you look for PARADOX everywhere, you can hardly proceed. It is one place where you cannot let the obstacle become the way.
I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology.
---
One theme I like around all the ideologies grappling with PARADOX is that they help with some deep version of the virtue of lightness. At least for someone bound up in rationalism habits of thought like myself, there is a deep relief I get when briefly immersing myself in places with acknowledged PARADOX, like Zizek or the TV show Legion. You can’t just keep clenching forward or you’ll get burned by your own pigheadedness, so you have to do an extremely central version of “going with the flow”.
(Lacan: “ah, so you’d like to do this more often but are unwilling to go out on a limb because you’d lose status in the eyes of your culture, so instead you like to use the cover of ‘truth-seeking’ to put yourself in situations that will demand deep unclenching from you?” “yes Lacan, but it’s a fine patch :face_with_rolling_eyes:”.)
Has anyone brought up Christianity in regards to The Giving Tree? I think that's a major vector for the idea that giving, almost regardless of consequences, is virtuous and how you get into Heaven.
I say "almost* regardless of consequences because at least feeding the hungry and clothing the naked gets them food and clothes.
As for TLP, part of what's wrong with his approach is the black and whiteness of it-- there's no hint that if people fall short of his standards, they can make any degree of improvement. (From causal reading, there may be some exceptions in his writing.)
Okay, I have been thinking a lot about The Giving Tree and I'm continually running things through a "how does this interact with Christianity?" processor.
This one especially pinged "coming from Christianity?" as this would be the sort of thing that probably wouldn't very much occur to people to do without some of the words from The Sermon on the Mount:
> "The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done out of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be?"
("Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing" and stuff.)
First, I am going with a model of, "The Christian Ideal... has been tried and found difficult"! (ripping that from Chesterton.) I think that the warped versions of "trying to 'do Christianity' according to 'what the words say,' but not actually wanting 'the real thing' because that is too hard" is responsible for a lot of messes. (My hubbie calls one version of this the "Let's not and say we did" model of doing things. American Evangelical churches do this a lot: Planning accountability groups for people to talk about their struggles--except, in practice nobody wants to share deep, frightening stuff with people you barely know. Doing evangelistic campaigns--except having NO IDEA what will help your target audience because you don't know them. Running church youth group programs that nobody wants to go to.)
My reasoning is that there's a large pool of people who have "wanted in" to the large cozy community that Christianity built. But not all of them "want in" because they are excited about transforming their lives to line up with the high standard of True Christianity. Some didn't understand what was being asked of them. Some were kids of people who were Christian, and thought that "gets them in." Some wanted their neighbors to think well of them. (not to mention being justified in their own eyes!) Some wanted the "nice cozy community." (But that's become less of a draw recently!)
So elaborate "self-sacrifice" that RESEMBLES the true beauty of the Christian ideal of sacrifice is a target that lots of people (and communities!) are motivated to pursue. The other option takes longer and will cost more. (On further contemplation, I should say, "and will cost everything.")
Scott, I know you're familiar with Strauss. I'm surprised you didn't invoke him when interpreting this book. Maybe that gets old if you do it too much, but this seemed very much an "esoteric text " type of territory. When an author says that an anagram of "The Giving Tree" is "I get even, right?" when the author obviously didn't intend that, the author is pretty clearly using a book like tea leaves to talk about whatever the hell he wants to talk about. Death of the author, by nefarious means if necessary.
I'm not saying that this is a good work or worthy or whatever, but the notion that indirect speech avoids outsider criticism of philosophical ideas seems too obvious to pass up.
Strauss was where my mind went too; but it’s sort of reverse esoteric writing in a way; rather than appear milquetoast and acceptable to disguise an unpalatable truth, you appear unpalatable and histrionic to disguise a well reasoned argument. I’m not sure what conclusions you should draw about the respective of authors opinions or methods based on which approach they choose.
> Something I learned when writing this review: Lacan admitted to being deliberately obscurantist. He said Freud was easy to understand, so everyone read the text without deep thought, then misinterpreted it. Lacan figured if he was hard to understand, people would think about it, let the ideas float around a while before forming an opinion on them, and maybe get them right.
since it's almost exactly the same defense Judith Butler gives why her books are unreadable. I wonder if she straight up took that from Lacan.
From what I can gather, TLP is down on people because they have desires, don't act on them, and make up reasons for not acting on them. Does he talk about how one chooses between desires, or whether some desires (aside from the desire to not do things) are not worth pursuing?
This is my big issue with a lot of psychoanalysis: It treats repression of desire as the root of all problems, and implicitly assumes that one we get rid of all repression, whatever remains will be the best of all psychic conditions.
This extends to social movements that were somehow inspired by psychoanalysis, which includes 60s counterculture and therefore the ethos of the modern American left: The problem is always repression of some kind, and the solution is to remove it. But are we sure that when all social norms have been upended, what remains will be functional?
Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience. That made me feel satisfied, that I was the type of person willing to notice this and admit it to myself. But wait... isn't that itself a defense mechanism?
I think the point of the unfalsifiable claims like: "there's always a repressed desire" and "everyone is playing status games in their head" isn't that they're necessarily true; it's to make the acid more potent.
Regarding the voice of the book: you're supposed to apply the type of analysis advocated in the book to the book itself. The author is abusive towards me, and yet I'm enjoying it and thinking more highly of him. What does that say about me?
Wow! I also have been extensively testing my ways of thinking & doing things (and what things I choose to focus my thinking & actions on) against these ideas. (...from this review, and one of the other two Scott linked to.)
I -THINK- it's been really productive for me. (I also have something like the "imaginary audience" problem, real bad.)
RE: TLP's use of "always" and "never"... Yeah; I was thinking something like that. When people normally use "everyone," they never really literally mean "everyone"!! Also, there's this: "But you didn’t mean it literally. You never mean anything literally. Try it. You can’t." <-- I mean, he said that in the same work! XD
BUT I do think Teach's point is that people do these things (let our desires be determined by things as dumb as "large-scale vibe," seek glory through fake "self-sacrifice" while rejecting our actual responsibilities, etc.) WAAAY more than is reasonable. Shockingly so. And it's more frequent, more unquestioned, and more pervasively-woven-into every area of our lives than we'd imagine.
> "I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning." <-- Also, I liked this.
I haven't much considered whether envy and narcissism are the disguised core of my thinking. Confronting such an argument sounds like a good challenge to complacency regardless of whether it is true. From that perspective, reading the book would have a purpose.
But a different writing style than what Scott quotes above would be a lot more convincing. Couldn't TLP express his challenging ideas clearly in the text, let these ideas fail to breach readers' defense mechanisms (whatever those are), and *then* blame the readers for not getting it, at the end of the book?
Another problem is that obscure writing means the writer himself can't check if his ideas cohere. Isn't this TLP avoiding responsibility himself?
Anyway, the review did what book reviews are meant to do. I hope Scott posts more reviews of similar polemics/rants that might or might not have some insight hidden away.
Where can I read the most comprehensible case for the unrecognized centrality of narcissicism and envy to our thinking? (Key word: 'comprehensible'.) Perhaps a primary source, but ideally a steelman summary to start with?
"Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
[A bit later, the cure is described.]
"...it will be cured when you come to the fountain."
"What fountain's that?"
"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."
-"The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis
To want to be the person who wrote the music, or who would skillfully play it before a huge audience, to great acclaim... yeah, that is common to this time. The self-forgetfulness is much to be hoped for.
I don't think everyone lives for envy/jealousy, but have the story of a woman who was punished for a kidney donation by her writers' group and then by the ....wait for it.... New York Times.
> I mean why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?...But lots of people like story porn
Is this actually surprising? Most of us can't tickle ourselves either. Some part of the lizard brain needs to believe that the stimulus is coming from the outside world, or else it gets suppressed somehow.
This is true of all sorts of sensations. Why do we watch any movies at all, instead of just imagining the action or the romance or the drama or whatever in our own heads? Even before people invented movies and books they enjoyed hearing storytellers tell stories, even when they'd heard the story before. Some children love hearing the same stories over and over again. Why can't they just tell the story to themselves? I think the most important factor is clearly that the stimulus needs to come from outside.
I think the premise is simply false and thus trying to explain it is futile. As a teenager I watched porn because I had no real sexual experiences to base imagination upon, but once I did I lost all interest in watching badly acted bad sex on my computer screen, and written sex scenes are interesting only insofar as they are part of a meaningful story and not purely porn (there's an excellent 'definition' I read years ago that "it's 'porn' if you stop watching/reading it once you orgasm")
Seems to me that The Last Psychiatrist is a cranky old man complaining about "kids these days"; except as a psychiatrist, instead of complaining about "music, these days" or "fashion, these days" he prefers complaining about "human psyche, these days". He is smart and educated, so you can enjoy reading his contempt of others if you don't mind that almost in every paragraph he reminds you that he *also* despises you... maybe less than the others, but still.
TLP is definitely *not* an aspiring rationalist. He does not let any fact check spoil his favorite game of "Blemish" (as they call it in transactional analysis). Hey, it's not like he owes his readers anything, including the clarity or the factual correctness of text; he has made this quite clear in his texts repeatedly. If you keep reading regardless, you get exactly what you deserve, and what you were told you will get.
His vision of human psyche is literally diabolic (as in "diabolos" = slanderer); he looks at a half-empty glass and calls it completely empty. Yes, humans can be manipulated about what they want. Yes, humans are often afraid to act according to their desires (this is sometimes a good thing, by the way). Yes, humans want to be high-status, daydream about being high-status, and are afraid to do things that might reveal their weakness. Yes, they sometimes want to hurt their competitors. Yes, they are often confused about altruism and reciprocity: they try doing things for other people "selflessly", and then resent them for failure to reciprocate properly. Yes, sometimes they wish for a strong alpha male to come and solve their uncertainties by telling them what to think and what to do (hopefully the same thing they already wanted to do, except now they would have the permission to actually do it).
However, taking it to the absolute extreme is so absurdly bleak that it even contradicts itself. Do the humans *desire* high status (in eyes of their imaginary audience) and *act* accordingly, or are they unable to desire anything? Make up your mind! Obscurantism is a weak idea's camouflage against falsification -- no one can debunk your theory if no one actually understands what your theory *is*. Trying to impress myself (or the imaginary audience, for the religious people) is a component of conscience. Narcissists do *not* need to impress themselves; they are already deeply impressed, regardless of their actions. Etc. Believing that men want sex only because the television told them to... well, maybe they also breathe only because some advertisement told them so, have you considered this? (Perhaps Peterson should teach you a thing or two about narcissistic lobsters and their status hierarchies. With the exception of the noble lobsters in Ancient Greece, of course, those have never did any of this.)
Maybe the exaggerated language is good to make you notice some things you would not have noticed otherwise. And that's probably where the usefulness ends. Everything else is, sadly, fake insight porn.
My other question is whether your interest in analytical psychology, Scott, is a common phenomenon among biological psychiatrists?
My own psychiatrist has treated me for about 25 years. I have always been depressive, and many years ago, I did see an analyst in New York. But, when my father died, and firm of which he had been the founder and leader, and in which I was a partner, collapsed, I fell into a deep funk. I looked for and found a biological psychiatrist. He successfully treated me then with SSRIs. I really liked him because he was cheerful, upbeat, and helpful, and he was undoubtedly the only psychiatrist in the world with Ron Paul swag in his office.
In more recent years I noticed a number of books of analytic theory in his office. When asked about them he commended them highly (I think he said said: "that's the real stuff"). But, they did not alter our semiannual meetings, nor his prescriptions for my treatment.
My question is why. Biological psychiatry has had the upper hand for the last 40 years. Analytic psychiatry could neither explain nor could it treat many obvious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness. Even mild discomforts such as mine that could be trivially explained by life history were seldom palliated by talk therapy.
My hypothesis is that in our conscious waking lives we do not perceive mental phenomena to be derived from the underlying biology, even though it is perfectly obvious that biological facts like exhaustion, intoxication, and fever can and do have such effects. All of us are unconscious dualists. This the energy behind the current mania for the idea that being men or women is a choice that is made for us or by us on a non-physical basis.
Another manifestation of dualism is that unshakeable commitments to biological psychology are fundamentally unsatisfying. Biology may explain mental disease and provide avenues for cures, but we are not happy to stop there.
Yet I continue to see staements such as: SSPIs do not treat the root causes of depression.
Let me put in a good word for porn. I have sadly learned, as I am in my eighth decade, that men and women commonly lose one or more physical attributes necessary for fully satisfying participation in erotic activities due to age, illness, or medical treatment. But, those loses do not deprive us of memories, nor do they extinguish desire in proportion to capability.
For many of us in those circumstances, porn can refresh our memories and allow us to slake our desires. The availability of porn over the internet in HD and color in the convenience of our own homes has been an unmitigated blessing. Further my son will be spared the difficulty I encountered in cleaning out my father's stash without attracting my mother's attention. I had to perform some slight of hand, but for him it will be a couple of key strokes.
Please spare me stories about your Aunt Tilly who at 80 was cougaring in the clubs, or Uncle Joe who married a 27 year old pole dancer when he was 74 and sired 4 children children by her. Somebody is always going to be 3 sigmas above average but 99.7% of us won't be. For us, the only thing that is going to be in our laps is our laptops.
I'm probably too late to the party here to get much of an answer, but isn't the kleroterion a giant spike in Teach's idea of Athens? The Athenians literally had a device at the soul of their democracy which used randomness to determine the distribution of power. I'm not even sure it would hold up to true randomness in the mathematical sense, as I'm not sure Athenians had such a concept, but then it seems obvious that the kleroterion serves only to create the illusion that power is distributed randomly and not in any biased sort of way. In other words, they have a technological device that decides what position in society that they act from, thus removing their own actions from the remit of personal choice and placing it in the hands of the machine god.
This gets into two of my pet peeves with this style of writing. One is people who are obsessed with ancient democracy but don't realize that Aristotle straightforwardly said that "[i]t is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." Another is people who engage is this Adorno-style torturing of the meanings of every public action to determine its most cynical reading but then defend unthinkingly the things they have decided are good.
'So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves?'
Because he can't act on his desire to tell them to fuck off, quit his psychiatrist job or just stop thinking about them. Because he's one of them.
If you are looking for the holes in your map that explain why some people have power and you don't, consider Pfeffer's book "Power". He did and perhaps still does real research on the topic at Stanford.
With regard to the powerful people who think Lacan is useful, page 11 of Pfeffer's book with the heading "Beware of the Leadership Literature" is perhaps relevant. It claims that powerful people have power in part because they can present themselves well, so the stories they tell about why they have power are self-serving and unreliable. Perhaps the species of powerful person you are looking at presents themselves well by occasionally espousing incomprehensible claims and by that means intellectually intimidating everyone else. Citing Lacan could be an instance of that.
With that said. I must admit that I don't understand Lacan. Lacan claimed to do psychoanalysis and make people more sane. I cannot find research claiming that Lacanian psychoanalysis actually does that, so I am reluctant to invest the effort.
Have a look at the fourth of the four principal landmarks of Lacanian psychoanalysis, on page 3 or so: "subject-supposed-to-know". The therapist is apparently supposed to deceive the patient into believing the therapist knows the hidden meaning behind the patient's words, and therapy is over when the patient stops believing that and believes instead that the patient is the only one who knows what their words mean, and the therapist knows nothing.
This is entirely consistent with there being no coherent meaning behind the various concepts Lacan espoused. We are supposed to reject them and come up with our own story about what is going on.
However, it isn't consistent with Dylan Evans voluntarily going to a Lacanian psychoanalyst when, presumably, Dylan knew all this.
I was a student of Dylan's and co-authored a paper with him once (though it never got published). He's a really smart guy and I hope to read his book on Lacan at some point.
Can I meme your summary of Teach’s anti meme? We learn pretty early on in childhood that being completely authentic in all situations is going to make living in society more difficult. Later on, we learn to be disciplined for its own sake. Hoping somebody else does the dirty work so we can realize a desire we have but kind of also don’t have, because rider and elephant/amygdala and prefrontal cortex , is maybe more a fixture of that duality than of not being purely authentic. In truth, we learn to “code switch” a lot with our authenticity. But we mostly don’t actually do antisocial or sadistic things, and sometimes the upkeep necessary for all this code switching causes us to be neurotic and uptight, and it’s probably important to have safe spaces to be more authentic, which is to say more in touch with the id, or kahnemann’s system one.
"Needless to say, this is not how Teach thinks of it; he suspects socialists (and lots of other people besides) would gladly see Elon Musk reduced to penury if it never helped a single soul, or even if it actively made the poor poorer."
Reading this, I immediately imagined myself in a dialog with -- someone, a Teach stand-in maybe -- saying that given this option I would leave Elon Musk's wealth untouched as diminishing without a corresponding gain accomplishes nothing worthwhile. I was suffused with a glow of self-satisfaction.
finding antimemes is a puzzle game. the book is written for avid gamers and no one else. there is precisely one interpretative lens that makes the whole thing make sense, makes every word in the book true. if you could inhabit the position that makes the book shine, you've become Edward Teach, and you'd be as good a psychoanalyst as he is. Edward Teach must be a very skilled and wise psychoanalyst because he wrote such a delightfully impenetrable puzzle!
i think you must have gotten at least some of it because the ending quote looks spot on to me!
“If your writing is easy to understand, the reader immediately gets (some possibly slightly-flawed version of) the first piece, then uses that to produce a (even more flawed) version of the second piece, and so on.”
For me, this does not describe interconnected insight but a stack of speculation.
With interconnected knowledge, trying to understand the second piece will shed light on our mistakes in the first. Then making sense of the third piece will consolidate our understanding of the first two ones, etc. It happens like that all the time in math.
What makes the difference, I think, is whether there is a process of validation. In math, once you understood the bits, you can prove things, and check in another way that your result is true. In sciences, you can predict things and confirm them through experiment. As far as I know, psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, not only does not have such a mechanism but actively rejects it by principle.
"There are aspects of my experience that sort of fit with what Teach is selling. How do I judge this? Maybe if I really understood the antimeme instead of muddled-understanding it, my experience would match it perfectly. Or maybe we should expect all fake psychoanalytic theories to vaguely remind you of true things, ... Or maybe Teach planted one or two real insights as honeytraps in the middle of his web of pseudo-profundities.
My current plan is to try to be more sensitive to the way my brain plays status-related mind games with itself"
Or, hear me out, some people are just different? A theory that describes 90% of humans doesn't describe the other 10%!
There is, of course, always a temptation to categorize oneself as special in some way, but I think there's ample evidence that you (and me, and a few of the other commenters) just don't view the social world around us as do most people. We are the ones who care a lot more about Truth than about tribal loyalty, who care more about the positions than the horse race, who care more about why <insert bad guy of the week> is doing what he is doing than in condemning his badness.
To me Teach's analysis pretty much all rings true -- Rene Girard-like "people don't know what they want, just that they want to copy and be copied", "Elephant in the Room"-like obsessing over *being seen* to love/care/help as opposed to any interest in actual outcomes, porn as fetish; it all seems correct insofar as I look at the behavior of other people.
You can view this at various "higher" levels -- woke and many other religions as essentially resentment regardless of the details (was it Andrew Sullivan who said, very cruel, and probably true, that the only single constant in the writings of feminists is, come whatever revolution it is they are pushing, they will be considered hotter than they are today?), virtue politics, and so on; but this psychological level (Teach and Girard) seems close to the bedrock.
(Not quite bedrock, there's still the question of "but why behave this way?" and my best answer to that is that this is tied up with sociability and language. For language and sociability to work, you need everyone to be on the same page, to copy aggressively and to punish people who innovate and/or refuse to copy, and it seems mostly a short step from that to Girard and Teach, perhaps with a short detour through Trivers -- best way to ensure that you copy everyone else perfectly is to have no pre-existing desires to impede the copying.)
To put it differently, Teach's analysis is similar to a huge amount of stuff by other people, but other people generally considered IDW (ie they refuse to buy into the mainstream analysis of how society or individuals work).
Hotel Concierge writes after a reader asks why they and TLP always repeat the same thing in almost identical phrasing...
> This is a specious reading for which I accept full responsibility. I know my style sometimes distracts from substance. I promise my intent is not to obfuscate or show off. This is just how I think when I think out loud. I’ll try to enunciate my words.
Either both TLP and Hotel Concierge write that way because they are just thinking as they write (and if they had to clean their thinking/writing, the book/post would never be published) or they obscure their writing afraid that there may not be a real insight, so they have some sort of protection against a reader claiming this, "You did not get it."
I think there's a middle point in this which is true, because I find myself thinking about ideas that HC & TLP wrote long ago, and I read long ago. So there may be real substance after all, but you just have to untangle it. I think it's the trade-off you have to accept for the content being written.
As someone just like your "cult leader" friend, I will say this: some things cannot be put into words, modeled, or "mapped" by humans. I know that this is hard to accept for rationalists, but it is the case nonetheless. Social intelligence cannot be quantified, dissected, or understood, so those of us who are uniquely gifted in that aspect often seem quite inscrutable.
Having read like one book on Lacan (Fink's The Lacanian Subject), the reason why Teach is so 'abusive' in his writing fits the methodology outlined in that book to a T. From what I understand, Lacan viewed the unconscious as a language that merely does whatever it's programmed to do. For Lacanian Analysis to be successful, it doesn't require the analyst to do all that stuff like making the analysand feel good or feel the warm cuddliness of self-understanding. All the analyst does is follow the 'rules' of the language and while remaining distant and inexplicable (something like this allows the analysand to project his desires on the analyst more strongly and not see him as some other human twerp with the same broken human stuff any other human has). Thus all the anecdotes of Lacan doing weird inexplicable things in his practice as well. One video I remember seeing that's quite interesting is a woman who survived a Nazi concentration camp or something going to Lacan for therapy. During one session he stroked her face gently and she realized something like the French phrase for 'a gentle stroke' punned off 'gestapo' and this allowed her to reconfigure her feelings towards her trauma and baggage. Seems like Teach is more or less just following those Lacanian ideas all the way with his antimeme.
Reading this blog almost exclusively to fantasize about arguing ("discussing") things with the author. Editing this comment to change "your blog" to "this blog" to avoid the fantasy of having this comment read or responded to. I think I would disagree with the author of this book on mostly everything. I would probably enjoy the read. Fun stuff.
In case there was any doubt Teach was making things up, I went searching and as it turns out, this post is the #5 Google search result for ["Shel Silverstein" "And He Was Never Heard From Again."]...
...out of 5.
The other 4 results also did not contain any evidence that the comic referenced in that excerpt exists.
A review of the book I imagine Scoot read, since my wife took our copy because I could read it:
The author has, correctly, identified the same point that Harry mentioned to McGonagall in HPMoR chapter... 3ish. That, for much of the world, people operate based on appearance, roles, signal games, and the trappings of status. This complex, easy-to-convey heuristic on how to live has gapping holes in its ability to handle many scenario. Because it is so easy to teach, it is near universal, and thus a high utility target for those attacking bad heuristics.
He attempts to break readers of this behavior via habit-breaking tactics like: A) a promise of inscrutable knowledge, B) a promise of life changing knowledge, C) a multipronged attack on possible base beliefs that might be holding up that behavior or D) holding back exploration of other behaviors, E) constant insults and other tactics to lower the reader's self-perceived status, F) raising his perceived status above the reader. All in the service of taking those who do think in role-base, status-based, signal-based ways and breaking them with the tools they use most often, so that they can begin to learn other tools.
He occasionally mentions some of those other tools, various abilities the reader does not have, again in an attempt to hit upon one that they are missing and thus drive further interest from them. It doesn't matter if he's wrong nine times out of ten. That tenth time will hit were you are weak, where you are missing tools, and thus achieve his goal regardless. From descriptions of individual failings to descriptions of societal problems, all are an attempt to find a hook that works on the reader, to break them open, to get them to question if they have all the answers.... and then leave them too it, because he doesn't have the answers per say. He points to what they do not have and that's enough to achieve the goal of the book.
From memory: he said the goal of psychoanalysis shouldn’t be for the patient to gain a better understanding of themselves, but to take power over their situation. And that the pursuit of information/“knowledge” is a defense against impotence.
How can you tell a psychic defense is successful? Because they were satisfied and nothing changed.
Maybe he’s trying to deprive you of information/satisfaction, so you’ll be forced to wallow in your impotence. It’ll either motivate you to go out and do something with your life, or at least stop infecting others with your nonsense.
>porn is the defense against noticing you don’t have an interest in real sex. You don’t actually want things, you can’t actually fantasize (because fantasy is a step between desire and action, neither of which you’re capable of), so you download mass-produced fantasies from our corporate overlords in order to, essentially, fantasize about fantasizing. “Human beings,” he says “have abdicated moral, social, and political power to the technologies, much as you’ve done with your sexuality.”
I feel that Ayn Rand could have written this passage.
I'm unfamiliar with both Lacan and the author of this book, but a big thread of the criticism read bizarrely to me.
People who enjoy Lacan are painted as "manipulative" in a charismatic "cult leader" way because they will complain about most other people, but be nice to the person they're talking to, thus the person they're talking to feels special and wants to talk to them more.
But... they're not manipulating anyone? Everyone has people/groups/behaviors they're critical of, and will tend to discuss those with people who aren't that. Rather, it's the insecure, validation-thirsty types who are even more guilty of this behavior because they're too chickenshit to be openly critical to anyone's face! I would bet nearly 100% of the insecure people's conversations follow that pattern, whereas the Lacan-enjoyers -- who I understand to basically have manifesto energy? -- actually do say stuff directly to people they're criticizing, or in digital earshot. That type will actually engage with detractors and even push back against the pushback of their own admirers; they are not simply flattering people.
Those types are not trying to manipulate anyone, they are simply expressing sincerely held convictions to people who seem interested! A person does not build up longwinded byzantine theories criticizing the world if their priority is to be charismatic. Are we to blame them if unusual and sincerely held convictions are attractive? Are we to pathologize expressing sincerely held convictions?
What is the expectation of people who have widespread critical thoughts about society? That they should never talk to anyone because, if their ideas are received with interest, it's inherently manipulative? That they should express these ideas in a way that denigrates the curious people who engage with them, even if those people do not exhibit the traits they find objectionable? (The author overtly does this and yet gets lumped in!) That if a person is critical of enough of society, they must be a raging asshole to everyone they meet -- even if they rationally feel this makes society worse, even if it goes against the philosophy they're espousing -- or else they're a bad actor playing some sort of mind game?
And to what end? It's not explicitly suggested that they're doing anything other than getting attention for their ideas, which is what every writer or thinker aims to do. It would not be fair or healthy for me to allege the popularity of this very Substack is evidence of manipulative intent, rather than a healthy urge to spread ideas and connect with others.
In other words, what is anyone supposed to do? It suggests that a person's ideas are sincerely held only if no one else likes them, that the reactions of others can somehow retroactively change one's intentions. (It sounds like maybe the author would agree with that, that he thinks it's impossible to act without being motivated by social capital, but I don't.) And even being deliberately abrasive is no defense against being accused of manipulative flattery, apparently. I dunno, when people set impossible traps for others in their mind like that, it's a clue to me that their thinking is compromised.
And what if it simply makes sense to want approval from someone whose insight you value? Should we encourage people to seek approval from people whose insights they don't value? Obviously not, and that's because the core issue starts not with wanting validation per se, but the lack of self-awareness in the people seeking and experiencing the validation! To some extent it's healthy to look around the world at all the competing ideas and want to reciprocally vibe with some people. What's not healthy is acting like others have done something negative by merely vibing with you or not vibing with you. What if it's every individual's responsibility to assess whether the ideas they admire are good for them, and what if that process is arguably the work of navigating life itself? What if it's bad for everyone to pretend otherwise?
Actual cult leaders are overtly controlling. They deliberately manipulate. They aren't simply expressing ideas near people with neuroses. What is the utility in framing self-expression or charisma as "manipulative" or "cult leader" behavior? What is the harm being done here that justifies such loaded terms? No one is being forced to do or think or even feel anything.
What, we're afraid one day they'll find the object of their admiration may not have 100% positive thoughts about them, and they'll... feel bad, and like they've been manipulated into liking them? That should be no surprise: almost no one has 100% positive feelings for anyone in their life, and no one should expect the people they admire to only ever feel positively about them to begin with -- or to care much about what they think or feel at all, when it comes to more distant relationships. It's infantilizing people to say those they admire are manipulating them in some sort of cult leader way.
Again, I haven't read this book and I don't know anything about Lacan or the author, but the perspective of charisma-is-manipulation seems to emblematic of the author's apparent argument that most people live in resentment of those who have something they don't -- in this case, charisma I guess -- and so inevitably want to win a weird secret mind game against them by pathologizing their motives, rather than confronting and taking responsibility for their own insecurities. I mean, isn't it saying, "oh, I'm not like those charismatic people because the kind of person I am isn't manipulative, so that's good, actually?" Isn't it a smokescreen to feel the issue has been examined and put to bed in a way that's favorable to oneself, when the truth is there are actually ways to be more charismatic but no one wants to fail in the attempt? Or perhaps one thinks charisma can't even be learned, and so feels even more certain they would fail to raise their status.
When I read these excerpts and find them interesting or funny, I don't feel manipulated. I don't feel like it's not okay for me to disagree, and when I disagree with some of it I don't feel conflicted or wounded. I don't feel like he's flattering me by expressing ideas "near" me. It feels quite the opposite. It feels like his ideas have little to do with me, unless I feel like some do, and I consider the ideas on their own merit, independent of their source.
He's not manipulating anyone any more than a painting in a gallery is manipulating anyone: either something there sparks interest, or I am free to look at something else. How the originator of an idea and I might feel about each other as people is a level of neuroses I'm dismayed to observe is common. I genuinely feel it would be something approaching psychosis to feel manipulated, to feel flattered or insulted, because it ignores the reality that the locus of control lies entirely with me and most people do not care one way another what I think or feel -- even if i know they would tend to hope I agree with or understand them as a sort of default, a constant underlying motive of self-expression.
The locus of control literally cannot lie anywhere else, and I know it's unhealthy to live in a world where I cast others' self-expression as inherently manipulative; at least to me, that would be an obvious indicator that I am putting others down to flatter myself. Clearly there must be a lot more criteria met for "manipulative" to have any useful meaning. It must mean something more than "persuasive" or "compelling" or "people tend to express things in hopes that it will impact others' thinking." It's far more easy to "manipulate" others with familiar, accessible ideas that do not challenge them.
I mean, is it charismatic to smear the exterior of one's home in shit and hope it attracts others who are willing to look closely enough to "get it?" Or is that a weird form of self-actualization, and that's inherently compelling to a subset of people somewhere who are looking to find themselves too? And on the flipside, can we not admit that many people resent others for their self-actualization, and that's it? Doesn't it just make a lot of people feel upset when they see someone else getting admiration by not doing the done thing?
Can't weird people just be compelling without that being malignant? Can't it just be that most people have a sense of society not being ideal in some way, and so we're drawn to people who have novel frameworks for why we feel unhappy, and invigorates us to think of how things could be different? Can't it just be prudent that people expressing iconoclastic ideas appeal to others as if they're not so different than they are deep down, rather than treating them as so hopelessly tainted by society that they won't even engage with them civilly?
Shit, can't it just be that people with iconoclastic ideas are often quite idealistic and actually want people to be happier, and genuinely believe in a purer human spirit that is quickly twisted by people's environment and bad luck, and so don't have the disposition to be mean to people in person? Can it not be that they criticize humanity because they love it, and hate that others are caught in traps rather than meeting their potential, and see that bad ideas make life worse for everyone?
It's that they're manipulative cult leaders? Really? Okay.
This just seemed like a weird thread, to say people like types like this author because they're... so nice to people who listen to them? And then all we see is the opposite?
So maybe I would like the book, I don't know. The author's arguments made more sense to me than the criticism because the criticism seemed to support the author's ideas, or what it seems those ideas are anyway. Maybe I would find the book validating, or interesting enough to learn more about him. I don't know if I have the patience to mine insights from something that sounds so scattered. But if I did, it would say nothing about the author's motives to manipulate me in any meaningfully negative sense of the term.
If anyone's read this far, feel free to tell me if I'd enjoy Lacan, lol.
Anyway, I still enjoyed reading these thoughts about it, so thank you.
When he and his pirate mates were sitting at a large mess table getting uproariously drunk, didn't the original Ned Teach have an alarming habit of firing a couple of fully loaded flintlocks at random under the table, to keep everyone on their toes, well anyway the ones who didn't hobble out with a wounded leg or worse?
I haven't read "Sadly Porn", and (I'm ashamed to say) only skimmed the review, but it sunds like this author is figuratively doing much the same! :-)
Thank you. I'd heard good things about Fink but was debating between this book and the one with the lightning bolt on the cover (I think it was "Lacanian Subject" or something) - have you read both? Is this one better?
Oh man, I suggest avoid Fink, read this seminar 2 directly. Note: You yourself mentioned Finnegans Wake, and Lacan was friends and personal family physician of Joyce in Paris (20s), by the time he is in "aphoristic mode" as I call it, that is, 73 yo or something 1973(?), I think he hated the fact he got famous and those classrooms where packed with 1300 people in his last years, also to the conclusion he failed ("reason for a failure" is the name of a conference itself indeed. "I failed" too, a public letter iirc all found at staferla.free.fr) in his enterprise to reinvigorate the whole field and elevate it to the status of economics or linguistics as a science by overhauling almost any and every concept, epistemology, ethical practice, affiliation to different disciplines etc., that today it's lost, I escaped the lacanians who speak their own jargon, incredibly obnoxious smug.
But the explanatory power of Lacan is pretty big and can help so many in clinical settings practice; but not as long as it is coopted by his nephew and all this is shrouded in mystery and cultism. Also, I'm sorry, the Zizek, Zupancic & Dollar all are students of this already chewed Lacan, Miller was even Zizek's analyst during his stay as a graduate there in Paris in the 80s; So they draw on a not clinical Lacan, it's the film studies Lacan, although in the past decade or more Zizek has become critical of Miller for biologizing Lacan back into Freud. So You won't get much out Lacan to understand Zizek. My thesis is forget the style (syntax, prose) and previous knowledge (hinted by footnotes for example), or given it's given, what so difficult to understand? for me it's simple: it's unbelievable.
For example, regarding metaphor and metonym as the ways we make dreams and lapsus and symptoms and anything unconscious, he defines: the unconscious is structured as language. And language is a structure, so, the unconscious is structured how, through condensations and displacements, or metaphor and metonym, and specifically (here comes the bomb):
symptoms are metaphors and it is not a metaphor to say it. <--- swallow this. And so he goes one through many pages or hours trying to make and build around it. In history Aristotle had the same fate, de Saussure, etc., it might be we need another generation to die before he is "re-discovered"
> This was even more of a personal victory because it signalled the goal of my target of trying to figure out if there was anything of substance in Lacan following his rude and public flogging during the Sokal era (specifically I wanted to figure out the context for the 'penis is the square root of minus' one comment that drew so much laughter)).
So... did you find any substance? I've engaged with Lacan before on both the psychoanalytic and philosophical sides, and while I suppose I can't fault anyone who finds the former helpful (but definitely wouldn't actively recommend it!) I haven't pulled much from the latter. I think I have a grasp on the aesthetic appeal of where he's coming from, but when the best compliment I can give is "understandable aesthetic appeal" I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Mostly the core philosophy of language of his later work, intersubjectivity, the Real, etc. The concepts behind the obscurantism are all quite evocative, but there's still a general failure to attempt anything like predictive power - it's all competing explanatory narrative.
That's not nothing, especially if it can be backed by a solidly successful therapeutic record... but last I checked, psychoanalytics haven't managed any more success there than anyone else.
..."Rorty-esque anglophone sense of decency to not obfuscate"?
Rorty is a goddamn sophist who is only famous as a philosopher because he obfuscates so hard Rorty probably isn't even his real name.
Unrelated but heads up that there's a newly published text (on Palgrave Lacan, which seems to be on the forefront) called "The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence" by Isabel Millar. It seems to apply Lacanian ideas to rationalist AI stuff -- the introduction is all about Roko's Basilisk -- and might be of interest if you already have a background in Lacan and are reading this blog. I haven't read it yet but I could be interested in gathering a group of like-minded to read it together and discuss, helping each other to work through the ideas.
Fink also cares about people. Leaving the apparent misanthropy of TLP aside, Fink is in a way a critique of the lack of caring in the current US mental health system. I'm not sure what your experience in reading him was, but for me, Fink really humanized the Lacan and Freud approach, ultimately making it all tools for greater empathy. I don't know if its correct, but at least in Fink's approach, the purpose of the Freud/Lacan work was to better understand people so he could help them.
Did Teach also write the Tumblr "hotelconcierge"? The writing style is so similar! Does anyone know?
hotelconcierge has been accused of that many times and AFAIK has always denied it and there's never been any evidence for it, even after TLP was doxed.
^ correct -- can second this
I know they're not the same person, but I don't think hotelconcierge has ever addressed it?
Not directly, but he regularly acknowledged TLP’s influence on his writing.
What happened to HC? He left on such a strong note. His last two essays are the best things he wrote.
I find myself wondering this a lot too. Shame and Society in particular was so good that I go back and re-read it regularly. Hopefully he'll come back and write something again eventually.
I do the same thing with 'The Tower'. It's up there with 'Mediations on Moloch' ; blog posts that provided more value than most classic books I've read
Not the same guy. TLP inspired a lot of people to write in his style (just check out the subreddit), but the guys who floated to the to the top usually focused on subtly different subject matter or expertise.
So, you are saying that David Foster Wallace returned from the dead, this time without any empathy, now projecting all his self-doubt on to the world esp. his readers.
(Perhaps in our new alternate universe New Wallace simply stayed at Harvard, which would explain Teach/newWallace's baleful uncaringness and cold show-off-ey verbal tics.)
I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like. Teach sounds to me what people who hate DFW but have never managed to read snything of his THINK Wallace sounds like.
I will now play the audiobook of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" here in the shop at high volue and see how manypeople I can offend.
B
Crap, seems I'm not the only one.
Lol spot on.
I think this Kanye take is dead wrong tbh, regardless of which era of Ye you mean. When I think of the racist rap-hater stereotype I'm imagining someone who is criticizing gangster rap for glorifying a life of crime and violence and such, and who thinks that it's narrow in instrumentation and musical themes and so in some way musically inferior.
And Ye has never been a big violence glorifier, and has always gone really hard to cross genre boundaries and try new things. I mean hell, the moment he could afford it (i.e. after his first big album blew up) he recorded the next one with a full string orchestra. That's not what rap haters think of.
I think a lot of hateful racists would have a big problem with New Slaves and other stuff like that. Even general rap haters can hate stuff that isn't Fuck The Police.
I'm sure they would. He's political, he talks race, and he would disagree with them to the extreme. But just being something they would hate is a far cry from being "what they THINK rap sounds like," that is a far stronger claim that I read in a much more specific way.
The first time I ever heard Kanye, I literally unplugged the amp, I was worried that one of the woofers had blown and shredded the cone. NOTHING could possibly sound THAT BAD. No way that professional musicians and recording engineers had deliberately made something that sounded like a massive electrical fire. Plus the lyrics were straight-up crazy racist.
"What the F*** was that?" I asked. "Kanye" "You have got to be shitting me! I know people who actually respect this guy, and THAT is what it sounds like? You be clowning me, dawg!"
Well, sorry to hear you don't like him. I feel the same way about the last half of his albums.
I am pretty sure Kanye is semi-genius atist, who is so good he got bored, and maybe deliberately made albums that were 75% real work, and *possibly* 25% total bullshit, where that 25% was an easter egg where he made the most dumb pandering ear-candy stupid crap he could make in like 25 minutes, and put it out there as a "canary", where the un-hip would love it and play it and then the "real fans" would know they were otiose and un-hip and stupid and the real ppl would band togher more tightly and love KW even more.
But that is just speculation, KW don't return my calls, I called Hova but can't get through to that MFer, don't make me roll out to Calabasas, bitch....
MM, Maybe we carry this discussion on through several topics. I like your opinions.
For the record, my favorite/greatest rap/hip-hop artists are:
1) Rakim
....... (how do you even rank below the Rahj?)....
MF DOOM
Big Daddy Kane
_____________________
GODS OF HIP HOP LIKE RUN-DMC ETC
_____________________
Eminem
Etc
(Talk amongst yourselves)
> I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like.
Probably the weirdest thing I've read in the day.
Right, DFW without Wallace's saving grace of, no matter how badly he may have lived it out, wanting to be a better person.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I, for one, care a lot more about the insight than about the empathy.
And I suspect Teach would say your comment is exactly what's wrong with America today -- you prioritize empathy (the giving part of the giving tree) over achievement, meaning, insight, responsibility or anything else; ie the ethics of a perpetually 9-yr old girl.
Actually, I think the 'without empathy' thing is important as a distinguisher, while not being the priority. The narcissists and sociopaths I've known (and I've known some of them quite well, professionally and personally) think like this. Everything is about status/image, including the stuff they do when no one is watching, they envy anyone who has or accomplishes any thing, no matter how tiny, better than what they themselves have or accomplish, and anything anyone does (including themselves) is a manipulation and/or self-delusion. They're also often extremely passive, preferring that others come to them (except when they are extremely sure of succeeding, and can brush off the effort somehow), and the idea that they do this to avoid desiring and the responsibility to act on that desiring is a cool one.
And, quite logically, they assume that everyone else thinks the way they do. (As do people who are higher on the empathy side, of course. Until they run into enough narcissists and sociopaths .... And sometimes even then. See the 'there is a fragile, hurting child inside every narcissistic defensive shell!' theory.)
Narcissists and sociopaths also respect no one (except briefly a bully bigger than they are) and resent the hell out of everyone.
So, not all people who are low empathy are narcissists and sociopaths (seems they also have to be raised 'right' to achieve that), but it could be a good way to conceptualize these differences.
I've studied a decent amount of Lacan, and my general conclusion is that he'd also fit this way of thinking. And he must have LOVED making people work so hard to 'understand' his discourse/writing, while encouraging the doubt that those who tried to do so would always come short of understanding. Narc orgasm!
Also, at least when I lived there (now 25 ys ago), Brazilians (independent of age, gender or orientation) were mostly entirely unafraid of approaching an object of desire, in multiple fields of desire (sexual, romantic, friendship, food, all sorts of other pleasures....). Not sure what to attribute that to, although it seems to be (or have been, don't know if it still applies) coming from a fundamental security, that one can tolerate rejection just fine, especially when it's a) coming from someone you don't know that well, and b) on a matter so clearly one of individual taste, and one can tolerate disappointment and loss, without crumbling, at least not for long and not irremediably.
When I first moved back to Canada, I couldn't understand how people here manage to reproduce. Then I became convinced it mostly involved copious amounts of alcohol..... Very sad.
Thanks for reading the book, because I can't even begin to imagine how I could read something like that charitably. Methodologically, those excerpts remind me of Adorno (et al): take a text, free-associate yourself to a theory, and then claim it as a sociological/psychological truth.
You know how Aaron Swartz was the person to take the time to figure out Infinite Jest http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
?
What does it say about you that you took the time to figure out Sadly, Porn?
Don't worry, I didn't actually figure it out.
I haven't read SP yet, just a few reviews. Yours made the most sense! Though IDK if that means much given what the book is.
It's not even possible, as far as I know. I'm not a great critic of art, but I can read pretty OK and I have no idea what this book is about. I feel like I read peyote.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
If you want psychiatry, start at the beginning. If you want psychoanalysis, start at the end.
This one is at the heart of him, though it won't make much sense the first time through: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narcissus.html
This one is my fav: https://web.archive.org/web/20110903213849/http://thelastpsychiatrist.com:80/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_1.html
Agreed on The Terrible Awful Truth About Supplemental Security. I
Also https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/01/penelope_trunk_abuser.html is an incredibly useful essay almost entirely devoid of the ouroboros of intellectual fapping that appears to make up much of Sadly, Porn.
Someone above recommened the Dove one, which I think works. It's real accessible.
This one is my favorite: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/07/my_name_is_michael_bay_and_i_j.html
Obviously couldn't constrain myself to just the recommended ones. Past two days have been non-stop reading. Favourite thus far is: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html
I'm guessing the book would say you did figure it out, and just aren't acknowledging it to yourself, because it's that kind of book?
(Also I suspect it's right, in a sense. In something the same sense as enlightened people noting that enlightenment is mostly just realizing you were enlightened all along, actually. And I don't think that's an accident, but I'll maybe report back after actually reading it.)
Several chapters in:
Sort of? Not enlightenment, sort of adjacent. A lot of what it's doing is going to come across nonsensical, because a given reader is only the intended target of, like, 2% of it. I think that's it's biggest failure; it's trying to target everybody. It also makes it kind of fascinating to read, because it feels like somebody else's nightmare, at times.
Curious to see if it successfully targets me.
The rough understandg i get, from your summary is: damn, people think about status a LOT, to the point where we sabotage ourselves to improve our perception of our own status, and it's kind of a bug, but i guess if you _can't_ get rid of that, maybe try to use the pursuit of status to actually become powerful, rather than just playing mind games with yourself.
That's the takeaway i get: see if i can catch myself either trying to get or maintain status, recognize how unhelpful that is, and see if i can't substitute something constructive in there instead
I agree that you didn't, but think there are way better uses of your time than figuring out what this rambling alcoholic misanthrope was trying to get at. If you want to read something weird, dense and dark and tell us what you think, how about some Wittgenstein?
TLP, if you're reading this, you should start a Substack. This is the only way for you to find true happiness.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept. I found it profoundly depressing, and I suppose I still do. But over time I guess I just "learned" not to think about it because it was depressing and there was nothing I could do about it anyway and it was all making me a little crazy.
Sometime in college I was introduced to a very low-level version of some of the ideas in this review. Namely, that everything is about status. I had another mini-crisis about this, which culminated in my writing a ponderous and indulgent column in my university newspaper, which received predictably vicious responses from my readers. Still, I was haunted by the idea that I didn't *really* like the things that I thought I liked, and was only concerned with raising my status -- whether in the eyes of others or in my own. And like the free will situation, I never came to a satisfactory conclusion to the question of whether I really liked what I thought I liked, because it was basically impossible to verify anything, and just decided it was probably best not to think about it too much because it was making me crazy.
But at the risk of making myself crazy, I'll say this: I think status-related considerations, in general, play a fairly big part in my life when it comes to explaining why I like certain things. I can recognize myself pretty clearly when I read descriptions, in this review, of status-motivated reasoning and preferences. But I do struggle with the leap that sometimes gets made which is that status and signaling are absolutely everything. That to me seems basically unverifiable. I can grant, without much argument, that part of why I enjoy having sex with my significant other has something to do with the feelings of status (of being worthy of said sex) that accompany it. But I'm not willing to say that my entire relationship is completely determined by this, and I think sometimes the misanthropic perspective can over-emphasize these seemingly unsavory aspects of "human nature."
Use it in the wrong framework and it will twist your mind into a mobius strip
Where there is no I there can be no She. But there's no need to posit the existence of a subjective conductor (homunculus), brains still do stuff. Hearts pump blood, kidneys filter toxins, lungs exchange oxygen, the motor cortex activates limbs - sometimes to pet a cat. Who needs contorted definitions of choice to explain that?
"I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept."
I would put a Teach-ian twist on it: the sort of free will that everyone says they need to believe in is an incoherent concept, which creates a lot of conflict and focus on that concept and draws attention away from the sort of free will that we definitely DO have which is incredibly powerful but people apparently think isn't good enough.
I like that spin. There's probably something to it. I certainly agree that the naive concept of free will that I wanted to be true at that time had some serious problems with it that probably render it incoherent. I think if Teach were to give their perspective on my high school philosophical crises, their take would be a lot less charitable to me :).
I second that like.
Totally agree: using a weird old definition of free will does produce an incoherent concept but most people do not use nor need this weird definition, and in a more usual and useful meaning of the terms, we definitely have free will.
As I have long put it, it doesn't matter if we "really have free will", because we have a radical and unavoidable constant* <I>experience of it</i>.
Even pure mechanists <I>always act like they think we have free will</i> except while <I>writing or talking about how we don't</i>, and they usually fail even then.
(Physically, of course we can't have "free will" in that sense, as you say.
Doesn't matter!)
* Most all of us, most all the time; people with various mental illnesses or trauma responses and such <I>experience lack of free will</i>, I'm led to believe. Never been there, myself.
People often mean two completely different things by "free will". One is the decision making ability and the other is some vague metaphysical freedom, which can include unpredictability, being the ultimate cause of ones action and existence of counterfactuals outside of ones mind. People usually claim that these two things are related or follows from one another: if there is no metaphysical freedom then we can't decide anything or, at least our decisions do not have some "special meaning".
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is completely wrong. Whether we have metaphysical freedom or not, doesn't affect our decision making at all. All the really interesting questions, related to the freedom of will, like agency or moral responsibility or futility of choice, require decision making and are irrelevant to metaphysics. Whether or not my decisions are determined I still have to make them, it is them that affect the future and that's what gives them meaning, not some metaphysics.
eventually you run out of things to claim 'aren't real'
if liking something 'for status' is the dominant reason we like things, then that's what it means to like. feels like this kinda book gets hyper focused on categorization
are we allowed to just say "good comment"?
i think you just did
Well said. If we know how X works on a deeper level, it's an evidence in favour of X actually being real. And it's just the bug in our psyche: wanting everything important to be fundamental, which sometimes convinces us otherwise.
Agreed. If status chasing is what everyone is doing, then it is a bit much like semantic quibbling to act like desire is therefore not what we think it is.
Your pointing out the focus on categorization reminds me that I just recently read some papers, for unrelated reasons, by a few psychoanalysts and this particular idea came up a bit as a/the current conflict in the psychoanalytic community: categorical vs dimensional analysis.
Makes me wish I knew PS' author's real name so I could see whether they previously waded into that discussion as a professional. Might be illuminating.
No, that's no it. There are really interesting (and non-obvious) insights in the idea that most people have no idea what they do or don't like, they just copy people around them. This sort of thing, for example, shows why society has taken so many different forms over space and time.
(Which is not to say that human elasticity in infinite; but chances are the reason you think democracy is so awesome is because you were born in the US in the past 50 years, not in Rome 2000 years ago or Mongolia 1000 years ago, and not not because you've carefully analyzed all known historical social structures...
Or to put it differently, one month ago you couldn't have named the [Prime Minister? President? CEO?] of Ukraine. Today you're ranting to your friends about how the US should risk WW3 to do something. That's some pretty strong "I have no idea the reality of the situation, but I'll just do what every else around me is doing".)
I like keeping up with current events, ukraine became more prominent because of an invasion, so I learned more. Certainly this was to impress myself and my social group but humans are social animals-saying we only like things as a reaction to society just means that's what "liking" is, unless enlightenment is liking things somehow independently of the world we exist in.
I like eating chocolate. Could someone please explain to me how exactly this is related to status? (For the record, it is usually not one of those bitter 99% chocolates, but the regular kind that is made for plebs.)
I propose an alternative explanation where the so-called "lower" desires are genuine ones, and the "higher" ones are about status. (Because "higher" literally refers to higher status, duh.)
Thank you, adding to my reading list.
Also, if it helps, I'm reasonably certain that when he is talking about The Giving Tree, he is actually talking about the specific interpretation of The Giving Tree as a mother, not The Giving Tree as a book.
If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
> If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
How can he be saying basically the same thing in response to a completely different interpretation? Teach seems pretty interested in specifically talking about motherly love and obligation and independence, and I'm not sure how any of that comes about in response to someone whose takeaway from The Giving Tree was "the proper measure of Nature is in its service to human desire", or something even more esoteric.
Or did you mean that what he is saying is specifically centered on 'misinterpreting something as a fantastic version of motherly love'? If so, doesn't the whole thing fall flat to someone who isn't making that mistake?
Well, do you think The Giving Tree is about - I'm going to generalize a little, and say, parental love?
I do not. To give the full version of the popular Tolkein quote: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
The Giving Tree is about a particularly generous tree, and its relationship with a particular boy. There are many metaphors than can be projected onto the story - and a multitude of readings for each interpretation - but any transposition will inherently inject some deviation. (To say nothing of inconsistency!) I do not "do violence to the text" by insisting on any particular interpretation, both as a point of critical analysis and because I authentically don't feel the need.
That's not to say there can't be value in those readings! But any argument that assumes I straightforwardly subscribed to what Wikipedia lists fourth in its catalogue of interpretations is... off-base doesn't feel like a strong enough condemnation.
Excellent. So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
Why would you write a cuckold porn, when you don't really care about cuckoldry porn, and freely admit it could as easily be about BDSM? (Also: It's not written for people who like cuckold porn, it's written for people who hate it.)
> So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
I'm torn between wondering what flavor of Voight Kompf test this is, and recommending the answer as "someone sent a little something to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and asked nicely". Works even better as a response to porn commissions!
More seriously, I'm assuming "write what was written" refers to Teach's stream of consciousness directed at the person who believed the tree-as-motherhood interpretation, and not the interpretation itself? The obvious response is that I *wouldn't* write something premised on such a weakman, and hanging so much text on thin premises would be the result of the ample contempt on display and not any particular deep insight. Blowhards raging at morons isn't novel, and isn't a signifier of much worth.
If instead you're claiming that Teach doesn't believe the tree-as-motherhood interpretation and *also* doesn't believe the reader believes it, you return to the original task of demonstrating any value in the first reading and not as a dialogue. Blowhards raging is even less novel than the subset.
I think the point is that the collective unconscious, if you will, affects both the writer and the reader, in the way they can communicate cultural assumptions without either being aware of what they're doing. So it is _an_ interpretation, but it is fundamentally true if the wider phenomena it references are true.
Still going through the book. And - yes? But also no.
The book vacillates wildly between what I am pretty sure are actual points, and what I am pretty sure are stories whose purpose is to get some percentage of the expected audience to feel and/or notice something (and whose factual accuracy I am pretty sure the author does not care about at all, because the factual accuracy isn't the point). For that passage, which I haven't reached yet, I think it literally doesn't matter whether or not it is true in any sense.
But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.
It's really weird reading; it's so close to what I do and how I write, and yet so different, focusing on different things. (Also, I find the book to frequently say outright what should be hinted at, and to hint at what should be said outright. Yes, masturbation is about satisfying yourself, and sex is about satisfying somebody else. Just freaking say this already, why the constant niggling hints over multiple chapters, using an encryption that nobody who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?)
Can confirm that this book will never be ruled out as a work of great genius, but that's because nobody will ever understand it, and that's probably because it's nonsense. I promised a part 3 review on this, and I've been avoiding it because it's actively painful to read this book.
Thanks for the link, Scott!
I actually kind of like how this book reduced you to these enjoyable ramblings. But I do have to say I've always been confused by people who thought TLP was amazing and profound, and especially was surprised by your admiration. (I think I heard of TLP from a David Wong Cracked article on the Alec Baldwin monologue in Glengarry. It's been a decade but I had a sense that article was popular and captured something about the early 2010s lead up to todays Culture World War.)
I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse. When you cite him as an important influence in decoding scientific studies and psychopharmacology, I was very surprised -- that is not at all what I thought people admired about him, but maybe I've never gone far enough back into his archvies and that's what he used to do?
Yeah, exactly. It's a shame because he was really excellent at that, but his cultural critique fame overshadowed this both in terms of what he wrote and in terms of how people thought of him.
I think his fame corrupted him and he became a caricature of himself. That happens to some people. There's a wonderful anthology by Dwight MacDonald called *Parodies*. It has 2 sections, "Parodies" and "Self-parodies," and the latter section is subdivided into "Self-parodies, conscious" (did you know Graham Greene won second prize in a Graham Greene parody contest?) and "Self-parodies, unconscious." Many fine writers produced unconscious parodies of themselves in their later years -- Hemingway is one example.
Watch out, Scott -- don't let that happen to you. (I don't see any signs of it yet.)
"Why Do I Suck?" seems like it might neatly straddle the line between "Self-parodies, conscious" and "Self-parodies, unconscious".
(For what it's worth, I still liked and respected it as a piece)
I am not sure what you guys mean about TLP becoming corrupted by his own fame and his later posts becoming self-parodies. The last post up on his site is "Who Bullies the Bullies?" which, at least by my reading, is a pretty cogent analysis of why activists' calls to censor and regulate the internet will only be successful to the extent that they align with corporate and other institutional desires to monetize and control.
Perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the activists (ie all of us) believe that they are challenging the existing categories of control, they are mostly just reinforcing those categories.
> I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse.
Same. Whenever I try to read something he wrote, it just fails to connect in such an immediate and decisive fashion. Ex: "It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother." Well, no, *I* never thought that. And now the next pages of strung-together thoughts aren't even starting from any grounding at all. "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish." Haha, nope! *Definitely* falsifiable. And so on.
"Well, no, *I* never thought that." Yes, exactly. I read about 50 pp of Sadly Porn, first the opening 30 pages or so, then, in an effort to find my way in, random chunks from here and there, and my impression is that this guy keeps making the same move over an over: He presents some insulting caricature of what I, the reader, think, then scoots off towards the horizon cackling, apparently convinced that I'm willing to follow him to the ends of the earth in order to find a page where he shows a deeper understanding of me the reader, or to get a chance to argue with him, or to find out whether his insulting caricature was just a form of flirtation or . . . But I'm *not* willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, because I don't see enough evidence that he will have something big to give if he and I, the reader, reconcile. I followed him for 50 pages, saw the same move over and over, and left in search of greener pastures -- which are not all that hard to find, by the way.
"But it's not really falsified, since you're just in denial about how porn is your fetish, because it's a better power play and status move to claim you really have desires and fetishes!"
(That sort of argument is itself so deeply unfalsifiable and smug as to drive me to figurative rage.
Not literal, because it's not worth expending real emotion over.)
I found TLP to be around 50% interesting insights that I wasn't getting anywhere else and helped me see the world in a different way, and 50% pure unfettered bollocks. Luckily I have a pretty accurate algorithm for discerning the bollocks - it occurs primarily in passages containing the word "you"
That's very sensible and would probably work just fine in most cases. I think it might make sense though when reading this guy to have in the back of one's mind the idea that Teach is very very committed to a picture of himself as specialer and smarter than thou. Even when he's not raving on about "you" he seems to me like the kind of person who would pull away from saying the conventionally accepted truth about some subject *even when he thinks it's valid* because giving a conventional answer would interfere with his feeling special. There's mention of something like this somewhere in the comments here. Somebody quotes what he says about how the ancient Athenians handled something-or-other and says nope, he's wrong about that, and that the Athenians were way more interesting than that. I'm not terribly knowledgable about life in ancient Athens, but there was an era when I was interested in it, and when I read Teach's remark about Athenians I thought "wait -- really? -- that's not how I think of life in that era . . ." but I just skated over the comment, in the sort of irritated daze this guy's prose puts me into.
So much here but one part for me about why people like art and I guess why I read the whole thing and why I keep coming back to this substack:
I think, therefore I am.
Wtf? Therefore you exist.
To me, when I get to wrap my brain around someone’s ideas who is genuinely different from myself it gives me a much more visceral and immediate feeling that other people exist than in normal day to day interactions. My brain’s first thought is “what is this? Well, I didn’t make it.”
Makes the world bigger.
Ha, thanks. This is a nice sentiment.
Nice
You just named an experience I've never noticed having but do. Nice.
Re: "why write a book if you have contempt for the readership?" and "why repeatedly tell your readers they shouldn't be reading your book," I think it makes sense if you factor in opportunity costs and think counterfactually about what his readers would be doing with their time if he had not written it.
He may believe, "my readers are the kind of people who waste their lives reading insight porn and esoteric bullshit on the internet, when they should be putting their energy into real things like taking care of their families and advancing their careers. If I don't write this book, they'll waste their lives reading some other kind of esoteric internet bullshit instead. If I write something that will appeal to the kind of people who want to feel special by convincing themselves they understood and benefitted from some esoteric internet bullshit, maybe I can trick them into noticing that they're wasting their lives."
I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the weeks after.
Gonna take that almost 2x pay job offer tomorrow.
Yes -- and he says in the "disclaimer" that this felt like a "duty" to him, or at least that he "fulfilled his duty in life" which is left kind of ambiguous but I take to mean that writing the book was the duty.
I'm not sure if I understood what you're writing about here much at all (was I meant to?) but one thing did resonate with me. I was once mildly addicted to porn, but could never understand what anyone saw in going to strip clubs. I just assumed that this giant nationwide phenomenon was fundamentally unexplainable, even as porn was completely different. But I take you to be saying that rather than look as its patrons as automaton dupes to some social programming, maybe I need to try and *understand* a little better.
Well, you could try, if you like, but you could also do something else. I’m generally on team curiosity, but I think you get to be selective about what you’re curious about.
Deciding not to be curious about something feels vaguely wrong if you’re the sort of person who thinks curiosity is a virtue. But half-hearted research of things you’re supposed to care about isn’t a good substitute for actively wanting to learn how something works.
Going along with the book I am going to horrifically reduce this style of thinking to just being entertainment for the bored well-read. That's not to say it isn't good do self reflections on your desires and status seeking behavior, but this book accomplishes its goals of making sure only those who spend time on such obscurities get barely anything out of it. Which for me, if I am to be spending an absorbent amount of time on something, there are better books that offer more enjoyment and life payouts for time inputted. This also sadly updates me in the direction that Teach has gone insane, based on the giving tree excerpt.
So basically Nietzsche with a side of Bismarck. "Wir sind nicht auf dieser Welt, um glücklich zu sein und zu genießen, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu thun."
I don't think he believes modern people are doing a very good job of being happy either.
Bismarck's point was something along the lines of "Fuck happiness, there is work to do."
Also, fun fact: this quote comes from a letter Bismarck wrote TO HIS WIFE.
That's easy to say if you're Otto von Bismarck and your work is high status and important.
What if you're not, and it isn't?
Yep, and Teach wouldn't believe the sweet words - Bismarck must have loved his work/duty/mission more (as Otto wrote). Teach would approve: making a feeble Prussian King of an outdated monarchy into the absolute Emperor of a modern nation industrialising on steroids - much more Lord Voldemort than Harry Potter. And to many words of love anyway - just trying Edward Teach's perspective. - btw: Nice translation! https://archive.org/details/frstbismarcksbr00bismgoog/page/n317/mode/2up
I had no idea the Iron Chancellor could write like this. Very interesting, thank you.
In trying to find a translation, I was looking at a lot of Bismarck quotes-- he was very sharp, and the letter shows he could also be sweet.
I'm about 15% in and I definitely get a "modern Nietzsche with a healthy dose of misanthropy whose rants aren't curtailed by illness" vibe. I'm actually enjoying it, quite a lot.
I've always gotten the sense that 75% of what Teach says is just him projecting his personal neuroses onto all of society
The other 25% is sometimes interesting
Personal neuroses are rarely one-offs.
Yeah, but he overestimates how common his are.
I'm not sure, his description of the tendency of inaction felt like a personal attack. Late in high school, I realized that I secretly enjoyed it and eventually decided it was because we were forced to be there and didn't have to play any popularity mind games in order to have fun with friends.
The only thing I dislike here is that the whole section on "purposefully misreading something as a defense" is something that could ironically paralyze you into never taking action.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
Holy crap, The Last Psychiatrist book finally came out??? Why isn't this bigger news? This is my white whale. I'm buying it just because I feel like I owe him for TLP, which had more influence on my life than any other single piece of writing.
Seconding, JDatE was really impressive.
I can only imagine Seanbaby will be crushed to hear that.
Holy cow, I did not know you had a substack. Thanks for posting here, I guess?
> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?
> "So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge."
You made me realize that this is exactly why I first hated, and then loved, his blog TheLastPsychiatrist. Reading this kind of stuff always leaves a kind of itch that won't go away, that demands I re-read and mull it over for days. There's an undeniable resentment as the mental worm works it way through me, but I come out the other side grateful for it.
Had to verify, but was pretty sure Edward Teach was Blackbeard's true name. I wonder if there's a connection.
His writing does have kind of a hang-the-authorities, take-no-prisoners feel to it. That's what I'm going with.
IIRC Blackbeard was like a gentleman pirate. Erudite and vicious. It's as good an identity to steal as any.
Sadly, Porn sounds like what would happen if Infinite Jest were rewritten as a work of non-fiction.
That and he comes up with some rather convoluted explanations for are at base, simple psychological processes.
1) This feels like you tried to write the most Scott-Alexander Book possible just to spite the people who say you suck and I'm loving the energy of it.
2) You really need to read René Girard's "Romantic lie & romanesque truth" and "Violence and the Sacred" (and probably one of his later books on christianity). They are about desires and mimetism for RLRT and primitive religions for Violence and the Sacred, and you will probably obscess about them for weeks, oscillating between "this is a whole lot of crap" and "this exactly describes the World as it is" (I've still not made my mind up).
I wanted to review one of those for the book review contest but I won't have time due to my dissertation...
I got the sense that Teach was drawing from Girard the way Jean-Michel Oughourlian uses mimetic desire to explain events like the mass "hysteria" among the nuns at Loudun. In any case, the relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation. I'm fond of Otto Rank and his explanation of the artist's creative personality as it both draws from, and changes, the dominant ideology which evolves according to whatever is the current soul belief.
"The first page has an eight-page long footnote at the bottom"
Gods damn it, stop recommending me books I will want to read because I've already got my reading slots stuffed full of "I bought this and haven't read it yet".
Especially as this seems the kind of book to make me have out-loud arguments with it as I'm reading it! Which is one of the best ways of reading!
As in for instance:
"You are the kind of open-minded replicant who will say, “I don’t have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written!”
Well, yeah, *and* it has to ring my bell. Some things just don't, no matter how well-written they are (e.g. spanking and a lot of BDSM type erotica. I do not get spanking, it does nothing for me, and even when it's presented and explained as to why the person in the story enjoys it, I'm still 'how nice for them' but you could equally be talking about how having your feet painted purple turns you on). But that *is* the crux of the moral problem: if it's not a temptation for me, there is no virtue in resisting it (any more than not painting my feet purple). And badly-written crap of the "Joe got out his [long description of the exact dimensions in every axis of his cock] and started fucking" sort just does not tempt me. So if I condemn it, it's not on moral grounds, it's on "ugh, this offends my aesthetic sensibilities" even if I dress it up as on moral grounds, and that's an entire other chicken to pluck.
And yes, I did wonder if anyone got the Blackbeard The Pirate reference in the nom-de-plume, I should not have doubted this readership 😁
I had the same reaction...
"I cannot spite-read this book and nit-pick every semi-colon of the footnotes with gleeful enjoyment that this is precisely my cup of tea, I do not have the time right now!" 😂
I think Teach is still condemning you here, even for expressing your aesthetic objection to poorly-written porn. I believe the idea is, demanding any kind of merit or standard upon content you're consuming is just a cheap way to signal, for purposes of status.
The "I don't have a moral problem, it just has to be well-written" is just a maneuver to *look* open-minded while actively advertising your selectivity. I think Teach might say that your substitution of "it has to be well-written" for "it should actually do a good job of being tittilating" doesn't really change the fact of what's going on.
Well, trying to work out what his meaning is from a second-hand report of what the book said is really throwing the oracle bones, but my interpretation is that he's saying "yes you *do* have a moral problem with porn, you're just pretending to be open-minded and liberal".
But he could well be saying "your aesthetics are your morals" or something, and that "you really do get turned on by the cheap grubby stuff but you want to signal that you are classier".
To which all I can say is that I'm about as classy as a potato, and the cheap grubby stuff does not do it for me, even if it's dressed up like the new Amazon "Rings of Power" trailers (I don't care how much gold you scatter on the Dwarven princess, where is her beard, you cowards?)
I know nothing about Lacan or Lacanian psychology, but this guy sounds like straight-up old-school Freudian which is a delight and an amusement to me - like encountering a living fossil today 😁 Also, and again it's because I'm only going by the excerpts, I'm not as affected by his attempts at conviction of sin, because I'm used to this - Original Sin and Redemptorist sermons. I already know we have all fallen short, and all our righteousness is as filthy rags!
To offer a perhaps orthogonal viewpoint, I would suggest Teach's observation would perhaps be closer to saying "I don't have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written" is like sighing over the decline of "Playboy" magazine *not* because the women are now the same age as your daughter, but because the literary enfants terrible -- P. J. O'Rourke let's say -- aren't to be discovered therein any more. "They used to be bold, daring! Now it's just tedious ads for Old Spice and Courvoisier intermixed with photos of tits photoshopped to the same unimaginative ISO-36DD standard." Sure.
Plausible that that's his idea.
But that just means his idea's unfalsifiable "because I say so" bulldada.
(I also dislike boring or badly-written porn about things I don't find interesting.
Before this discussion I've never really mentioned that, so it's not signaling-to-others, and I <I>do not do</i> status games in my own head [being in the "half" of people Scott mentioned who respond to the entire framework with "what, people are actually like that? WHAT?"].
Smut works better when the writing doesn't piss me off. That simple.
"Everything is always about status for everyone" is, to use Twitter terms, "some neurotypical normie bullshit".
I would not be surprised if Teach also thought "everyone literally sees pictures in their head when thinking about things", but here I am, aphantasic - and I should relatedly note that the first time <I>I</i> realized "what, wait, for other people a mental picture <I>is not metaphor</i>???" was one of Scott's posts.
The difference being I don't try and convince other people that they <I>aren't REALLY doing that</i>.)
I think maybe several people are talking past Teach here. Here's what I imagine he means.
Sure, there's (1) porn that's just objectively not readable for titillation: "He put his thingy into my you know what and then we did it." There's also (1') porn that is otherwise fine, but has terrible spelling and grammar; if you're the sort of person who gets too distracted by those to absorb the content, I don't think Teach has a bone to pick with you. (Until we get to the next way in which you're an Athenian democrat.)
But then we get to the divide between (2) porn that has basic technical competence, versus (3) porn that has characterization, plot, and actual literary merit. I think Teach is saying that if you refuse to read (2) because you demand (3), then you're just signaling.
Wow, that was a doozy. A couple random notes:
1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.
1. I used to have these fantasies even before I got to know about sex and that famous musicians did well in the sexual marketplace. Now it could be that evolution had designed me to fantasize about activities that would ultimately help me do well in the sexual marketplace....or perhaps I was just fantasizing about being high status.
Well, as a datapoint in favor of the former, I knew I liked boobs well before there was any practical use for this, um, predilection. But then again, maybe this is merely about status, also. As the great lyricists Trey Parker and Matt Stone phrased this very philosophical question:
What makes a man?
Is it the woman in his arms?
Just 'cause she has big titties?
Or is it the way, he fights every day?
...No, it's probably the titties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851BqHMCaeM
Thank you for throwing yourself in that grenade. From what you said, I think Teach has been parasitization by what Sufis would call his nafs, his lower self. The rest seems mere justification for how wonderful Teach is, in ever more fractal and strange looping recursions.
I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness.
Based on his writing, TLP is perfectly aware of this trap, and freely admits he is in it. I don't have a direct quote because I can't be bothered, but I know they exist.
That's still a failing of self-awareness, and frankly a more SEVERE one. It's one thing for a repressed preacher to rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dwelling on the physicality of nubile, toned male bodies to a blatantly fetishistic degree. It's another to have a preacher rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dressed in a leather daddy outfit and openly admitting he has gay sex on the regular and has no plans to stop, but that YOU should stop or else you'll burn in Hell. Instead of narcissistic ignorance, he's acting out of megalomanic delusion.
Hey, Essex. Teach irritates the shit out of me too.
The point is not that people are p-zombies, the point is that you can be an actual human with free will yet think and act in very schematic and counterproductive ways without being aware of it.
I view TLP's writings less like "look how clever I am, you sheep", more like "so I found I am sick and you're sick and everyone's sick, now I'm going to insult you into seeing how because it sometimes works and also is enjoyable".
I think is exactly right. Reading a tone of superiority into it seems like a projection, it's more like "I think we're all fucked, I shall now elaborate."
1. I assumed his thesis wasn't "humans self-sabotage sometimes" or even "humans self-sabotage more often than you think" because, frankly, I'm not sure how someone could get as deep into adulthood as him without realizing that and his assertions (so far as I can parse any assertions from his manic rambling) seem more abjectly totalizing, along the lines of "99% of humanity self-sabotages at every turn and nobody ever actually enjoys anything, hate and spite are the only real human emotions".
2. If everyone is sick and there's no cure (because EVERYTHING is actually about how you're a hollow shell that seeks status, wants to be enslaved, and hates every other human being, including you "wanting" to not be those things), then AT BEST he's just saying nothing. At worst, he's done exactly what the wokes he decries have done: reinvented the concept of Original Sin but removed the possibility of redemption from the equation. My interpretation of his work as mental masturbation is me being CHARITABLE; if I wanted to be UNcharitable, I'd have accused him of trying to push vulnerable people among his readership into suicide, given that the parts that aren't purely masturbatory read extremely close to what my internal monologue sounded like when I was deeply depressed.
I would go for he feels miserable and wants other people to feel miserable, but I'm not sure he's trying to push people into suicide.
Recent insight: people don't just try to spread their beliefs, they try to spread their emotional habits.
This is closer to what I believe if I had to try and guess his own emotional state. In my experience, most people who are misanthropic are in fact self-loathing and are simply totalizing their thoughts about themselves to the human race. That's certainly how it was for me, at least (they also tend to be narcissistic, in the "so wrapped up in their own problems that everyone else's problems stop existing" sense).
Do people really think that Zizek is smart / interesting? I thought he was just a meme made flesh.
It weirds me out to no end, but people do seem to think he is.
I always thought Zizek was more of a Monty Python sketch. For example, here: https://youtu.be/dp8aTYUrPi0
Have you read any of his books? He's not an idiot.
Do you have a recommendation for someone who hasn't read any of them? I know of Zizek in passing and i've seen an interview of him, but I'd like to read him.
Not convinced on interesting, pretty sure on smart.
I was immediately turned off on him when he first gained prominence, by who his supporters were, and his intellectual heritage, and - and this is probably unfair to his thought, but that's life - the sort of smarmy, pithy crap he got *quoted for saying*.
(In fairness, you could do the same with quotes from philosophers I rather like, though their fans mostly don't seem to; with Zizek I think it's the intersection of a Marxian worldview on the economic/social and obscurantist pomo writing style; "sounds deep and attacks the Capitalist Other" is more than enough to make you "brilliant!" for a certain type of person.
It's that type of person that soured me on Zizek; if he doesn't deserve that himself, well ... such is life.)
(I say this not as an entire outsider going "Ewww, Postmodernists!", but as a philosopher by training who's *tried to read their obscurantist bullshit* and found it lacking.
Zizek may well be extremely clever, but I've never seen a reason to take him seriously as a thinker or analyst. This *may be* my fault, but equally I have better things to do with my time than read someone's catalogue to see if there's a hidden gem in the manure.)
I didn't like The Last Psychiatrist-- it seemed like he could invent reasons for just about anyone to be considered a narcissist, and I was never clear about what he meant by narcissist.
He was probably right about disability payments somewhat substituting for a more general social safety net.
My current theory about a lot that's hard to explain: a lot of people, at least some of the time, would rather have intensity than practicality. This doesn't explain little details like what *sort* of intensity different people want.
Could you explain what intensity over practicality means? Is this along the lines of virtue signaling, perhaps to oneself?
No, I'm talking about real pleasures, or at least compulsions, as far as I can tell.
To take a moderate example, there are people who like martial arts well beyond a practical interest in self-defense. They want that experience of attention to fighting. (I'm looking at this from the outside.)
It's possible that practicality is doing things for the sake of the parasympathetic nervous system, and intensity is letting the sympathetic nervous system out for a run.
Here's a mild example-- people who stay loyal to a losing sports team. If there was nothing but comfort and safety, no one would do it. Instead, there's not just the feeling of loyalty, there's the hope of winning some day-- a very intense experience which does happen occasionally.
"Signaling" implies not actually being virtuous, but that isn't it. The most addicted to intensity actually are virtuous, at least within the realm they're trying to be. Think of Michael Jordan being so competitive to the point of being an asshole to every single person he ever worked with, or Kobe Bryant being so obsessive about optimizing every single possible minute of practice that he couldn't stand to wait in traffic or miss a day due to bad weather, and he got himself and his daughter killed because of it, but in both cases, that level of dedication really did lead to being the best in the world at what they were doing, not just a hollow signal to convince others or themselves that were better than they really were. Or think of early alpine mountaineers. The first people to summit Everest had a greater than 50/50 chance they'd die trying, and they were guaranteed to be in pain every second of the attempt. Even when successful, it's likely to lead to permanent reduced capacity, possibly disability. But doing it still means you're the best there is at alpine mountaineering. For a sufficiently competitive or driven person, that's all that virtue means. They won, no matter the cost.
Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading ACT felt like a giant waste of time.
If the goal was to create an antimeme it was succesfull because midway my only though was "Thank god i have a marxist basic training against over-intellectualisation" but then shortly after Marx and socialists were mentioned for some reason so I kept on reading because that didnt seem like a conincidence.
But it still felt confusing and really like stuff for people who do a lot of second and third guessing and then for some reason woke people were kind of insulted because they dont like Elon Musk?
I didnt get much of this whole text, and if this was the intention of the book I feel that its probably a bad book. It reminded me of trying to keep track of the narrations of a disorganized shizophrenic or rather of trying to keep track of someone who tried to keep track of an disorganized shizophrenic. Or of that one time where someone who believed really strong in NLP told story after story without conclusion and claimed that if someone was feeling confused by that, this was how it is supposed to work with a mysterios smirk.
All in all I will never read this book and I guess thats at least something positive.
Also enjoy this smbc. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/clock-speed
There's not much connection between Kenneth Burke and Lacan (I don't think) but I remember studying Burke and seeing a photo portrait of him screaming. I imagined him screaming because of his realization that there was no escape from one’s own lexical frame—every choice of frame makes some thoughts unthinkable.
Lacan, and perforce Teach, seem to be a pure rendition of the Burkean scream. One's thoughts are trying to deceive one, but thoughts are the only way to access truth, BUT their treachery puts any conclusion permanently out of reach—especially for questions of what one wants and what one ought to do. Every positive statement becomes a new enemy, a new guise of self-deception to be triumphantly, then despairingly, unmasked.
To apply Teach’s method to himself is trivial, inevitable—as the Joker would say: “I want you to do it.” What is the hidden content of a book like this? To cause intellectual suffering of the kind that Teach himself feels; to inflict on others the iron maiden of reflexive self-recrimination to which he himself is confined. But it is no victory to point that out; maybe Teach says it himself. I don’t know. All the act of unmasking does is add another level to an interminable game.
There is no personal growth in this direction, only a growing sediment of “surfaced” perversions, each one seemingly superseded only to reappear again and again.
The way out of this is somatic: spend some time in your body, get some information straight from the source! And when you experience thoughts, face them not with suspicion that they are agents of some hidden psychological complex, but with open curiosity and with trust—not faith, trust—because engaging sincerely with one’s own thoughts is where trust begins.
"Take a goodly dose of a serious hallucinogen."
(Serious alternative mode of somatic alternative to that trap.
Fortunately, I'm not in that trap, and Teach can't put me there.
A life of introspection can put some people in that trap, but it's made me absolutely sure that trap has no power over me.)
Glad to know I'm not the only person who does the "pretend that I'm performing music and am awesome at it" thing while listening to music. Congratulations on raising your status to your imaginary society while allowing me to take less of a hit from my own.
More generally I've always thought that TLP was genuinely insightful but also that his narcissism theory could explain literally any thought anyone has while being completely unfalsifiable.
"I'd like to provide money to this charity."
"Ah, yes, to signal to others (who don't even have to exist) that you are charitable."
"Uh, no, because I believe in the cause."
"Because you want to perceive yourself as the sort of person who believes in this sort of cause."
"...yes?"
"Your admission that you are intentionally sculpting your perception of yourself is just a defense mechanism to keep you from developing real values."
"...okay?"
TLP got me through some really tough times, and there's something true and real at the bottom of all the...whatever it is he's writing, but for me it really just boils down to: "Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job."
Well said, I don't know much about this but I think I agree
In the end, the measure of a theory should be its usefulness
I love the last sentence, did you come up with it?
I've been using it for years, but I swear I think I heard it somewhere else.
Given the content of this review, it seems eminently appropriate to miss the point here and get bogged down in a mere subpoint. Please consider this comment as if it were a five page irrelevant footnote.
... anyway, on Biblical depictions of angels, it's a bit more complicated than the prevalence of the "biblically-accurate-angels" meme (referenced here as an "antimeme", but I'd argue it's actually the regular sort) would suggest.
The "biblically accurate angels" memes are derived from how angels are sometimes described in symbolic prophetic visions, e.g. (and in particular) Ezekiel 10, which has angels ("cherubim") described as some eldritch combination of wings, eyeballs, and wheels. It's possible these are intended as symbolic, and not literal.
... but when angels appear in the less prophetic/symbolic parts of the text and play a role in the narrative, it's usually implied that they look human: much more like the "traditional" view of angels.
Daniel 10 explicitly describes an angel looking "like a man" (albeit with "eyes like flaming torches"), Hebrews 13 says "Do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.", and in a lot of places it's not remarked one way or the other, but I think if angels were always appearing in the form of reject Yu-Gi-Oh monsters, it would have been a relevant detail for the narration to have included.
It's possible that this is just how they choose to appear and maybe the crazy accounts are more of a "true form" but it's hard to say and it's not unreasonable to imagine them in the way they usually appeared. So, yeah, no halos or harps and clouds, and, like Balrogs, the wings are debatable, but the traditional view is probably more conventionally accurate than "biblically accurate angels" meme.
Yes. I logged in to say exactly that.
It's not obvious that cherubim and seraphim are angels, as opposed to some other category of creature.
But it is clear that angels at least sometimes can look like people.
In one of the most famous angelic encounter in the Bible - when three mysterious strangers have dinner at Abraham's tent, they explictly looks like humans (so much so that the people of Gomorrhe then try to rape two of them).
However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
Anyway angels don't actually have bodys of course, so the aspect they take is necessarily an illusion, either caused by the expectations of the human being or by the choice of the angel.
> However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
I think it fits with something like Daniel's "human but with 'face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches'", fairly well.
Because, on the one hand, yes they said "do not fear", but on the other hand, it apparently *worked*. If they looked like Ezekiel describes, there's no amount of "do not fear" that you can tell me that's going to convince me to listen to what you're about to tell my about my pregnancy
As with everything else in Christian theology, this has already been thought through by some guy in the sixth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_angelology
There's nine orders of angels, starting with Sepaphim and Cherubim with many faces and unreasonable numbers of wings, and going right down to Archangels and Angels who might on occasion intercede in human affairs. Nobody seems too sure about the function of the "middle management" angels from Thrones to Principalities, but... well, as above, so below.
Luke seems to suggest that Mary was scared of the salutation of the angel, not his appearance. He said, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women."
While it happens "when she saw him" she was "troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be."
Good point. In fact if we are doing serious analysis angels are truly frightening, not because of the way they appear, but because they are a proxis for the presence of God, and no sinful human can see the face of God and live. That's why Moses only sees God's back and Eliah put on a veil before stepping out of the cave to see God. Similarly in Isaiah's vision the eldritch angels are not what he is afraid of, they appear mostly as a warning, like the colours of a poison dart frog.
Yes, a lot of times when angels are described interacting with people they're described as just "a man in shining white clothes" or similar. And never with wings except in the visions of heaven.
There's exactly one place the now-standard (outside of "biblically accurate angels" memes) winged humanoid angel appears in the Bible, and it's so obscure that I think it's probably a coincidence (standard attribution is that the classic winged humanoid comes from Classical depictions of Nike and other figures.) Zechariah 5:9, buried in the middle of an obscure apocalyptic vision.
I don't know what biblical reference you've got in mind, but the angel outside the garden of Eden is at least humanoid enough to hold a sword.
They are talking about obviously *winged* humanoids angels, not just humanoid angels. Their example doesn't seem to necessarily be about angels though. In Zechariah 5:5-11 there are two winged women who fly down and then fly away with a basket that contains another woman who represents wickedness. They take it to Babylon to build a house/temple and a stand for it. Zechariah never calls the winged women angels.
Another issue is that he talks about the problem of Biblical Literalism vs. those pop-culture depictions.
But neglects that Biblical Literalism in that sense is very much a modern [19th century or so?] American invention, as I recall the history of Christianity - but our pop-culture conception of angels dates to at least the Renaissance, centuries earlier.
(Your argument *also* undermines the facial contradiction, since the Literally Perfect And Accurate Bible - as the straw-Literalist holds it - describes them as able to appear both ways...
Mostly his argument just irked me because it looks like the typical Internet Atheist Problem of conflating "a minority view even among American Weirdo Baptists" with "what All Christians Obviously Believe" - same mechanism by which we get people shocked that the Pope doesn't oppose teaching evolution, because they have *no idea at all* that Catholics aren't Young Earth Creationists.)
I'm a conservative Protestant and sort of agree with your point but think the "Biblical literalism was invented by 19th century Americans" line of argumentation is also overplayed. It seems that in the two main sections of the Bible where literalism is an issue -- Genesis 1-11 and eschatology -- there has long been a diversity of opinion. And my understanding is this is still true, even within the Catholic Church -- the church has never repudiated YEC, though in practice conservative Catholics, both laity and clergy, are more likely to stay away from it than conservative Protestants.
What does seem to have changed in the 19th-20th centuries is that Biblical literalism/inerrancy became something of a Schelling Point, as Protestant denominations that didn't hold to it have had a strong tendency to break from a lot of historical notions of orthodoxy, which has led to a doubling-down on YEC that I doubt any of the Church Fathers or Calvin or Luther would have pursued, if they had access to our scientific findings in their own time.
But all that said, even among those who hold to YEC, there is a diversity of interpretations of eschatology, and a fair number of people who throw up their hands and say Revelation cannot be fully understood.
This guy sounds like he would be a joy to argue with. But a book seems like exactly the wrong medium to interact with him.
I disagree, the book gives a nice sense of distance. I think all those angry rants would be terrifying in person.
Are there really people who enjoy the 'English prof sleeps with his grad student' genre of literary fiction? I didn't think people were even supposed to read them, tbh, I thought they were some weird in joke amongst literary scholars.
I got a lot out of the Koan. 👍
That's "literary" fiction as opposed to "genre" fiction, a high vs low divide related to this:
https://acawiki.org/An_Economic_Theory_of_Avant-Garde_and_Popular_Art,_or_High_and_Low_Culture
Neal Stephenson, cruelly but (IMHO) accurately describes the split as The Literature of Competence vs The Literature of Incompetence. (And hints at, but never goes so far as to say, how that relates to the people who read each.)
Which would seem to have nothing to do with "The Unsung Romance of Incompetence": https://crookedtimber.org/2014/08/05/the-unsung-romance-of-incompetence/
I'd agree the one has nothing to do with the other.
Holbo's point is, perhaps, relevant and interesting to those who like or care about their fictional hero's having some sort of (generally extremely obvious) flaw; I am not one of those people, and I don't think Neal Stephenson is either.
Mostly I consider that genre ("flawed hero", ie Noir and all that crap) to be a subgenre of The Literature of Incompetence.
(And honestly, while Marvel have done a pretty good job in the construction of the MCU, it becomes least interesting when it becomes most obvious and ham-fisted in it's "let's now roll out this character's flaw and make a big deal about it" moments.
In particular I think he gets Guardians of the Galaxy completely backwards. That's a comedy of bumbling twits who manage to do OK, but that's VERY different from The Literature of Incompetence. Few identify themselves as bumbling twits, but The Literature of Incompetence is all about creating excuses for why, sure, you the reader may be alcoholic abuser cheating on his wife, but hell, here's 800 pages (or three boring movie hours) of why you are justified in behaving that way; or it's envious cousin "Sure he may seem so great, Mr CEO/policeman/politician but I bet you if you looked closely he's just as fscked up as I am, more so in fact, he's just better at hiding it".)
One set of authors and fans comes from a position of admiring competence (even bumbling competence) and wanting to be better; the other comes from a position of hating competence and wanting everyone to be as incompetent as the reader/author at life in general, albeit perhaps not in the narrow domain of a particular art form.
Of course this is one of the way's where Teach is wrong. Both populations are large; it's just that the envious incompetents control most of the cultural discourse so they seem ubiquitous, but they aren't, not if you go to genre art, to much of STEM, to much of manual labor.
If one wanted to really go out on a limb, one might even say that the admiration of competence is mostly associated with the masculine professions...
"Stoner", by John Williams, presumably qualifies. I enjoyed it very much.
I found it dreadful, and had an impression much like OP's.
Around the time I gave up on reading literary fiction, I mentally tagged these kind of novels as the Hampstead Adultery Novel, because so many of them were professor has affair with hot student due to mid-life crisis/wife of professor has mid-life crisis due to her husband having an affair. Pages of "whatever shall I do now that I am in my 40s-50s, the kids (if we had any) are grown and left the nest, and this is the most successful and happy I shall ever be, and from now on it's just another thirty years of the same until the grave?" Some of them had the wife leaving the husband and taking up with a lover of her own, but generally it was just - not very interesting, unless you were a part of that class of people and could recognise the characters in your own social circle.
The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book.
As a stylistic note, the closest comparison I can think of is Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. 1900 pages of madness, with a preface of "this is an experiment to see whether people are more or less likely to promote this work after an actual suicide".
Heisman was way more lucid.
(Based on my distant recollection of sampling a few chapters, but still)
Very smart, intense people either a) eventually realize the naive view of the world is largely correct, and chill out or b) repackage the naive view of the world in obscurantism to justify the sunk-cost of their intellectual investments.
Sounds like TLP is the latter.
My articulation: We can (mostly) trust our perceptions about reality, and our intuitions about ethics. Our desires are legitimate, and not implanted or manufactured. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there's a lot of joy in it, so enjoy the good times and help others who are going through the bad. People want to live happy and meaningful lives, and the best path to those kind of lives involves self-discipline and/or dedication to an entity outside the self (family, vocation, religion, art, community).
I.e., put a thousand mundane self-help books in a blender and season with a healthy sprinkling of cliches.
Obviously, this view can be nit-picked and edge-cased to death. And it doesn't mean there's not value in studying those exceptions and other quirks of human cognition. But I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of what comes from those deep dives (in literature, philosophy, and psychology) is "Huh, the human brain really does weird stuff when turned inward. Maybe just stop thinking about yourself so much and go engage with the external world."
Imagine that this bundle of naive / small-c conservative / common-sense conclusions happened to be mistaken, but someone had already tentatively accepted it as largely true. How would that person find their way out of this mistake? If the fruit of their experience is that reasoning and literary-type introspection are not reliable ways to reach true, non-obvious conclusions, what's left? Religious awakening?
Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.
It reminds me of George Santayana on 'animal faith' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepticism_and_Animal_Faith).
I should add two other options: c) embrace extreme / bizarre theories that bear no resemblance to the lived experience of most human beings; d) generate useful +/- novel insights.
The aggregate societal benefits from d) makes it worth bearing the annoyance/costs of b) + c), but our pre-test probability that any individual piece of intellectual esoterica is d) should be quite low.
See also: Jordan Peterson, who seems to be a mix of the approaches.
This is the second damn time I’ve made it through 2/3 of a review assuming that it was one of the ones from the competition, and thinking the exact same thoughts: “Wow this is good, but this person REALLY needs to read less Slate Star Codex and develop their own style”…
I have long believed that the reason PUA somewhat works (for a value of "works") has nothing to do with the techniques or the negging, and that's about teaching enough misogyny that it doesn't *matter* to you to get vast amounts of "no's" (because who cares what the bitches believe anyway?). This means that you can hit on them freely because rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you, and with enough attempts, *something* is likely to work out sooner or later.
Alternate theory from Claire Thorn ?)*-- a moderate dose of PUA is good for men who suffer from social anxiety. They wouldn't go to a therapist, but PUA calms them down enough so that they can approach women.
The crucial thing is that they stop with the PUA culture then rather than letting it become their major social group.
*this doesn't seem to be the right name, but I can't remember it. A woman who's also written about S&M and has a thing for men who like theories about gender.
Clarisse Thorn
Thank you. I have no idea why Google didn't do better from the clues I gave it.
Wow Clarisse Thorn, haven't heard that name in years. She was moderately big name on a subset of feminist blogs over a decade ago.
Her theory is basically in line with the common ideas around PUA. You can't win if you don't play.
Negging and peacocking actually do work, though. But only on a subset of women. Something to try if you aren't having much success otherwise. Of course unlike "just ask women out" they are not morally neutral.
I thought peacocking was just wearing some interesting item of clothing in order to possibly get compliments from women. This seems harmless to me. I don't mock men for wearing fedoras, though I suppose that if the fedora has become a cliche, it won't work as well.
Negging is another matter. If you misjudge how the woman will take it, you can make her life worse.
MODERATOR ACTION: Medium warning. Seems neither true nor kind, not sure about necessary either, refers to women as "bitches" (I understand this is in the process of claiming other people think that way, but to me that just adds an extra layer of hostility).
It absolutely wasn't kind, but do you rule out the interpretation? If PUA works at all (questionable), then surely it's significantly about making the practitioners try and try again, and to discount the mental cost of getting a "no"?
But Scott, *necessary* doesn't make sense as the third of the triumvirate: kind, true and [.third thing]. There are very few statements that is is necessary to make, other than "lookout!" as elephants began to stampede towards you and your companion. It seems like the 3rd criterion should be, *there's a point to saying this.* There's a point = it advances the argument, clarifies the writer's meaning, adds a relevant detail, or otherwise contributes to a worthwhiile conversational goal. "Necessary" is just the top end of the There's-a-point-to-saying-this scale. "Necessary" means that there's such a tremendously important point to saying this that it's just necessary to saying it.
I was looking at this because of Scott's moderator action. I suggest that your point would have seemed less offensive if you had not written it in the second person. For example, rather than “rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you”, you might have phrased this as “rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on them”. I hope this is helpful.
The idea was a "generic you" construction ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you ), but if this failed, it's on me.
Yes, I got that. But the thing about the ‘generic you’ construction is that it still says “you“. So it's usually best avoided in cases like “if you're a child molester and you want to evade detection, then…”. I don't think your point had any logical or grammatical problems, just rhetorical ones. But rhetoric matters. Perhaps you can imagine why “If a child molester wanted to evade detection” might be easier for the reader to process.
I apologize if you reach this conclusion but I just wanted to say before I finisih the essay in case I forget:
This strikes me as yet another of the many many things where it's important to learn that something is possible, possibly even common, but equally important to remember it's NOT universal.
It's absolutely vital to survival in our society to learn that people can lie to you. But you can't assume everyone is always lying, or you wind up in an insane asylum. It's important to learn that people can steal, murder, or rape, but it's insane to assume that everyone wants to do those things all the time. It's important to learn that people frequently fail to do the things they claim they will do, even if they're not lying, but it's not the case that everyone who says they're going to be somewhere at 5 pm will show up at 6 or never.
It seems clear to me that some subset of people make decisions about some subset of things for status or mimetic reasons, and some people do not.
Agreed - as a total non-expert in psychoanalysis, that's always been one of the odd things about it to me - most theorists seem to believe they have a "theory of everything" that succinctly explains all human behavior. While not impossible, that certainly isn't how anything else which I have ever studied has worked; it would be weird if human psychology was less complex than the climate, financial markets, or ethics (especially given that human psychology is clearly influencing those things!). But I have gotten a lot out of ideas like this by re-mapping their theory from "an explanation of literally everything" to "an explanation that is true more than you expect if you look for it!"
This is literally the opposite of psychoanalysis -- the theories are really a set of meta-theories (Freud called his project "metapsychology") or formal patterns that help the analyst empirically understand the the one single person (analysand) in front of them, as they reveal themselves through free associative speech.
It is a theory about how to make theories for the most idiosyncratic objects of study known to man, the mind (or in Lacan's case, the "subject who speaks"), as it spans backwards through time via memory and contains associations in the present. It makes no claim to understanding everyone, because that's unrelated to (and literally impossible given) the epistemic basis, which is the unique space of analysis itself.
I will likely read this, but I strongly suspect he has wildly misinterpreted the Athenians and their actions. If nothing else, the Athenians were VERY OK with dragging everyone down to the same level. Suggesting otherwise is...odd.
Also, that Oscar Wilde quote isn't an Oscar Wilde quote. It appears to be from one psychologist writing to another, but was mentioned in the introduction of a book about Oscar Wilde. This makes sense, since Oscar Wilde predates the use of the term "sex" to refer to banging like monkeys (though, interestingly, I'm pretty sure I found an example of it from a few years before the supposed earliest one that can be found online. It is, unfortunately, somewhat ambiguous).
The really interesting part is how closely the "massively dependent on slaves" axis maps to the "historical societies most likely to be lionised as virtuous" axis.
This even holds up *within* ancient greece. A lot of ancient writers, from Plato to Xenophon, comsidered Sparta the most virtuous of greek polises. Sparta also happended to be the most slave-dependent of them all. Most of them where themselves Athenian.
Perhaps work makes you unvirtuous, contrary to popular belief.
I'm a bit skeptical that Athens would have collapsed with the abolition of slavery, but it definitely would've changed things. And Sparta definitely would've.
Also, if the Athenians had no distinction between public and private desires, there were a lot of traitors, rebels, and political changes. And a lot of pining for being more like Sparta amongst the elite.
I sense you share my skepticism.
Most interesting quotes are either attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde, or both. Ben Franklin gets a few also.
Mark Twain was robbed!
Don't forget Einstein. Sometimes Socrates, too.
There's an entire industry of people who speak very earnestly about historic peoples (especially in terms of their mindsets, virtues, vices etc) without knowing a damn thing about their history. It's no consolation to know that this goes all the way back to Herodotus.
This Ed Teach sounds like the kind of person whose defense mechanism against realizing how psychologically screwed-up he is, is to project his worst problems onto everybody else. (There are a lot of people like that.)
"But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it." -- This particular neurosis is not inborn human nature, but diagnostic of having been a teenager in the 1990s, when pop music became self-conscious and ironic for (I think) exactly this reason, to the point where singers couldn't even sing honestly, but used a kind of nasal throttling-back of their voice so everyone knew they weren't even /trying/ to sing beautifully.
"Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines." -- Platonism, Christianity, absolute monarchy, the French revolutionaries, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and Social Justice all deliberately united morality, religion, and politics. Other movements deliberately separated them. A big part of the history of Western civilization is the history of fighting over the very thing he says is obvious--whether these are two separate lines. And, yes; most Westerners /do/ think the answer is obvious--but they're split over which answer is obvious, which proves to any careful thinker that it isn't obvious at all.
"Greco-Roman traditions" isn't a coherent thing you can draw a straight line from, either. The three main strands of Greek thought represented by classical Sparta , classical Athens, and Hellenistic Greece, are all different, and all very different from Roman thought. And you CAN'T trace the correlation between the moral/religious and the political back to Greco-Roman times, 'coz there was no such thing as "moral/religious"--morality had nothing to do with religion to the Greeks.
His characterization of the Athenians as worshipping Lysander is bizarre. Lysander & Sparta set up 30 tyrants from the Athenian aristocracy (most of whom had conspired with Sparta against Athens during the war) to rule Athens, who immediately began slaughtering people who supported democracy. The Athenians rebelled and overthrew them just a few years later. Sure, some people welcomed Lysander when he came into the city--the aristocrats who'd conspired to bring him there. But that doesn't tell us anything about the psychology of most Athenians, and certainly not the thing he says it tells us.
My gripe isn't that any of these are important points. It's that it's easy to shoot down everything he says. Teach doesn't support anything he says well, and sometimes doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. His rhetorical strategy is to spew startling or offensive statements fast enough that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate them. It's basically continental philosophy, where by "continental philosophy" I mean substituting showmanship for epistemology.
definitely reading this book because it sounds like a trip but i have to say, the giving tree section rang extremely true to me.
as a kid we had these writing competitions in elementary school, or maybe it was 6th grade, where we had to do a book review. i didn't put a lot of thought into it - i've always been a procrastinator, and wrote mine the day it was due, maybe hours before. i so distinctly remember picking 'the giving tree' out of a vague sense that it was the kind of book the judges would love to see reviewed. i talked about how it's about parenting and about how it was so important to teaching me, jack, about how good my parents were and how i should be more humble and thankful.
but i remember knowing that the book had no importance to me, hadn't resonated at all, and was my parents favorite, not mine. my essay advanced a few rounds, but didn't win, but it was enough that my mom - a teacher in the school district, shared it around with her peers. i remember feeling guilty and not ever dwelling too much on it. i felt guilty because i felt like i'd hoodwinked everyone, but i maybe i was fulfilling some amazing fantasy: "finally, a child who gets what this book is about (to me) - how good a mother i am for being so self-sacrificing and kind".
now i live 1000s of miles from my parents, but these two things may not be connected.
The Calvin and Hobbes approach to book report writing!
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11
Some of the quoted excerpts from the text are extremely evocative of Reddit comments made by people who admit to being on methamphetamine benders. Not to accuse Dr. Teach of anything, necessarily, but the wild psychological theorizing, misanthropy, hypersexuality, and the way that *it just keeps going like that forever and ever* really read like a text written under the influence of methamphetamine. (Or by someone otherwise having some kind of really intense manic episode.)
"This person writing that must be on $drug" is a reflexion I often make myself when I'm on $drug.
This captures my confused feelings about The Last Psychiatrist so well. Thank you for the work it took to articulate all this! It means a lot to know that I'm not the only person who wasn't sure whether to take him seriously.
This review either makes my want to buy "Sadly, Porn" or run the other way. Not yet sure which. I never felt like I understood anything after reading TLP, but man, the *feeling* of it.
Also: You devil! That link to "The Northern Caves" kept me up until almost midnight! A fictional story about bloggers analyzing a fictional story is exactly the sort of thing I can't look away from...and I suspect you knew what you were doing :P
Roko's Basilisk has nothing on The Northern Caves IMO. It will absolutely mindfuck the right kind of person.
I've now censored three different comments I was going to make after realizing that I had only written them for the purpose of feeling special and unique.
Really like this review, wasn't familiar with this guy, and I can see myself in several descriptions, though not all. Definitely going to try to get hold of a physical copy.
I aborted a comment that was just going to be a joke because I didn't think it was funny enough.
> “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”
My friend has played something like 5,000+ hours of a game that I tried for less than two before I put it down - just wasn't my cup of tea. I have *checks Steam* 1,762 hours logged in a game that he played for four. There is no "lack of understanding" to explain the difference there, beyond the observation that the investment of enormous amounts of time and energy sometimes hangs on essentially-random personal preference. Sometimes even on things that are trivial, by their own admission!
"Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership. It *would* be truly impressive if V could get arbitrary people to commit meaningful resources, but that isn't what's happening here - instead, you have recruitment from a population that's heavily-selected to be amenable for... recruitment. I have a lot more appreciation for charisma as a teachable skill than I used to, but even when I was (more) clueless it never struck me as odd that people who try to be leaders sometime succeed.
Dota patch notes won't really help you understand eSports as a general phenomenon, but they will give you insight into specific nuances that many people care strongly about. Lacan won't really help you understand cultishness, but it might help you understand the aesthetics of one particular cult. Those speak to things you might not know right now, but they aren't really "holes" in a map.
""Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership."
This is what I'm trying to argue against. Yes, it's just leadership, or just charisma, but those words themselves are well-known enough that they disguise mysterious concepts. It's like saying "it's not mysterious why there are flashes in the sky, it's just lightning" instead of trying to invent electrical theory and meteorology or whatever. How come somebody who isn't doing obvious things like offering people power or money can still become a leader?
I agree there's something like "you spend thousands of hours grinding leadership and eventually become good at it", but it still seems surprising that there is a thing to get good at; if I spend thousands of hours grinding ESP, I still won't be able to bend spoons.
> Yes, it's just leadership, or just charisma, but those words themselves are well-known enough that they disguise mysterious concepts. It's like saying "it's not mysterious why there are flashes in the sky, it's just lightning" instead of trying to invent electrical theory and meteorology or whatever.
Ok, I see what you're pointing at. For comparison though, do you consider being a football quarterback mysterious in a similar way? The rules of the game are well enough defined and while human biomechanics are fiendishly complicated, there's no secret sauce in how muscles work or why imparting spin on a throw is useful. Yet there *is* vicious disagreement over what nutrition strategies to pursue, practice regimens to follow, playbooks to follow etc. even among peer champions. And there's no expectation that any level of academic mastery of the techniques will translate to much field success, absent thousands of hours of training.
If football isn't mysterious, I don't think leadership is. If football is mysterious, it's a good sign that masters of mysterious crafts can nonetheless have an awful understanding of what it is they do!
(And if this is the part of leadership you want to understand more of, I'm going to strongly recommend *against* Lacan. Giving people a narrative that they can fit themselves to might win you followers, but it's not a mechanistic understanding. Lack of predictive power, and all that.)
>[I]t still seems surprising that there is a thing to get good at
Might just be conflicting intuitions here - I'd put "leadership" in the same bundle of distinctly human superpowers as throwing spears and distance running. It might be helpful to conceptualize it as part of the same ideaspace as "navigating bureaucracy", where it's an interpersonal skill with some anti-inductive properties but somewhat consistent core mechanics that generalize between scenarios.
> How come somebody who isn't doing obvious things like offering people power or money can still become a leader?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how many people filled out the last round of reader surveys? How many man-hours of effort did you marshal by asking politely? Humility is a virtue, but modesty is self-destructive - no need to be awed by lesser successes than your own!
Leadership is roughly like skateboarding or being able to read lots of big words really fast. Drive. You just have a compulsion to do it. I can theoretically be one of the people who makes obscenely detailed photorealistic pictures with colored pencils. But I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a reddit post saying "this took me 1000 hours" and a faceless shot of me holding a photorealistic dog.
I don't think that's true. The two most charismatic people I knew were in junior school (so maybe age 9..12) and high school, and neither seemed to especially care about this fact or be planning their long-term conquest of society.
Might I suggest that
- very few people ARE actually charismatic, and perhaps you've just never met one?
- maybe there is a reason Weber called it charisma? The word means gift (same root as charity), ie the exact opposite of the claim you are making that it's achieved by hard work.
You don't have to offer people power or money. If you provide (or project an image of providing) understanding of self, or psyche, or the universe, or truth, beauty and love, you'll find plenty of people willing to at least listen. And if you manage to write obtusely enough that they can't instantly dismiss it as bullshit, some of them will continue listening. That's a very effective form of leadership, even if it's not the "do this, and you will be rewarded" type.
As far as I can tell, being a leader is literally just putting in a modicum of effort into organizing people, and do it consistently.
Like, it isn't mysterious. You just ... do something, and people will go along with it, and be grateful that somebody else is doing the organizing, so then they don't have to.
Invite some people out to tea once a week, and you'll find yourself the leader of a group of people.
It's part skill, but also part personality.
Mind you, there's nothing that says you can't grind personality, but there's a degree to which you need to be a leader, not just know leadership.
It's possibly being a leader is "in my personality". Certainly I'd like to think so; the discovery that I could enjoy leading people is part of my personal narrative.
However - I notice that when I want to organize something, I just organize it; I give people a date and a time, and maybe I change it if somebody isn't available. And when I don't want to organize something, I don't organize it; I ask everyone when they are available, and so avoid doing any work at all.
And the difference between those situations is entirely the difference between when I am leading, and when I am not.
It looks like a difference in personality. One kind of person does one thing, a different kind of person does the other. What kind of person am I?
Well, I don't really think I'm a kind of person at all, in those terms. What even are those terms? Those aren't kinds of people, those aren't parts of personality, those are roles we play.
I can be a leader in online activities but get me to in-person stuff and ask me to lead. Not a chance. You are mostly right about how leadership works. Most people hate being the leader for the same reason I do in real life so they want to follow someone and have someone else do the "work". Leadership is simple in the abstract but it quickly becomes difficult in practice.
To be honest, the friend as described comes of as something of a creep. But then, Scott's lusting after cult-like power over others (and imagining himself in front of the crowd when listening to songs) also comes of as kind of creepy, and very elite-American.
I'm not sure how to describe it as a cultural outsider, except to vaguely gesture at the concept of a group of the nerdiest kids in school obsessing over how to be cool.
>...why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?
I have in fact always preferred the latter to the former and never understood why this was unusual. (In fairness, my psyche seems atypical in other ways as well.)
Seconded. Porn is incredibly boring!!
> Envy is different from jealousy: jealousy is when you wish you too had something nice, envy is when you wish the other person would lose their nice thing.
This is the exact opposite of how I remember being taught the distinction! Nor can I immediately find a dictionary source that really justifies it either way… what gives? Anyone else remember this differently?
Even The Simpsons says so!
https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA
The way I was taught is that jealousy is wanting to keep something exclusive to yourself (thus the Lord is a jealous god, or a jealous husband is someone who is constantly watching for signs of potential infidelity), while envy is the desire for that which other people have.
But, firing up my copy of the OED-on-CD-ROM, I get several relevant definitions:
envy 3: The feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another.
envy 4a: Desire to equal another in achievement or excellence; emulation.
envy 4b: A longing for the advantages enjoyed by another person.
jealousy 3: Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage.
jealousy 4a: in love, etc.: Fear of being supplanted in the affection, or distrust of the fidelity, of a beloved person, esp. a wife, husband, or lover.
jealousy 4b: in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part;
This suggests that it is proper to call wanting someone else to lose their nice thing either envy (3) or jealousy (4b), and it proper to call wanting to have the equivalent of what another has envy (4a), but not proper to call wanting to have the equivalent of what someone else has jealousy.
Thus, yes, in this specific distinguished use, I think they've been done backwards. Jealousy of a billionaire could be wanting them to lose their wealth, while envy could be any of wanting to have as much wealth, wanting their wealth, or wanting them to lose their wealth.
Sorry, I am not going to pretend that fair use includes verbatim quoting of entirely irrelevant (and often archaic) definitions in order to assuage the desires of random people on the Internet.
Copying and posting large enough sections from a copyrighted work outside of fair use or fair dealing sorts of exemptions is generally a copyright violation. You are asking for “chill” from someone whom you have just casually asked to very likely break the law for you.
WOW guys it's possible that Marty, like myself and many others, would not even *think* to worry about copyright law when asking for a list of definitions from a dictionary. While your diligent concern for the OED's legal privileges is admirable, and I'm not saying that you should change anything about behavior here, perhaps you shouldn't be surprised when someone is bewildered by legal citations in the face of "cool, can I hear more?" A little compassion goes a long way!
Who gives a fuck, it's the internet, and the copyright holder would sell you for organs if they could. I assume you'd turn over your neighbors to the Gestapo because the law compelled it.
Everyone breaks three laws every day, minimum. If Paris Hilton's stupid fucking attempt to copyright the phrase "that's hot" went through, would you be calling the police on every valley girl who talked for more than five minutes in your presence?
What was described sounded less like envy or jealousy to me, more like a distinct sort of preemptive schadenfreude.
+1 to this. I've always understood envy as 'wanting to have the thing someone else has' and jealousy as 'wanting to have the thing exclusively of the other'. It's clear that Scott has reversed these meanings.
The former doesn't exclude both of us having the thing, and the latter covers both guarding the thing (so that only I have it) and taking the thing away from another (so that only I have it).
Yes, this is the opposite of how I remember the distinction as well.
Precisely. God is jealous, not envious. (Envy is a sin.) By definition, God can't wish He had something, since He's omnipotent. He jealously wants to prevent you from worshiping other gods.
He could of course stop you from worshipping other gods, by changing your brain state. But He sets Himself a challenge of being worshipped by you without changing your brain state and also without even giving any particularly compelling evidence that He actually exists.
I'm not sure whether this is self-sabotage or the exact opposite.
I was writing just the same comment. The word "jealous" is the one we use with excludable possessions - boyfriends and positions of power. Random Dictionary:
envious: "wishing you had what another person has"
jealous: "1. feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship: a jealous boyfriend. 2. fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions."
Had been meaning to task here: what if cognitive biases are actually instrumental?
As in, if most people don't actually have goals of doing things in the world, and just want to look higher status, then beliefs should be picked up or dropped in relationship to how trendy they are.
And this seems to be what your analysis of teach is saying points at.
I agree that if you want to gain cognitive status through pure mind games without changing anything else in the world, you have to be doing something non-perfect-Bayesian (there's some good discussion of this in the comments of the reinforcement learning post) and that makes understanding the deviations from Bayesian reasoning more interesting.
Or as Jukka Sarasti (a vampire in Peter Watts' novel Blindsight) says:
"Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default."
I don't agree that "truth never matters, only fitness", but it's an interesting take nonetheless.
The accuracy of your map improves fitness in some contexts but not in others.
If i'm honest with myself, i think i have goals around this space a bunch, but very rarely are they conscious. It's more like, anxiety around 'this will lower my status!' pops into my head and motivates some action. Trying to make these things conscious will hopefully have the effect of lessening their impact on me.
I'm guessing that our assessments of our own status are _so_ important to us, for evolutionary reasons that, in the absence of official "here is your status today!" metrics, we might have been 'overfit' on anything that gives us clues as to our own relative status. And in modernity, with all the gadgets at our disposal, it's easeir than ever to change your perception of your own status.
I like his rhetorical technique of "it is universally acknowledged that X, therefore you are wrong but I am not, so you should listen to me berate you about it".
I confess I'm a little confused; if he thinks that we're incapable of wanting things and only capable of playing this weird psychological status game, why do we play it? Do we want to play, or do we not realize we can opt out? Most of the quotes you chose feel like rhetorical sleight of hand.
Even more than this, he seems to be talking about this as though we should care about this, and as though we should want to get out of this incapability of wanting things and find the *real* wanting that we never had.
Why would I want that, if I'm the kind of creature that can't even want things? Why not just stick with what I got, because some madman says there's something different?
I find https://meteuphoric.com/2013/12/22/pretend-to-really-really-try/ helpful for questions like this.
"Honing the pretense, and making sure everyone knows what the current standards are, are important goals in a community with goals that might be forgotten if we undervalue pretending to really try."
This seems like would be a great whole other topic for conversation. If honing shallow performance and insincerity is helpful for enforcing community norms to a kind of lowest common denominator -- at what cost does it do this? From my perspective, energy spent honing a pretense has all kinds of other costs to a community as well as to an individual's mental well-being. As a practice, it seems kinda toxic to me.
The layers of performative scrupulous second, third, and forth guessing I hear being encouraged by Teach and that blog post and is already perhaps too prevalent seems unwell to me. Isn't that part of what anti-wokism is railing against -- how destructive it is to demand that people be ever more self-consciously and self-mortifyingly performative in ever tighter circles of self-doubt and scrupulosity?
It sounds like you're asking two questions. One is about how to use the word "want" - I think it's fair to hypothesize we're bad at directly wanting specific external things (like sex or money) but can still "want" to win status mind-games.
The other is about why we don't opt out; I think the answer is something like "this would involve accepting you're not very special or high status in the grand scheme of things" which is hard for most people.
At some level the answer probably reduces to really basic things about what the human motivational system is.
But does he give evidence that and why these two kinds of wanting are different? Or just refuse to elaborate and leave?
It seems convoluted to imagine that we have two nearly-indistinguishable kinds of wanting. Do they occur in the same part in our brain? Which comes first in development? Why are we "better" at the internal, harder-to-observe kind?
Let me play devil's advocate: the internal wanting doesn't exist. Instead, we want big, abstract things in exactly the same way as small, tactile things. The self-defeating behavior he's trying to explain is just the accumulation of the pain-avoidance heuristic triumphing in small post-mortems in the face of vast uncertainty. We act, it sometimes doesn't work out, we sometimes overfit, and some people are wired to overfit more. And some people fit less; any success is theirs and any failure is someone else's. They have escaped the status mind-games by smugly playing without introspection. (Go ask a bunch of salesmen to rate their own importance!)
If you want to see self-improvement, ask someone to preemptively write two post-mortems (post-morti?), one conditioned on their success, one on their failure. It's an tactic I derived from the book Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick. One of their observations is that "everyone knows" about game-changing technologies and opportunities, but companies' heuristics prevent them from reorienting to capitalize on those game changers. But instead of supposing that companies want to fail, they suppose that companies just don't know how to pursue the things they want.
Perhaps because our wants are non-orthogonal and thus are in conflict?
Thought experiment (centered on my experience because I'm a narcissist (using an in-joke to be more likeable (calling out my self-awareness to seem sophisticated .....))):
When I was a little kid I loved rainbow-colored things. Indeed, I still like rainbow colored things. Rainbows are pretty.
Then I learned that rainbows are used as a symbol of being gay.
As I grew older, I concluded that I couldn't be seen with any rainbow stuff because people would think that I'm gay, and that's bad.
Then I decided that the only people who I cared about caring about my sexuality were the people I was interested in. So back to rainbows.
Except that it's also a symbol of supporting gay rights/gay everything. And because Culture War, I cannot give any suggestion of support of people who oppose things I care about, even though it's unrelated to this issue.
So I can't wear/use/whatever anything rainbow because it might provide support for people who hate me.
So my wants conflict and thus I cannot fulfill both of them at the same time. And one of these wants involves how other people perceive me.
That excerpt about The Giving Tree clicked perfectly in my mind and made so much sense that I have to read the entire thing now. I definitely do agree with him about the self-knowledge trap having experienced it firsthand. Although, I prefer imagining sex in my head as opposed to using porn and have always felt that this was more direct and enjoyable. Thanks for writing about this; not sure what it says about my thinking, that I find all of his explanations sensible but I'll have to explore more.
Are you by any chance a highly-driven highly-charismatic person, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout?
I don't know about highly driven but the rest would work for those that know me well. And though I am deeply misanthropic, I ultimately think humanity is what makes existence worth it and lovable so I don't know if I qualify fully.
Yah that part was well done but I feel like it wasn't that original. Hasn't Alice Miller been down that path before, or at least one fairly parallel? I liked the dream analysis bit better.
I'll have to explore this as well, it's the first I'm hearing of it.
Scott it's Infinite Jest! Teach is trying to write Infinite Jest!
IIRC Infinite Jest had most of its long digressions in end-notes. These are literally footnotes - he'll split the page and have half of it be the main text and the other half footnote, for as long as it takes.
No, the film! "In the climax of the book, James admits that he made the fatally-entertaining Infinite Jest as an attempt to create something so emotionally overwhelming that it would break his son out of his shell."
IJ was darkly funny and interesting. The thermonuclear war games on the tennis court. The Jinn living on human sweat on the towel dispenser. The lovable little brother with a mouth full of bicuspids. The head in the oven suicide - a microwave oven.
This book just looks tedious.
Minor correction on Rev 22:18 - the books of the Bible were collected as a library and canonized as scripture long after the Book of Revelations itself was written. While it's true that many people retroactively apply the verse in question as applying to the book as a whole, it's also impossible to read the various surviving texts without concluding that more than a few words in the Biblical texts were altered long before the whole thing came together as the 'Bible'.
IE, the Book of Revelation was referring to itself. There is also nothing about eternal torture in Rev 22:18.
Sure, but adding the "plagues that are written in this book" seems a close enough approximation. I guess if you're already misinterpreting this one verse to be retroactively incorporating all of the Biblical texts (+/- the books the protestants call the Apocrypha?), you can get away with a claim of eternal torture, since I'm pretty sure it's mentioned at least once in the whole Bible.
It’s not called “insight porn” for nothing — though we could easily use the term “sage writing” a la Thomas Carlyle, which leads to an either interesting or disturbing comparison of TLP’s writing style and, say, Mencius Moldbug’s; both engage in a kind of speaking-at and speaking-for the reader, putting words (desires? other things?) in the reader’s mouth/mind, so that the particular *type* of insight porn is pretty clearly BDSM. As a commenter once suggested on TLP’s blog [paraphrasing] “you all visit this site as a comedown lecture after a fap.”
What a strange book.
I think there is something in the principle of teaching by being deliberately obscure, though. I think that's one of the main understood reasons why Jesus used parables so often. If someone thinks they've understood you then they might go away and think about your point for a bit. If you say something memorable and people think they've not understood you, it'll niggle at them and they'll go on pondering what you said for longer.
More cynically, teaching in parables means that you never have to say anything sufficiently specific that someone can meaningfully disagree with you.
Less cynically:it's easy to communicate, understand and argue about information that slots into a pre-existing, compared to challenging or amending the framework itself.
Do we have any Mormons reading? What's the "feel" of the Book of Mormon? Does it have parables and stories and random mishmash so there's something that appeals to everyone? Or one particular tone?
So many of the responses here come from precisely the sort of hyper-intellectualized place that Teach is talking about. I, personally, can't stand rituals or the vagueness of "traditional" religious literature. But I'd be a fool to assert that my tastes represent anything commonplace. The history of humanity shows us that most humans love, and always have loved, both ritual and the protean vagueness of mythical language.
One could even argue that the real flaw in Marxism (Russia and China) was their lack of ritual and mythical-language texts meant they never really burrowed all the way into their societies. The Nazis seemed to be a lot more in touch with this, and I expect they'd probably have come up with some mythical-language texts in time, if circumstances had worked out differently.
If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog.
Agreed.
I'm confused, this seems like a very typical Scott post. What are you expecting from ACX that _isn't_ like this?
This seems to be an attempt to give some meaning to a rant by someone who tells us repeatedly that he's just trying to confuse us. Usually Scott seems to try to write about things that have some possible ways of making sense.
You could call it that. Or you could call it an attempt to extract ten thousand words of interesting insight out of two hundred thousand words of weird dreck to save me the trouble of reading the weird dreck for myself.
Or at the very least he's generated ten thousand words on the same theme.
Yes, I think he's done the main job of a book review, which is saving others from reading it who shouldn't, and encouraging others to read it who should. And there is some value in learning about what people in this community are talking about when they talk about this particular author. But if this becomes a larger percentage of what is going on, I'll lose interest.
"We don't really have desires. We only desire to desire something", where, as Yudkowsky would put it, desires are what push us to action to achieve real world goals. Regardless of whether you agree with all the implications of this, how does this not make sense?
That was where I gave up entirely.
It sounds like “you don’t really eat things. You only eat things that eat things.” It’s a blatant contradiction. Maybe it means we don’t desire external things, but do desire internal things, in ways that push us to achieve, and one of those internal things that we desire is to desire external things? But then why not just say that?
I think that's exactly what he meant, and I do find your phrasing to be clearer. But I didn't find his phrasing particularly hard to understand either.
Even then, that's either a truism (yes, our brains desire-mechanism has a lot of internalized bits that don't directly correspond to sense-input and we have a cloud of vague Cartesian doubt between us and reality- if you're the kind of person who reads weird niche rationalist blogs, you probably already know that), nonsense (When I want to eat something because I'm hungry, and feel satisfied when I'm full, am I supposed to believe my desire to eat had nothing to do with the external world at all?) or both.
Are the things you LIKE exactly the same as the things that you WANT?
Have you never felt a tension between liking vs wanting?
Or, to put it differently, 60 yr old man with 20 yr old girl. What's he after? It's not exactly desire, it's more the wish to desire like he did when he was 20, to care as much about sex, to see the world anew, as back then; it's not desire it's the desire for desire.
I'm not going to justify the writing style. But to simply dismiss the points (as summarized by Scott) as meaningless?
Well, that's the reason society is split into the few (who possess The True Knowledge) and the many (who do not). And it's not like the few have to jealously guard their knowledge; most people simply are not interested in how things really work.
Attempting to give meaning to confusing rants is one thing Scott is consistently drawn to and world-class at; I'm reminded of his steel-manning of the Time Cube for instance.
[like button] to Kenny's reply
I'm not asking this in a snarky way, but genuinely curious - what prevents you from not reading the things you don't like?
Did I say that it did? But I have to read it first, or at least much of it, to discover I don't like it. I read this, or more accurately skimmed it, with growing dismay, lack of interest, and most of all lack of belief in the validity of whatever either you or Teach were saying. That rarely happens here, and I try to give you the benefit of the doubt, or I would have quit earlier.
"I read this, or more accurately skimmed it, with growing dismay, lack of interest..."
That's exactly how I felt about it, too.
Edward Teach must be so much fun at parties.
If EVERYTHING Scott writes becomes like this, then not reading things like this amounts to not reading the blog. But you said that if he merely writes SOME things like this you would completely quit. Why not just read the posts you like and not read the posts you don't like?
I already answered that question in the comment you're replying to. I have to read it in order to find out if I like it. And since posts sometimes start out rather chewy and then become really good, skimming the first paragraph isn't enough.
This isn't like a post headed "Austin Meetup Next Sunday," which I know I can ignore since I don't live in Austin. Scott's book reviews are normally some of his best stuff; that's why I was so disappointed in this one.
For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. It took a book that I would never read, and presented its deep and insightful findings in a thoroughly enjoyable manner.
A statement true about many ACX posts. Only in this one the last five words seemed distinctly inapplicable.
For what it's worth, this was a book I was never going to read and I read your whole review and enjoyed it in much in the same way I enjoyed resident contrarian's (unfinished) review. What comes through of Teach's worldview I find repulsive, but then I find it kind of soothing to read you grappling with it. So as an aesthetic experience, it was rather nice.
Scott, since you said in a prior post that you, like most humans, can't help but let the naysayers prevent you from writing about things, PLEASE do not let naysayers narrow the scope of books you review. Your breadth of content is engaging and inspiring and I'm sure I speak for many long time readers when I say it's one of your blog's best features. Don't kill your golden geese cause one guy in the back wants you to cater to his every whim without a drop of energy investment on his part.
Yeah I sort of agree. I think that the books seems horrible to read, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the book review, but it was still something that I probably never would have considered (the tree should teach the kid math?), and I value that. But obviously if every post was this, I wouldn’t be thrilled
Wow, this is almost as belligerent as Teach himself. I didn't demand that Scott cater to my whim, I just said, in one line, what I don't care to spend my leisure time reading, and let him decide whether to do anything about that. I -love- the variety of Scott's book reviews (the Arabian Nights one was one of the greatest hoots ever), but not this one. Let others invest their energy in Teach; I tried but found it unrewarding.
I recommend skimming when things get dull.
I did. Wasn't enough.
What prevents you from eating something you find revolting every day?
I assume this was, like many of your book reviews, a one-off, but if you did, for whatever reason, start shifting your blogging towards trying to seriously engage with what I can only see as a mix of deranged ranting and vicious psychological attacks as if it had some heavyweight intellectual merit, I wouldn't be able to read your blog due to actual, visceral revulsion regarding the subject matter. I'm certain Teach would say something hateful and misanthropic about how that just proves his unfalsifiable and totalizing theory is right and I'm just coping (but in the form of a 10-page footnote), but I've dealt with enough psychological self-abuse to know what it looks like coming from someone else, and I have no desire to engage with it or with people who pretend that it's anything but what it is.
I read this review and I'm glad Scott wrote it but I also find "trying to seriously engage with ... psychological attacks as if it had some heavyweight intellectual merit" a bit triggering and unpleasant. So, maybe a content warning to allow people to more easily skip these?
What would the warning say?
FWIW I have little interest in TLP and no desire to actually read this crazy book but am entertained by ACX reviewing weird and out there stuff. There are many other places where I can get sober news commentary; This kind of post is more interesting.
But I will also probably keep reading no matter what.
I didn’t like this review and wouldn’t want more of it. But I do agree that it is the kind of thing I dislike that a site I find interesting might occasionally have. That is, it’s a mistake to do this, but at least it’s the right kind of mistake, ensuring he isn’t always erring on the boring side.
"Mistake" seems like a judgment that has to come from the audience, and the audience's responses seem to be generally positive so far, so...
Exact opposite sentiment for me, I really enjoyed this post.
I'm an intermediate sort. I didn't love it, but it isn't driving me away.
I now believe that one of Scott's big drives is looking for places where there *might* be interesting patterns, and deducing and clarifying the patterns.
This is actually my favorite sort of content, to balance out the conversation here
> The main message I get here is “Teach really likes talking about classical Athens”:
What a coincidence. So do I. The difference is that I also like reading about Classical Athens.
This is normally where I'd expound on how wrong he was. But chasing down this philosophy's points of fact is a waste of time. It is, at any rate, missing the point. Nothing so pedestrian as facts is relevant. I know what they found in the dark, what they mined out of ponderous tomes and dead languages. It's nothing more than a dark art. Useful but uninteresting.
An obituary for a certain experience of knowing and learning and for the self that creates. People get other things now. We will still be unable to satisfy the muse, but the right metaphor might not even be sex. I guess Teach is going down with the ship.
Here it is, someone who gets it.
Edit: or, at least, is perhaps on the same wavelength as me regarding, shall we say, a perennially popular mode of using historical societies as idealised analogies rather than trying to, you know, understand them on their own terms at all.
I actually started yelling at my computer when I got to the quote about Athenian democracy, like the proverbial boomer yelling at the TV: "THERE IS A TENSION BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM" IS NOT A NEW IDEA ANY FRESHMAN TAKING WESTERN CIV COULD...
and then i realized from the Teach perspective this probably reveals something discreditable about me.
"Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them."
You just described my personal hell.
Realizing the horror and revulsion the above statement caused me, for the first time in my career, I'm thinking about quitting and starting a one-man business.
I think we are complicit in the actions in our government is true and the source of most false conspiracy theories. False conspiracy theories seek to explain why we are not complicit. For example sandy hook conspiracies seek to explain why supporters of gun rights arent complicit in the most shocking example of the harms that can be caused by guns being readily accessible in America. 9/11 conspiracies seek to explain why 9/11 was not a discernibly motivated response to American foreign policy but a secret conspiracy Americans are not responsible for.
I first heard about The Giving Tree being a metaphor for mothers when I found online a script for the original stage-play version of Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds (then titled "Thoroughbred"). It wasn't at all subtle in its repeated references to The Giving Tree, so the actual film was better off without it.
Spotted Toad claims the secret to Harry Potter's success is that it's from the viepoint of Harry mother, who loves him unconditionally:
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/ghost-witch/
The phrase "you can be omniscient or omnipotent but not both" reminds me of the lesswrong post "Introduction to Cartesian Frames"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BSpdshJWGAW6TuNzZ/introduction-to-cartesian-frames#5__Controllables_and_Observables_Are_Disjoint
(Which I imagine is NOT AT ALL what Teach meant.)
As another reader of the book, I completely disagree. However, I don't think I have ever read a more thought-provoking book review.
This is a dense review, but my first and strongest thought was "if it's constantly telling you to lower your mental defense mechanisms to accept its truth, and you can't understand it but you get the feeling that if you did it would be some sort of massive revelation, and your definitely-not-a-cult-leader friend is a big fan of it... maybe it's a cult." Or at least, using the same tools as a cult.
Tell someone that you have rare and secret knowledge. Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth. Make your explanations deliberately a bit obscure, so that they feel invested in the work they put in to understanding it. If someone feels like they understand you a bit too well, tell them they're still wrong, they're falling for an antimeme, they need to study even harder. Keep them feeling like they're on the brink of a revelation without ever gaining the clarity that might allow them to notice that it makes no sense. Explain with wild free-association chains that give people the sense that everything is connected and so your ideas can explain *everything.* If they ever feel tempted to go with the normal, boring explanation that would connect them to broader reality, turn that temptation into a character flaw - the only reason they think that way is because they're giving in to their brain's defense mechanism and they can't handle the truth.
Defense mechanisms do exist, and sometimes it really is hard to explain a complicated concept without wrestling with various imprecise metaphors. But other times, it's hard to understand because it's not actually a good explanation and you're accurately noticing your confusion. And still other times, it's hard to understand because the simple explanation would sound something like "I want to sneak past your rational thought processes because I'm trying to manipulate you."
But.. a very bad one? He abandoned his followers for 18 years, didn't make any fuss about returning, and doesn't see to try to extract anything from them.
Commenting here to second this, this was the impression I received as well.
You left out one vital difference, which is that the zealot (or cultist) cares tremendously that you buy into his system. Teach could not care less whether or not you agree with him.
FANTASTIC.
+1
Hate to spam your comments section but I was thinking about your cult leader friend, the influential people I know, the general rise in conspiracy theories, and the way people talk about ostensible facts, and I'm wondering if any smart people know of resources on how symbolic thought works. In particular I'm wondering how fuzzy the line between concrete observation and metaphor actually is.
In my mind these are two distinct and complementary ways of thinking - It may get across the beauty and majesty of a sunset to describe it as gods spilling out paint onto the canvas of the sky or whatever but I didn't literally see any gods and I'm well aware of that fact.
If you talk to someone who believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya or whatever though...it seems like multiple things are happening:
1) The person says this in the same way that I said the sunrise thing: it's a story that explains all the things they dislike about Obama and why they think he's an illegitimate leader,
2) There's no correlation at all between whether they say this and their intelligence/curiosity/ability to observe the world and tell truth from fiction with less emotionally fraught topics, and
3) They appear to genuinely believe Obama was born in Kenya.
A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying - they don't actually believe Obama was born in Kenya, but they think they can say Obama was born in Kenya and that be taken as a fact mistake, where if they said "he has a funny name and is the wrong color" they'd have to own up to being racists. But this does not seem to be what's happening at all, and conspiracy theory experts seem to believe both the "it's a story that better explains their grievances than actual truth and that's why they say it" and the "but seriously they also believe it" idea.
Likewise, influential people often say things as though they are statements of fact when they're actually a simple opinion or obviously false. These are often statements that, if made metaphorically or more conservatively, would speak to very real problems that real people have. I've always assumed that their "followers" profess to believe this even though they don't actually because there was status to be gained in professing faith in an obviously untrue thing. But also it seems weird to just assume a bunch of folks are liars.
And then there's religion. Not to get into the weeds too much here, but my parents believe, truly, with all their hearts, that those who do not accept the existence of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be tortured for eternity in hell. They also are people of principle who would not let their son be tortured for eternity in hell for want of his company. But they do not bring up my atheism or lack of church attendance because it would make things awkward. That does not strike me as the behavior of someone for whom this fact, which I know they believe with all their hearts, is literally true.
My original question when starting this post was going to be "do y'all think other people might have a fuzzier distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation than I do?" but then it occurred to me that if I did this I'd have no idea I was doing it. So do y'all think people have a fuzzy distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation?
I don't know a thing about this so read this in that light.
It seems to me it's more like many people live bundled up in various fuzzy blankets of delusion that provide existential comfort by conferring a felt sense of belonging and meaning that is not available to them through other means.
So it's not so much that some people don't distinguish clearly between metaphor and literal objects, but that their self-protective delusions are fairly impervious to all kinds of contrary evidence. And maybe add to that that some people feel much more comfortable filling gaps in evidence with all kinds of unfalsifiable stories and mental fabrications. And some people feel more comfortable than others believing those fabrications if they are presented wholesale by a beloved authority figure.
I do this too. I can tell happy horseshit stories about things I want to believe are true about people and the universe and the nature of reality. My stories are pretty small and not very dramatic and I don't get a big sense of group affirmation from them, but I still do it. So it's a matter of degrees and I'm just somewhere on the human spectrum that way and I'm guessing you are too, even if neither of us are in the center of the bell curve.
I think people adopt a belief (and then consider it to be true) on the basis of many criteria, including the likelihood that it correctly describes the world and whether it is agreeable (is it consistent with my previous values, is it something my friends believe, etc.). For some people, probably most, the truth of a belief is not something that is very important during this adoption process.
> A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying
I've honestly never understood how people can honestly believe this conclusion. It's just a fantastic conspiracy. I mean they're *literally* saying that all of these people that claim Obama was born in Kenya don't actually believe what they're saying, but they're instead engaged in a grand conspiracy to just keep repeating that totally-true-thing, *wink*wink*nudge*nudge*, until Obama is declared an illegitimate president or something, but that nobody breaks character or slips and gives the game away, ever.
Believing that these people are lying strikes me as QAnon-level conspiracy nonsense.
I think the steel-man reading is something less like a concerted conspiracy and more like Zvi Mowshowitz's simulacrum levels: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/. The tl;dr:
Level 1: "There is a lion across the river."
Level 2:"I am saying there is a lion across the river because I do not want to cross the river. The existence of the lion is immaterial to me, but I'm assuming you believe me."
Level 3:"I am saying there is a lion across the river because I am part of an anti-river-crossing coalition who are lobbying not to cross the river, and we anticipate that the pro-river-crossing coalition will say that there is a lion whether there is or not, so we're just playing by the game's rules. Also we'd be better at the game if we all actually believed there was a lion."
Level 4:"I am able to gain support in the anti-river-crossing coalition by being anti-river-crossing, and anti-river-crossing people say there is a lion so I am also saying there is a lion. I literally do not know what truth or falsity is."
The statement "I don't want a black man with a funny name to be president" is socially indefensible, while "I genuinely believe this man was born in Kenya" is a statement that makes the outgroup think you're stupid but not evil/unemployable/ostracizable *as long as* it's believed that you genuinely believe it. Therefore people adopt that belief or at least the words about that belief just so they can express themselves while maintaining plausible deniability about being a racist.
The simulacrum idea obviously has some insights. But my issue with this whole theory, especially in this context, is that most people aren't just blatant liars, and have a hard time making a belief core to their identity while not genuinely believing it. My other issue with this belief is that such people are, at least on an explicit level, fine with black men being president, so long as they're the right kind of black men. They'd be thrilled to vote for Herman Cain, for instance. They therefore do not think of their problems with Obama as racism, but rather globalism, elitism, anti-American sentiment, etc. Things they'd think about a *white* president with Obama's beliefs.
With that said, it's clear they would not think or say that a white president with Obama's beliefs was a secret muslim, or that they were from Africa. Conspiracies around the white president's illegitimacy would also exist (see Biden and Clinton), but they wouldn't be based in such a weird and obviously falsifiable worldview. It's clear that the conspiracy theory's racial payload is a feature, but I don't think it exists because of Obama's race, and I don't think the underlying complaints would have led to ostracization (at least not in 2008/2012). So then what's the motive for lying? I think there's some signaling going on, but that these people actually do believe this on an object-level. I'm wondering how that is possible when many of these people are otherwise curious, thoughtful, intelligent, and reality oriented in other contexts.
> It's clear that the conspiracy theory's racial payload is a feature, but I don't think it exists because of Obama's race
I would speculate that it's just like any other physical feature that people exploit to make a viral meme, like Bernie's crazy hair. I think the main driver is the usual "sticking it to the other side" in whatever way they can.
People genuinely believe all sorts of incoherent things if its common in their social group (see religion), but this means that birthers are really not lying, they've adopted this belief as part of their identity.
I talked with a birther who seemed be pretty well-informed about birtherism. I asked him what would happen if it were proven that Obama wasn't a native-born American, and the birther had no idea. It looked like neither he nor his social circle had considered it.
I was shocked, but I didn't have any idea of how to pursue the topic. Does this prove that birtherism really is racism? Or what?
Does ignorance of civics imply racism in some obvious way that I'm just missing? The lack of drive to find out and the lack of curiosity about such questions isn't really all that uncommon. I don't really know what "well-informed about birtherism" really entails I guess. It could just mean he watched Tucker Carlson.
Are Christians straight out lying when they say Jesus was born of a virgin?
Do they genuinely believe it?
Do they believe in some kind of weird "it's truthy even if it's not true" way?
And of course there are woke equivalents for these sorts of statements, claims I won't write (because I have zero interest in being crucified) but which plenty of people with experience of the real world look at in disbelief as "how can you possibly claim to believe something so at variance with every day lived reality?"
"Belief" is more complicated than people make out.
Even the easier "claimed belief" is complicated.
A related concept: IRONY.
In the millennial generation, doing things "to be ironic" has been huge. The "hipster" sub-culture is almost entirely constructed around irony.
Anyway, I suspect irony is primarily a defense mechanism, whereby people are too afraid to say they like something (for all the reasons floated in this post) and so instead they pretend they *don't* like the masculine lumberjack ethos with flannel shirts and Carhartt hats -- but they're doing it anyway because -- isn't that ironic and edgy!
And that's for the bravest users of irony, who are willing to *act* on what they like but only if they can *claim* that they aren't.
Others "ironically" adopt objectively-hideous fashions and ideas -- just ride the L train to Brooklyn for examples -- because they aren't brave enough to either speak or covertly act on real tastes and desires.
By the way, you can even see it in basic sarcastic quips. Saying sarcastically, "oh, do you have high enough ceilings here?" spares you for having to actually say "you have really impressively high ceilings in your home" and actually saying something you feel.
Anyway, that's no way to live.
My sense is there was less irony in history, and my experience is that people in developing countries are more comfortable with expressing actual desires. Is excessive introspection enabled by material wealth leading to too much fear of just doing and saying what you actually want? Or is something else going on?
My son gives fantastic dinner table lectures on this topic and says that we've moved on past irony to post-irony and into new sincerity (which sometimes horseshoes back to irony). And it does all seem like layers of defense mechanisms for a particular socioeconomic class of people under circumstances of increased threat (economic, social, etc) where the rules are shifting so fast and enforced so harshly that everyone is safer if no one can tell where you stand. I'm with you, that's no way to live.
It seems much akin to sarcasm in that tiny doses of it can be lively on occasion but is destructive to trust and relationships in larger amounts.
Interesting. How would you/he describe post-irony? It is another layer of defense mechanism, or just going back to saying what one actually desires?
That's right, I think it is another layer of defense because it's where you intentionally befuddle people about whether you're doing irony or not. DFW was apparently the harbinger of this. There's a whole wikipedia entry (among other things): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-irony
If you're being ironic, there are ways that's usually signaled, so it's something one is generally owning up to while doing and whoever you're communicating it to is in on the joke, even if the joke is also giving you emotional cover. In post-irony, there's a perpetual plausible deniability and no need to own up to anything and no one gets to know what your intentions were. If the intentions in crafting irony are a kind of mocking social commentary or some kind of clever performative emotional distancing, then in post-irony the performer of it is saying "I have no duty to communicate anything to you -- take of it what you will but that has nothing to do with me." So it seems like the entire relational aspect of communication has more or less broken down so that it's pure performance simply making meta-commentary on how meaningless it all is.
(I bet there are people here who could add a lot more nuance to this and might disagree about my characterization. This is not like an area of expertise for me.)
Ugh. Anyway. Spring is coming! :)
Eh, I think collapsing everything into a single concept of "defense layer" actively impedes understanding of the cultural development of and past irony.
I don't mean there aren't defenses, or that they aren't layered, or that there's no point thinking in terms of those, but first: defenses against what? Your description suggests (assumes?) quantitative change in a single direction, from sincerity to greater emotional distancing, and that's not at all what's happening.
What's happening is irony having permeated our cultural consciousness and new developments positioning themselves in reaction to it. These can be, e.g.:
- reactionary: rejecting irony outright (new sincerity);
- accelerationist: layering irony upon irony until it's reduced to absurdity (meta-irony);
- adaptive: cloaking serious messages in irony-conscious delivery (post-irony).
Which is to say, post-irony proper is a defense giving you plausible deniability, yes. But the defense is, first and foremost, against ironic ridicule.
Or, to quote a classic: https://me.me/i/i-used-to-be-trolled-but-i-found-out-a-4270852 (Note how the picture is a ridiculous, badly-drawn panel of a cartoon character cropped out of an infamously crappy webcomic. Also note how what it's saying is meaningful, true to said character's background and, arguably, insightful and true.)
> This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.
I almost stopped reading here, in case the other antimemes were actually more powerful, or less powerful but be unsettling or have some other effect.
Like other commenter here, I was (and still am when I think about it too much) also deeply unsettled to discover that all my actions could be explained by some kind of status seeking or desire to project some image of myself, possibly to myself. It certainly makes me feel like a hypocrite at one level or another, at all times.
From the review, it seems the theory in this book makes the annoying jump from "this is one explanatory mechanism for some things you to" to "this is the only explanatory mechanism for everything you do"! Imagine if we did that, say, in physics. Even if there a single mechanism, there's no chance we'd happen on it without first discovering a number of apparently disconnected things.
That particular ancient Zen koan is great. Thanks for making me aware of it.
Well, in physics almost anything can be explained by the principle of stationary action.
If we extend it a smidge to the appropriate weighting of path integrals I think *everything* can be explained that way.
I'm don't know if I want to read that book and I don't know how to feel about that.
But thanks for the review, it was hilarious.
I've tried reading TLP. I feel about the guy the same way I feel about woke stuff -- I don't understand why I should listen to someone sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies that do not match my internal experience at all. Seems masochistic.
That's a very interesting comparison. See also hellfire and brimstone sermons, which can be pretty popular.
The next question is why a significant proportion of people like that sort of thing.
For a subset (to be clear, I don't believe the majority of people drawn to these ideas seriously believe this)- they like it because it gives them carte blanche to be an awful person. Everyone but the elect are awful scum, while the elect are good and pure- so whatever the elect does to anyone else, it's because the unelect deserve it. And if you don't have a category of "the elect"- well, if eveyrone's an irredeemable piece of shit, then it's not that YOU'RE awful- everyone's awful, you're just HONEST about it.
On the whole, "omniscience OR omnipotence, choose one" thing: I think about the tagline on Teach's old blog was also a Wittgenstein quote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." It reminds me of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao." Even speaking is a form of action which negates your knowledge, words are themselves limiters. They are defined by what they are not. So you can know, but you cannot act perfectly, or you can act perfectly, but only if you concede that you do not know everything.
...and yet billions of words have been written attempting to explain the nature of knowledge and wisdom and our existence. Why does Edward Teach? Because while your action is almost certainly going to end up wrong, not acting is 100% going to achieve even less.
A thought about the Elon Musk example: I suppose Elon Musk prefers to be viewed positively by the general public. I also suspect that he has a lot of control over his public persona and a bunch of smart people advising him in that regard. So why would Elon Musk present himself as someone who has gotten to where he is because of his strong desire/will/actions/accomplishments? You could make a reasonably convincing case that the important factors in his success were his very wealthy and extremely well-connected family. He could present himself as something like the Harry Potter Archetype. And if I understand your interpretation of the book correctly that would make him more popular/beloved? So is this a failure of Mr. Musks PR-Team or is something else going on?
Because Elon Musk's image of himself is more important to him than your image of him.
It's part of a broader question I think of sometimes. Why do we spend so much time and effort trying to impress others, when we know that others hate to be impressed? We just can't stop ourselves.
I don't think having a rich family satisfies the "chosen one" archetype in basically anyone's minds. To stick with the Potter allusions, I think coming from a rich family would make you the Malfoy of the group.
The fun thing about being a psychoanalyst, particularly of the 'you don't know your desires' school, is that the psychoanalyst is perfectly secure in their beliefs. If I say that I don't identify with the status games, then the psychoanalyst can simply say 'You see, you are simply double-plus-good at hiding your TRUE desires, which makes you feel smugly superior, so you ARE playing status games after all, ha-HA!', which is obviously a completely unrefutable type of argument that can be deployed against any criticism, whether from personal reflection or broader analysis.
Yuck, right? Who would want to subject themselves to that? It seems like before one gets to that type of psychoanalyst (and I don't know how common that type is anymore), one would have already heard amply from parents and teachers and other authority figures that they know better than you who you are and what you need and why. We have a surfeit of that by adulthood already, no? And what's needed is something more like the antidote to all that self-doubt.
Charlotte Armstrong's _A Dram of Poison_ is a good mystery with an amateur psychoanalyst of that sort.
The power imbalance built into the relationship between analyst and patient is enormous. Think of the asymmetry in degree of exposure -- or that fact that the analysand can ask a question like "what did your mean by that?" and it is perfectly acceptable in that context for the analyst to remain silent, or to answer that question with a question, or to respond with some statement about the analysand's thoughts or feelings or psychic structure (a statement which itself cannot be responded to with a question that will necessarily get an answer).
There's a description of psychoanalysis in _The Brain that Changes Itself_ by Doidge which is a careful, responsible search for subconscious patterns of thought. I have no idea whether this approach is at all common.
There are undoubtedly many smart, kind psychoanalysts who undertook the long, insanely expensive analytic training in hopes of learning to recognize something like subconscious patterns of thought. I know several. They way things play out in real life for many who got analytic training is that the training gives them some skills and schemas and forms of attunement that get tossed into the mix with all the other stuff they have learned or figured out or know instinctively about how to get people unstuck from various hells. Pure psychoanalysis is rarely practiced these days. Its glamor has faded and it is extremely expensive -- $450/ session in NYC, and patients come for 3-4 sessions/week - so there aren't a lot of customers.
I do think that of the various schools and styles of psychotherapy, unadulterated psychoanalysis is about the worst in terms of the power imbalance between patient and therapist. I would rather have some psychopharmacologist telling me I should take drug X in order to tame my attentional deficit, psychotic flares or whatnot than to have a psychoanalyst telling me he knows better than I do who I want to have sex with. The former would be giving me expert info about how to tame my brain with drugs -- the latter would be telling me he knows more than I do about who I am.
Why are they able to charge $450/session if its glamour has faded?
$450/hour is the going rate for psychiatrists in NYC, no matter what kind of treatment they are providing. Not everybody charges that much, of course. To become someone who can do that you have to chart a course in the direction of seeing wealthy patients -- network with other docs who see that crowd, get an office convenient for those folks, etc. It helps to have gotten your training in prestigious settings.
There are quite a few people for whom that sum of money is not a problem.
I know that New York City and a few other cities around the world still have lots of psychoanalysts working from variations on that tune and also that the vast majority of therapy has not worked that way for a long long time. Though there are of course other ways that therapists misuse their authority, which you and
Eremolalos point out can be considerable.
The more modern-day version of it might be all the various fads and dogmas around this or that modality -- CBT, IFS, EMDR, etc etc -- and people encountering therapists who talk about those modalities as if they have something like scientific ground beneath them, when they don't, not really. The phrase "evidence-based" carries a lot of water these days that it really shouldn't (in clinical psychology that is).
In the 1980s there was hubbub around buried memory retrieval. Through the 90s up to now there's abuse that's happened by therapists who guide clients through psychedelic trips. There are still therapists of course every year busted for having sex with their clients/patients. It's terrible that this happens. The egregious stuff is rare. And of course malpractice happens all through medicine and law and all the other places where professionals have lots of impact on other people's lives.
(I'm a psychotherapist)
My impression of TLP is that he could be replaced with that rock, on which is written "you're a narcissist" (per his idiosyncratic definition.)
And, if you carve it fairly carefully with a good hand, the rock would weigh less than than the book.
I think that the advantage of pornographic literature over fantasies is largely the same as that of any literature over fantasies. A story that has actually been written down is much more concrete, but an imaginary fantasy is very fluid and it's difficult to get a coherent sequence of plot beats out of it (unless I'm trying really hard).
Fantasizing well enough to replace reading would probably require a decent portion of the work required to write a good story.
Charisma is something one has or hasn't. It's like having a big dick. Has nothing to do with understanding concepts.
For examples, here are some highly-driven highly-charismatic people: John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, John Travolta, Muhammad Ali. I doubt any of these people have a mental map one could use to become more charismatic.
There's a good reason Charisma is an independent attribute in D&D.
I’ll go along with Ali and Presley. The rest? meh
I'm not saying I like all those people but, objectively speaking, all of them are highly charismatic. Box office receipts are an objective measure of charisma.
What makes you think you can't train or practice charisma?
Maybe you can a little. All the PUA blogs argued you could do so, but most acknowledged the improvements one can make are modest. Charisma is more like IQ than it is like Strength.
The old PUA blogs like Roissy did a good job of analyzing the components of charisma. It's mostly about displaying confidence in an interpersonal, physical situation. But one can only fake confidence to a degree. Real confidence will always beat attempts at faking it.
What makes you think you can't practice and train real confidence?
Lots of people seem to gain non-fake confidence from mastering a skill or becoming physically fit?
People can and do become more confident, but someone with high charisma is like someone with high intelligence or high musical or athletic ability: you are born with that. You can hone or improve those skills, but you are not going to become a genius, a professional athlete, a top musician or actor unless you are born with a ton of raw talent in the respective field.
To believe otherwise is to be a Blank Slater.
I doubt there are many Blank Slaters here when the subject is intelligence or athletic ability; my point is that charisma is similar. That's obvious to most people, but I think some rationalists are oblivious to some things that are obvious to non-rationalists, because it is more of a Zen thing, taken in holistically, than something that is easily grasped by the intellect.
Eh, there's plenty of ways to lower your intelligence. And if you stop doing those things, you can become more intelligent.
That skills can be trained to a certain extent (and perhaps to different extents by different people) doesn't make one a blank slater.
Average untrained people can improve their strength at least two-fold pretty easily with a simple weightlifting routine. (Of course, that's far from competing at the olympics.)
I see no reason why most people couldn't get similar improvements to their charisma.
Sales people do get better with experience for example, too.
You can't practice it because real confidence isn't a simulacrum. It is simply the outcome of a number of components (some tangible, some intangible) plus experience.
The only way to become more confident in a real sense is to become a different person with the sorts of skills and experiences which promote confidence. Which is like saying that the only way to lose weight is to eat moderately, get lots of greens and vegetables in, and exercise - everyone agrees on it in principle, and then overweight people bend every faculty in themselves to deny it at every step.
Plenty of people do manage to lose weight.
Plenty of people become more or less confident over time. Depending on what happens to them, what they decide to do, general aging, genetic factors etc.
I don't want to say that managing your weight or increasing your charisma or confidence is easy nor straightforward nor that everyone who tries will be successful.
That's absolutely true, but misses my point (which is that you can't "one weird trick" your way into either weight loss or confidence).
> Charisma is more like IQ than it is like Strength.
There is no intervention that can increase IQ the way that a single dose of MDMA can increase confidence and charisma; I'm talking an order of magnitude difference. Therefore I don't think your analogy is valid.
I've said it in another reply, but this sort of analytic approach to making oneself charismatic/successful is both quite creepy, and very... American. From the outside, it looks very much like a bunch of nerds discussing amongst themselves how to be cool.
Not a new theme at all for TLP. He was posting back in 2015, paraphrasing here ... "you only married her so that you could keep her away from other men. If they knew how much you refused to enjoy her on a daily basis- they'd knife you."
Response - reading suggestion - to the part about "want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them." you might enjoy this essay by an actual shepherd and his experience with his actual sheep falling into similar mental traps https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ .
Sounds like the Gervais Principle plus Adlerian psychology.
1. Zizek: I don't have a high opinion of Zizek because he's a communist and seems like yet another fraudulent public intellectual, but I don't think about him much and haven't engaged with him in a really long time so my opinion is only weakly negative.
2. Zen: Holding in my mind simultaneously the entire spectrum of input from all five senses seems easy but I can't point to any benefit of doing it.
3. Envy: Teach's weird definition of Envy (but I don't know a better word: Schadenfreude is too narrow because it doesn't encompass desiring hypotheticals, and Sadism is too narrow because it requires being the one inflicting the pain) has only been felt by me against people I hate, and I spent 80% of my life not hating anyone, and even in the other 20% Envy was rare. I hated some bullies in elementary school, and I hated some SJWs in 2016-2020, but I got over it. I have been Jealous of my friends' hot wives, and Jealous of my cousin's hot wife, but at no point did I desire depriving my friends or my cousin of anything, so it wasn't Envy in the way Teach uses that word. If I had a magic button that would copy my cousin's wife and make the copy be in love with me, I would press the button. If I had another magic button that would make the original divorce him and marry me, I would never push that button. If I had a magic button that would zero out the wealth of any billionaire of my choice, I wouldn't use it.
4. If all all our desires were just faked for status purposes, no one would ever have a low-status kink. So Teach is wrong about that. I don't think I gain any status by being a 36yo dude binging on high school rom-com-dramas on Netflix and crushing on some of the characters, who are typically 25 year old actresses pretending to be 16. (Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, To All the Boys I Loved Before).
Wow, you were willing to share a 'low status' kink with us? You must not be ashamed of it, or yourself. If you reasonably believe you are secure enough in this context to risk withstanding a little status ding, you probably won't even get one. You also helpfully point out that the actors playing 16 year olds are in fact, over age and so carefully divide your (ooooh, a little embarrassing!) feelings towards them from those interpretable as being directed at actual 16 year olds (talk about a low-status kink!)
You were willing to conclude that he was wrong on the basis of this example, which I don't think is convincing. That is a different epistemic stance than eg asking if your situation was a valid counter-example. Why did you choose to reject it over being curious about how the theory applied to your situation?
There are obviously lots of other low status kinks that exist. e.g., homosexuality until recently. Mine may not be the best example, but it's the only one I can talk about from personal experience.
This seems to just completely discount the possibility of viscerally pleasurable physical experiences, if I am understanding it correctly.
As someone who largely (get it) buys into the palatability theory of obesity, I am not sure how to square these theories.
The only thing I can think of, is that I am trying to sublimate (well the opposite of sublimate really ... deposit??) my secret desire to be fit, by instead making myself unfit. That some 'thing' happened in the 1970s that radically changed the culture such that it became a lot more common for people to secretly desire being fit which then obviously led to a lot of obesity.
Of course, this makes it fully generalizable and totally unfalsifiable. I do the high status things because I want status and I do the low status things to hide my secret desire for high status things. I am not sure if it is even possible for this type of analysis to ever be helpful so I must be missing something.
Good point. (Although I see how TLP could twist that into his theory, it would be highly speculative and offer little insight.)
It might be helpful if writers who generalize about people would go through the following imaginary dialogue with a questioner to check if they actually mean 'all people':
Q: 'Are you including the brain-dead?'
W: 'Well, obviously no...'
Q: 'Are you including those with Down syndrome?'
W: 'I guess not...'
Q: 'Low-functioning autistic people?'
W: 'I hadn't thought about that. Probably not...'
Q: 'Infants?'
W: 'No!'
Q: 'Clearly you're not including everybody. Please go through this list of all (known) developmental stages, mental disorders, and personality types to indicate who you're *not* describing.'
-- 20 minutes later --
W: 'Wow, that was a long list. I ticked at least 1 out of 5 boxes. Thanks for helping me trade away my pseudo-profound generalization for the possibility of some degree of accuracy!'
It's not supposed to be helpful, it's psychological self-harm. You can explain away every good aspect of your personality and make your worst self the only "real" self you have. This is only useful if you want an excuse to be an absolute piece of shit to other human beings as it gives you total absolution from your conscience.
I know almost nothing about the Kabbalah, but I feel like Scott knows or people here might know. The one thing I picked up goes something like, when the sephiroth does the thing it does, quarks fly off into the past and future. And sometimes one of the bits is opposite in meaning or at an angle to the piece it came off of. I am sure that’s wrong, but I use it to tell myself “good things can have bad consequences” and similar wisdoms. When I read people reading Lacan - like now - or Freud (a few weeks ago for school), I come back to this idea. When a thing exists, it automatically starts firing off contradictory bits, and that’s true inside the psyche and everywhere else. In terms of “real desire,” it’s turtles all the way down. In terms of someone is telling me about their life and I should say something helpful, I don’t know how to tell if the quark went left or right. Guess I need to read more Lacan.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
I can do some mad libs with this to explain obscurantism in terms of cowardice.
"Intellectually unhealthy people, e.g. postmodernists, don't have beliefs, at least not in the normal sense. Believing things is scary and might obligate you to have evidence to support those beliefs lest you look like a crank. Your belief might be wrong, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who is forced to update his map. Better to just avoid committing to saying anything unambiguous."
Ha
>the modern person wants to be special not because they accomplished great stuff but because special-ness is just who they are.
People want the proxy measures of low dna transcription error rates.
Great review. I think I'll probably read this under the Julian Jaynes exception, by which weirdo polymaths interpreting all of history and art through their insanely particular theory can be compelling as fiction if they're sufficiently good at writing prose.
Personally—and you can accept this and Teach can dismiss it—I read the old 800-page classics of western literature because they're really fun to read. They're also very insightful and profound sometimes, but something like "Anna Karenina" or "David Copperfield" is a page-turner in addition to all those artistic features.
My impression is that the naturalists and modernists of the late 19th/early 20th century got more into doomed professorial affairs and interpretational difficulty, but they made things easier on their readers by mostly making the novels much shorter. The Victorians (and their contemporaries) were writing sentimental barnburners that also just happened to be profound.
You certainly have to give Jaynes points for intellectual creativity and lovely writing. His theory, while unlikely to be true, has the virtue of demanding of the reader the ability to seriously imagine a very different world than the one we live in now. Most books that intend to do that (usually science fiction or fantasy) are far less demanding because the people they describe aren't really any different than the people all around us today. Heinlein wrote about characters who lived for thousands of years yet seemed to have gained nothing from all that experience (admittedly, it's tricky to describe someone like that when you've lived less than a century yourself). Or characters might have some sort of psychic or magical powers, yet those powers rarely seem to have any deep effect on them -- telepathy (or whatever) is basically treated as another tool in the box. Jaynes, on the other hand, really wants you to imagine people who are fundamentally different from us. (Another thing I love about his book is its influence on the recent Westworld TV series.)
Arguably, Lazarus Long changed in his thousands of years, but it was more like getting depressed rather than learning things. Alternatively, in Methuselah's Children, he was in a situation perfectly suited to his talents and temperament, and that never happened again.
Where can/should I go to learn more about antimemes? I followed the link to the SCP Foundation and read the first entry. I'll probably go back there and read more later, but after a first impression I'm worried that that website is itself an antimeme.
Antimemes are not just "ideas that are hard to spread". (I have to be vague about this next part:)
You, yourself, have powerful, mostly subconscious mental shields you built when you were very young. The shields protect you from very bad things. Those shields, by their very nature, also distort your personal reality and make it almost impossible for you to understand or even perceive / remember certain ideas, even if they are directly explained to you. These ideas are antimemes. Technically antimemes are relative to an individual mind; some minds can have different antimemes. The human condition tends to be such that there are some near-universal antimemes. {This part censored after some thought as it would have messed up this post, sorry but I did try}. Antimemes are VERY powerful, and very real things. They are like inferential black holes that you can see out of the corner of your eye if you know how to look, and they are everywhere. {I had to remove this part as well on further consideration. This is very frustrating!} Unfortunately explaining antimemes in any medium is almost impossible.
The literal definition would be just "an idea that's hard to spread." A long stream of random numbers would be probably the best antimeme you can make.
But Scott is using it as an analogy to the SCP Foundation stories, where it's more about ideas that are *supernaturally* hard to spread. Entities that destroy all knowledge of their existence, facts that you can't know because knowing them drives you mad, etc. The central idea of the Antimemetics Division stories is basically "how do you fight something when merely knowing what you're fighting against will destroy you?"
Antimemes are an analogy for your brain's defense mechanisms since, while they're not supernatural, they're still a mysterious force that keeps you from really understanding things.
If you haven't read any other SCP Foundation articles, I wouldn't pick the Antimemetics Division as your first one, because its whole gimmick is flipping the Foundation's concept on its head. Every article on the website is a small horror story built around "here is a supernatural threat that we've carefully studied and documented how to contain," and then the Antimemetics Division comes in with "this is a threat that's literally impossible to study, that we only know exists by the conspicuous gaps where our scientists got killed trying. How do we contain it?"
It's a very twisty sort of story. Fascinating and incredibly creative, but not really a straightforward introduction to the Foundation.
There’s actual, literal facts that you can try to explain to people, they will realize they are deeply confused about the issue, and then their mind just “bounces off” the idea, they sort of stare into space, and later they misremember what you said and are right back to where they started. I’ve personally seen this many times for many different facts. It’s not SUPERNATURAL, it doesn’t need to be. But antimemes are very real.
Can you give some examples of those facts? I definitely know what you mean and have seen it before myself. I'm interested in what sorts of facts you've noticed this happen with.
I find the idea of two people sincerely trying to share the antimemes they've discovered to each other, each with an open mind, to be both fascinating and terrifying. I don't feel comfortable doing it in public, but I have to admit I'm intrigued.
How many such facts do you know? I just made a list for 20 minutes and I came up with around 30 discrete things.
I'm curious as to what aspect of this conversation you would find terrifying? Personally, I'm not very interested in antimemes themselves, just interested in better understanding the concept of them, which an exposure to a variety of examples will presumably help facilitate. If you're willing to share some of your examples in private, my email address is emwjazz@gmail.com
I can't say I can pull many examples off the top of my head. One thing that could potentially fit your description above is certain basic aspects of quantum mechanics. Entanglement is highly unintuitive, very difficult to understand, and easy to misinterpret. In that respect, it seems like a perfect antimeme for most people (myself included). However the idea is nonetheless very interesting and therefore not a perfect antimeme. Particularly for physicists, I imagine that its unintuitive nature contributes to fueling a desire to think about and propogate it, and for that reason (plus the fact that it's something I've thought about myself), I lean heavily towards not viewing it as an antimeme, although I still think it fits your description above.
It's terrifying because the consequence of actually truly hearing / seeing a real anitmeme and then failing to integrate that knowledge properly has extremely severe consequences, including inverting some of your values, permanently experiencing less happiness for the rest of your life, or death.
Of course, people are mostly fine because they don't really hear or understand when they hear an antimeme, and then misremember what they heard later, making it safe.
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maybe something like the inevitability of death, or Scott's post "By very slow Deacy" we can intellectually understand these things, but to really be consciously aware that is our inevitable future is not something we can hold on to for long.
Or perhas the idea that for any married couple, one wil die before the other, likely leaving the surviving one alone for years.
Or maybe an awareness of the capaicty of evil in the people all around us, and how we're subject to random prejudices or people who would literally see us dead if they were capable iof it- or the actual fact of how of something like that, for example how deeply irrational most people are. These are things we recognize intellectually, but to really be aware of them is terifying.
Or- certain conversations about say, the complex realities of how asocial use of alcohol facilitates human mating.
Something people are aware of and can talk about in private, but which no one wil ever acknowledge publicly.
Or in a similar example- with all the shaming and cancel culture, its interesting that people porn habits are never brought up (witht eh exception of pedophilic pornograpghy) as a way to shame them. One might assume this would have happened by now.
The reason I suspect it hasnt is that is "mutually assured destruction"
So that's sort of an antimeme- everyone knows men (and a great many women) regularly look at pornogrpahy and often have specific interests that would be embrassing. But if one goes the route of exposing someone else's porjn interests, THERE porn interests are then fair game. This is a sort of anti-meme. Nobody wants this, so it doesnt happen.
There are a lot of these sorts of things that people know and will discuss in private but never in public.
Historically this was even more so the case. What as acceptable as maters of public discussioj versus private was even more radically "we dont publicly acknowledge such things"
Hi, I'd love to read a list of 30 ideas that you think my mind will immediately reject.
My email is benellinoam@gmail.com
Not him, but I will say, without a trace of irony, that UFOs are an antimeme. We have nearly a century of documented encounters with aerial objects that defy our understanding of areospace engineering and physics. These encounters are publicly acknowledged by the US government, and in their original research into these events, the genuinely unknown events were described as most likely being extraterrestrial in origin (Project SIGN). Another pile of documents showing that these encounters continue well into the present day dropped just a year or two ago and made a lot of news.
And the public's continued attitude, even among those who boast of their skepticism towards established narratives and willingness to engage in open-minded rationality? To summarize the most popular arguments in one sentence:
"It's all a bunch of attention-seeking hillbillies on crank hallucinating weather balloons and having schizophrenic episodes."
Quoting the actual government documents produced by very sane people about these phenomena gets you treated like you're ranting about demons from Hell crawling out from behind a painting in your bedroom and sodomizing your dog.
But everybody knows about UFOs, and many people talk about them openly. I've talked to someone who said he genuinely saw a UFO, and I don't know that many people. I've talked to plenty of others who fell on both sides of the issue. Shouldn't the fact that it is so commonly discussed disqualify it from being an antimeme?
If you want to be technical, the antimeme is "UFOs are real phenomena verified by credible organizations, who themselves admit they're probably extraterrestrial and defy known physics (meaning, by implication, that our understanding of physics is probably wrong)". This is papered over in most of the public consciousness with "UFOs are some vague phenomena that's probably fake and which science either sees as beneath its dignity about or has successfully disproven", and in a small minority with "UFOs are holy chariots carrying my fringe religion's chosen demons or angels". When most "normal" people do discuss it, it's almost always couched in defensive irony, making jokes about LGMs and with a thousand conditionals of "I'm not crazy, I don't believe in the supernatural or Bigfoot or any of that, BUT-", and even then their accounts are rationalized away, with "you genuinely encountered something beyond the realm of our scientific understanding" not even on the table.
REAL antimemes are a fictional concept- and if they weren't, they wouldn't be capable of being discussed by definition. But given the weak, real-world definition of "information that is unusually resistant to being spread", the scientific fact of UFOs definitely fits that category. Mulder was right: it's not that people CAN'T believe in UFOS, it's that they don't WANT to, because that information would force them to update their entire worldview due to the implications and knock-ons. So, they simply reject the information without even processing it.
sure. Most people have a very hard time intuitevly understanding the lack of a true mind/brain dicohotomy. Like, if someone experiences depression, other people who may haerd and accepted that someone's brain is a sate where they can expereince happiness or pleasure will keep reverting to "it's such a nice day, a walk will cheer you up."
I think for many people, the idea that the mind/being is not some thing separte from the body just doesnt "click" and can only be temporarily held on to untill they are either educated enough or have direct experience.
It's rather strange that so many people who've experienced being drunk still believe in a mind-body dichotomy.
I've never seen something like that, and my prior on such a situation would be "maybe you didn't explain it right."
And in any case, OP seemed to be asking about the SCP Foundation specifically, which is about the fictional supernatural kind of antimeme.
(was trying to respond to @Argentus but the reply went to the wrong comment for some reason).
You've really never seen an antimeme in action? I guess that has to make sense... But there is very strong evidence for them! One such example out of many that's easy to see because it's caused by an injury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlI7GsBHok8
Clearly it's possible for the brain to elaborately screen off reality in a way that's not obvious. Suppose that there's things like that, but for everyone.
> Most of my behavior for the next 15ish years could be described through the lens of "trying vainly to recreate my childhood."
There is something similar in Buddha's biography, sadly I can't find the right link. Short story is that he tried all forms of extreme asceticism (the traditional way to achieving supernatural happiness), and then he was like "actually, this doesn't make me happy at all -- the only true happiness I remember was when I was a kid", then he gave up asceticism and ate some good food (which made his fellow wannabe gurus abandon him as a loser), sat under a tree and started meditating... and became the Buddha.
Which might suggest that this antimeme is the very thing that prevents us from being enlightened.
Scott, does this need a [sic] or was this a transcription error from the original:
"this is an repayable debt that keeps the child indebted to the parent"
Is that "an unrepayable debt" or "a repayable debt" or "an repayable [sic] debt"?
You're right, thanks, fixed.
>And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test.
I'm not sure anyone has done a direct replication, but looking at the PubMed page you linked (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/650387/), there are plenty of similar studies about self-handicapping. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15130190/ which claimed that "Following noncontingent success, high self-handicappers reported greater anxiety, more unproductive attributions and claimed more handicaps than low self-handicappers." (It seems that this study divided people into high and low self-handicappers.)
Harry Potter's super power, and the reason why he's the protagonist, is that he knows when the rules need to be broken.
Everything is about power, except power. Power is about sex. - Hitler such an epic fail compared to Dschinghis Khan. - And pathetic me: afraid to win the jackpot, as it would leave me no excuse but to DO ... err ... not-Scott-like-stuff. Which some guys with much less dough DO. Edward seems to be right in parts, at least. We do excel in excuses. - Is the porn part any good? Elfriede Jelinek did some awesome porn (Nobel in 2004).
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em
And Edward Teach has Edward Teach has Edward Teach has Edward Teach
And so ad infinitum.
Or you express the same idea via a sexual metaphor: Book's a circlejerk with 7 participants, all named Edward Teach.
https://old.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/subm80/feeling_too_cocky_also_need_attention_rroastme/
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.
Scott, you seem to miss the context when he addresses the reader. He doesn't just say, "This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." He says, "You're stumped by the layout? This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." The context indicates that "This book isn't for you" is a response to those who are "stumped by the layout." "You" isn't you, personally (at least not necessarily); it's the kind of reader who would only misunderstand the book, and Teach does all these things (and tells you he's doing them!) to try to get them not to read it in the first place. When you say you had to replace "you" with "a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person", I think you're close, but kind of overdoing it. The readers in question are hardly "maximally unvirtuous" (whatever that means; it sounds a bit like Caligula), they're just ordinary people who think the ordinary thoughts they were taught to think, who don't really want to be challenged, and wouldn't know what to do with this kind of challenge anyway because it's completely beyond their capabilities to seriously consider that the world might not be what they've been taught to believe it is. So when Teach says he's trying to drive readers away, I think you can take him literally. The thing is, it's not ALL readers, just the ones who are wasting their time reading a book that's beyond them (and they self-select by being put off by these tricks). The question is which type of reader you are.
You seem to be trying to look for some hidden meaning in Teach's writing when he seems, as far as I can tell from the quotes you've provided, to be laying it all out in plain view. Your response to the book reminds me of a quote I came across once, I forget who from (Mencken, maybe?) to the effect that if you want people to laugh and think you're joking, just tell them the plain truth.
Having read your review and the two you linked to, in the end I find that I don't really trust any of the three of you to tell me what this book is about. The self-styled Contrarian starts off by sneering that Teach's old blog was popular with "pseudo-intellectuals" (which we may take as an implicit claim that the Contrarian is a real intellectual, or at least able to tell the difference, which I am not sure I believe) and reviews the book after reading only about 20% of it; he also tells us that Teach's style is "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic," which is a fairly lame attempt at wit and, based on your quotes, seems to me rather exaggerated. Teach does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, but try Henry James or A.E. Waite if you want something that's "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic."
Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms.
I wonder Teach is really quite as condescending as he seems. At the very least, he apparently likes playing that part (and it surely helps to drive away the wrong kind of reader, so it counts as another tactic of that sort, along with the long footnotes, etc.), but he seems too perceptive. The best psychologists, in my experience, are good because they actually have a deep understanding of human nature and know that that understanding applies to themselves as much as to everyone else. I suppose he really could have a huge blind spot in that regard, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Anyway, I've ordered the book, so at some point in the future I'll have my own more fully-formed opinion of it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Well said
I agree with your approving comments about Teach's read of The Giving Tree. But Teach could have made those same great points in a single Scott-length post. Instead, he embeds them in a monstrous saggy monument to his own discontent, sort of the book version of Miss Havisham's wedding cake in Great Expectations.
In fact, and here's my read of Teach's psyche: He sort of IS Miss Havisham.
Now THAT'S a curious idea I'd love to hear more of.
Thank you, Essex. But I don't think I can elaborate on it. I found the book so profoundly irritating that I bailed after about 50 pages, and so am not in a position to back up my judgments with text analysis etc. When I wrote that Miss Havisham comment I had a strong experience of felt truth, but can't tell whether a little lightening bolt of validity shot through my head at that moment or, alternatively, that I'd just hit on a phrase that discharged my irritation in a very satisfying way.
Perhaps you felt that he's a human being so deeply miserable that his only remaining joy is trying to inflict his exact brand of misery on others?
Yes, it’s that, but more than that. My impression is not exactly that his only pleasure is to inflict his brand of misery on others, but more that he feels *entitled* to do that. So you’ve made me think about what constellation of traits led me to match him to Miss Havisham, & here they are. You should know, though, that all I know about this man is miscellaneous second-hand info, most of it picked up here. I think of him as nearing retirement age (because he seemed to have been around for a long time) and alcoholic (several people have mentioned that). OK, so the traits the Edward Teach in my mind shares with Miss Havisham and her wedding cake are:
old
good years are in the past
feels wronged
miserable
entitlement about own misery (thinks of it as more important, deeper, more complicated, worthy of being inflicted on others)
effort to inflict it on others (Ms H: on Estella & Pip. Teach: on his readers)
disarray,, rot and corruption (my picture of him, sort of disheveled and grubby — and also his prose and his train of thought)
But I do have a feeling that there's something else besides pattern-matching contributing to my take on him as Miss Havisham, but truly cannot put that into words, and recognize that it may just be an illusion. Was he left at the altar in some sense?
I'm only about 15% into the book, but yes, I agree. Teach reminds me of Nietzsche, in that it's easy to miss the message due to the style.
I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self.
YES!!!
There's a new strain of neuropsychoanalysis from the last decade that you might find interesting, haven't read it but this 3 part series of papers relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas comes highly recommended: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/
For a text that self-confesses to be obscurantist, I was nodding my head in agreement an awful lot, both in terms of Scott's interpretation of what it's trying to say, but also the direct quotes. Whether that's because I've willfully misunderstood everything and am now patting myself on the back for these "insights", because I've converged on to something truth-adjacent, or because I've converged on to some Schelling point of crackpottery, is anyone's guess.
For a while now I've been drawn into thinking that humans aren't agents. And by that I don't mean the weak notion that humans don't exactly match the mathematical formalism for agents as that statement is pretty much trivially true (due to bounded computational resources imposed by laws of physics) - this is what the idea of boundedly rational agents is for. For me it's the stronger notion that claims it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences. There are some trivial examples like observing that humans tend to claim to want money, and indeed they're likely to cash in winning lottery tickets or pick up hundred dollar bills from the ground (citation needed), but once you get into more complex behaviors, such as Scott's example of not asking people on a date despite yearning for a partner every single day, where exactly is the preference-satisficing behavior? One could argue that having a partner isn't people's true preference, that they actually prefer to be forever alone, or that being rejected hurts so much that even a perfectly rational agent would not risk it, but when people (I'm thinking about philosophers arguing for compatibilism in particular) talk about humans showing agenthood, they're explicitly giving some reality to people's preferences. On the other hand, to deny the reality of these preferences would seem like equating humans to rocks, that rocks have a preference to stay immobile because that's what we observe them doing, which I think is an even more radical view than my own.
My view is that the preferences people see themselves as having are real, but that accurate model of human behavior rarely invokes them and uses other concepts instead. These concepts are still endogenous (nobody's being puppeteered by an evil demon) but are often of the nature being talked about here. For example, I draw a juxtaposition from the story of the tree to ideas presented in HPMOR's chapter involving the troll attack: people often act out roles. The tree acts out the role of a mother, McGonagall a strict disciplinarian, and that way of modelling behavior might actually get you somewhere. Ditto for behaviors like virtue-signalling, or any of the other social games people unconsciously play that end up dictating their behavior.
Similarly, the idea that people want their freedoms curtailed speaks to me because I've also thought about that a lot. It seems to me that humans would indeed be the happiest in a state of "choicelessness" (I believe there's some Eastern philosophical concept for it, but if I've known one, I've since forgotten about it), always living in the moment because there's no other option. The extreme example of this would be monasticism, but this has to large extent been the general experience for most of human existence: you could in principle do something else than forage or work the fields, but then you'd starve so you don't actually have much choice now do you. Even in today's environment a lot of people seem to find the idea of not /having/ to go to work every morning abhorrent: what would they do with themselves? I've never drawn a connection between historical forms of choicelessness and modern forms like "domination by corporate HR departments", but now that the idea has been presented to me, it does seem to make sense.
(For the record, this does in no way excuse slavery: you can experience choicelessness without also being subjected to misery)
(Also for the record, I'm claiming no superiority here. In fact, I'm uncharacteristically incapable of acting on my claimed preferences)
Have you run across the Gurdjieffian idea that people are pretty much mechanical?
And have a profound inability to see that mechanicalness..
George Gurdjieff? I have not. Can you elaborate a bit on how his ideas might have been relevant?
I'm not an expert, though I might be able to get help from experts.
Have a story about how Gurdijeff convinced Oaspensky (his chief follower) that people are mechanical
Once upon a time, they were standing on a hill above where a battle over Crimea was about to take place. Gurdijeff had been claiming that people mechanical (when pressed, he would admit that, with effort, people could become less mechanical), and Oaspensky ddin't agree.
Gurdijeff pointed out that trains full of artificial arms and legs were coming in-- they'd be needed once the battle started, and said that if people weren't mechanical, they wouldn't be attacking each other. And Oaspenky was convinced.
I don't know if Gurdijeff got into how much people do to keep each other mechanical.
Gurdijeff was another obscurantist writer.
I'd add that Ouspensky only got a genuine taste of mechanicalness when he was able to see it in himself. And that took hundreds of hours of patient and very skillful 'pointing' by Gurdjieff.
This isnt that hard. Models of humans as agents absolutely rationally maximizing choice are wrong.
We are shaped by evolution. In social heirarchies, if one was a low status male, the best survivial strategy may nit have been trying to maximize sexual partners as presumably this could lower one's status furtrher or perhaps lead to explusion from the group.
Of course the psychologt of evolution doent translate to the modern wiorld, but we're still governed by those heuristics.
Asking "are we agents?"- its like the "free will" question. For practical purposes, our neural architecture forces us to assume agency and the agency of others, so there's a utility territory where that is the right map.
For other purposes, like understanding why humans do things that in modern contextxs seem against their best interests, there are other maps that are more useful.
it's all stil the territory- but for certain purposes, a political map may be more useful, whereas in other cases, a map of ocean currents may be the thing to navigate. They describe differenrt aspects of the territory for different purposes, but the seeming contradiction is illusory based in cinfusing useful categorizations as the whole of the territory.
Its like saying which map is the right one, the one with geographic features of political boundaries? they dont actuall contardict, you're looking at it wrong. ( not "you" personally. speaking in the general sense)
Is there a word for this kind of "unassailable truth" writing ("condescending" doesn't seem to cover it), where the writer basically says a) you're too stupid to understand this, go away, and b) if by some miracle you're smart enough to understand this, you'll know just how brilliant it is? It basically screams "I won't take any criticism seriously, because if you disagree you're either the kind of terrible person I'm describing or just too dumb to understand what I'm saying."
"Unfalsifiable"
"Double-binding"
"Kafkatrapping" (where literally any reaction to the accusation of guilt is taken as proof of your guilt).
Your basic narcissistic mind fuck. If you buy into the message you have a terrible dilemma: You can be a loser or an acolyte.
Section 2: I read a chunk of it, and I have to admit it's not entirely wrong. The feeling of helping without taking responsibility is definitely a thing. Consider charities which don't track whether they're actually helpful. I'm not even talking about detailed EA levels of tracking.
This is also an example of what annoys me about TLP, and also possibly why he has a powerful hook for some people, though perhaps this book is worse than his blog. He's got an actual insight there, but he's not very clear about what responsibility covers.
What's clear is that he's saying he's so very right and a huge number of people are so very wrong. At least he admits that there are people getting responsibility more or less right, he's just not very interested in them.
In agree there are some valid and interesting points, but he totally loses me with the "everything is abourt status" and "everything is you tricking yourself out of your actual desires because that would require you act."
It's such a simplistic one size fits all explanation for human behavior- I suppose he could just be talking to the "certain people" who arent supposed to be reading the book, but he makes it sound like he means almost everyone one.
That's just... not true. Human beings are psychlogically more complex then "one idea explains everything."
And its just so obviosuly not true that nearly everyone who is in a relationship actualy wants other people to not have access to their partner, but doesnt enjoy the relationship themselves.
There's definitely a feeling of someone who maybe had some very clever insights who is sort of sad and incredibly cynical whose mental faculties are dergrading maybe due to alcoholism.
> I suppose he could just be talking to the "certain people" who arent supposed to be reading the book, but he makes it sound like he means almost everyone one.
Actually, I think he IS talking about the people reading the book. That would explain why he spent the first 50 pages driving away all other types of readers, so he could talk directly to his real audience for this book: the group of people for whom status really is very important, even if only subconsciously, and these explanations could be very insightful for them.
Alright Scott, you're making me make a throwaway account for this. CW: frank and gross discussion of bizarre porn.
> Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.
It is not insane. I've spent way too fucking long looking at online hentai communities for this to sound insane.
It's probably true of me: at some point I realized that the thing that makes my dick most hard isn't when I'm diving into a cool-looking hentai comic. It's when I'm scrolling through the grid of covers looking through to FIND some that I might like. The search, the potential for a nice surprise, is what kicks a part of my brain into gear. The diving into it is just the follow-through. You could literally describe that as having a fetish for nhentai's search page and you wouldn't be too far off.
And among the general populace of these communities, there's an oft-running "haha only serious" meme of 2D women being better than 3D women. I don't think everybody falls into that trap, but there are people that do, and it gets really sad really quickly: https://www.reddit.com/r/waifuism/
I'd say these people would sooner admit to the thought behind Teach's quote than most porn consumers, but that's probably just me falling into the same status-raising trap that's talked about in this entire review by trying to say "at least they're honest about it".
The "porn is your fetish" thing is even more true the more "extreme" or "weird" the fetishes get, particularly in hentai communities. You get people that fetishize shit that's illegal or immoral, sure, but then there are people that fetishize shit that isn't physically possible. You can't have that in the real world. Porn is literally the only outlet.
>Porn is literally the only outlet.
There are things like roleplay. And in any case that does not make porn your fetish, any more so than being a fantasy fan actually makes you a fan of the mental process of converting symbols into language.
Yes, agree wholeheartedly. “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish” is an excellent example of what's wrong with Teach-think. He wants you to feel intellectually one-upped by this idea. He wants you to think he's seen right through your simple conception of porn as a depiction of things that some but not all find hot --as though he's sort of broken on through to the other side intellectually, and shown you the *real* structure of things as regards porn. But he hasn't. He's just sort of arbitrarily arranged some words and produced a sentence expressing an idea that is novel but not valid. He's like someone taking a glove and turning it partially inside out and claiming to have invented a remarkable new form of outerwear. Problem is, it does not fit the human hand.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Porn is a depiction of arousing actions. But I believe what he means when he says porn is your fetish is that a fetish is some (presumably unusual) action which you find arousing. However, action =/= representation of action. If you are aroused by porn, the porn must be arousing for you, however, if you claim that you have a sexual fetish which porn can fulfill, the only thing porn can do is be porn, which suggests that the porn is your fetish.
To me it seems like you sort of took the glove that Teach had turned partially inside-out, tied it in a knot, then said, "see, that's how it works." But really what I mean by that is that I just don't understand your argument. It's not that I disagree, it's that I just don't understand what you're saying.
A fetish is an act or an object that most people don’t find sexually arousing, but that a few people do, right? So how can porn be a fetish? It is neither an act nor an object, and many many people find it sexually arousing.
As the original poster described, the search for and acquisition of porn is the fetish.
I think I get the phenom you're talking about, but I don't think "porn is your fetish" is the best way to capture it. It seems like what gets your dick hard is shifting into anything-goes mode: I'm gonna scroll until I find the hottest possible thing and I give myself permission to find absolutely *anything* hot.
A fetish is a *thing* -- an act, a look, a kind of person -- that turns you on. In the situation you're describing, the essence of your turn-on is the "anything goes" mindset you allow yourself to have. The hentai search page isn't the *thing* that turns you on, it's just an ideal setting for your anything goes mindset to play.
ironically there is a fetish called "gooning" which is the fetish of being addicted to porn- but thats clearly not what hes talkign about.
yeah... no. Without going into specifics, i have a real life kink that i also look at pron of. I dont see how the porn is my fetish is I also like this thing in real life.
Can't resist saying that "Zen story" is fucking horrible. It isn't a passable Zen story at all because most of the real ones from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones" are tremendously great stories that send chills down your spine, if nothing else.
No way it gave you a better understanding of Zen, rather it gave you a defense against pursuing a real grasping of Zen. Zen is not "understandable". It is, however, graspable. In a similar way that music or poetry is.
That said, keep writing more posts like this. Your book reviews are great. I think some who disliked this post can't separate the review from the book. The book sounds horrible, but I appreciate the post.
We need more negative book reviews. The writers are becoming soft.
That zen koan is perfect for some people, because it tells them to stop reaching for an understanding that will not come, searching for a form of meaning that is not there.
What does that have to do with Zen?
What exactly do you think Zen is?
I can only point to the actual Zen Stories. Maybe I don't understand them-- I certainly can't explain them without destroying them -- but they send a chill down my spine and I feel a flash of what they mean, or I feel like I do.
Words like "stop reaching for a form of meaning that is not there" is an attempt to rationalize Zen, but it destroys Zen in the process. It's like reducing music to an explanation.
Not that it isn't correct to say "is not there" but saying "that's not it" doesn't tell you what it is at all. There *is* an it to Zen. It is inexplicable but not incomprehensible. Like music.
What's the music theory of zen, then? Because reducing music to explanations is as I understand it a fairly necessary and routine part of musicmaking.
but not a necessary part of experiencing music. I made a purposeful decisiion not to "learn" music, because it's impact on me was so powerful, and I didnt want to risk intellectualizing it in a way that might make me perceive it differently and lose some of that effect.
That's maybe comparable to zen. Or perhaps like how one might enjoy stage illusions but not really want to know how an effect is done and it would ruin the "fun"
Of course you can give an explanation of of music itself, as a pattern of sounds -- you can talk about keys, chords, rhythm, sound waves etc. But I think what Jack means is that you can't give an explanation of the experience of being moved by music. You can't explain or demonstrate to someone that they should weep when you hear this piece, dance with mad elation to this other one.
It's explicitly telling you to -stop- rationalizing Zen, that that entire framework and approach cannot possibly work, and you take it as a form of rationalization?
Here's the problem with this. One has to already assume zen has some inherent value.
If I am someone who is agnostic as to the benefits of zen, and I try to ask what the benefit would be in doing the work, and someone tells me they cant explain it to me.. well, how would I know if the work was actually worth doing?
I think for many people outsidr of buddhisms, there is a skepticism that there actually is such a thing as enlightenment, and it sjust people who believe enlightenment is a thing in the same sense christians beieve heaven is a thing, and the "i cant explain it" thing is just a tautological defense for practices that are faith based.
I dont believe this, based on some of my own experiences and neuroscience related to this- but I dont think zen or any other system is a unique sacred path to certain states.
I think the explnation Scott give is pretty close. There are things in buddhiskm and other similar practices that will help acheive those states, but the specific dogmas dont really matter.
This explains a mjor problem of buddhism for me- that various teachers claim to be englightend or say they reperesent the correct understanding whereas everyone else is getting it wrong.
Or how there literal succession wars inside chinese budhist monasteries.
Fighting and killing other buddhists so that your guru can be the top guy instead of theres seems pretty antithetical to the spirit of buddhism.
Or How in Tibet, the monks did in fact live in relative opulence at the expense of the very poor peasants. When there was a peasant rebelliong to stop the heavy taxation from the capital. the capital forces, supported by the monks, used violent campaigns inculding torture of dissidents to acheive their aims.
Those things dont really jive with the whole enlightment thing.
Again my hunch is that yogic prsacties can make these states accessivle, but they arent necessarily permemannet or make one immune to all the other things like lust for power and status.
the site was from a "broken koans" website. Scott took a very literal one but they are "joke" koans. They arent intended as actual koans, but parodies of the style of koans.
example-"Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When anyone asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy would raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. He seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and ran away."
What I don't understand about this "desire for desire" idea is I spent all of middle-school and high-school with a hard-on looking around at the girls in my classroom, imagining the terrible, beautiful things I wanted to do with them. As a Gen-X-er, talking to others in my generation, that's how we all experienced it. You'd spend all day in class imagining fucking the girl who sat in front of you in English class, then go home and jack off thinking about her the moment you got home. You couldn't wait to get home to jack off. It was torture.
But was everyone in my generation experiencing some memetic desire, something different from today because we consumed different porn? I grew up when porn meant Penthouse and Hustler magazines. You spent a lot of time looking at a picture of a hairy pussy. Did that create the desire I felt for my female classmates? It seems implausible, yet I don't know how to rule it out.
If that's the case, then it seems like magazine porn was the good porn, because it was just pictures of tits and cunts and made you want to experience them in the flesh. It wasn't a substitution, maybe it was a catalyst.
It strikes me as crazy that most young men haven't always spent most of their time fantasizing about exploring women's pussies. After all, aren't we here because that's what every generation before us did? It seems nutty to think porn is a driver of desire as opposed to a pacifier of it.
But maybe internet porn is different? Perhaps, but any "This time it's different" claim needs to make a strong, clear case.
Why the focus on what was, instead of what is?
Comparative porn studies?
That'd be more applicable to older, 25+ men who suddenly find they can think clearly again once they're not a walking bag of hormones, and sex is pretty neat, but orienting your entire life around pursuing it seems weird. That creates some serious dissonance between you and everything you see in the surrounding society, and there is no straightforward non-disgusting way to pursue status and social approval anymore because fuck virtue and being useful there's just consumption and instagram.
So you want to be that tinder gigachad anyway because apparently that'll make you happy, and if that's not happening organically then something's wrong with you.
Any resemblance to real-life real dogs is purely coincidental, and I think a good 60-70% of the publicly broadcasted hypersexuality is performative, perhaps fooling even the performer.
I dont think the desire in and of itself is "socially consturcted" but the standards of what one is attracted to definitely are.
"Flappers" of the twenties who were the sex icons of the day look nothing like the early 90s "tranny" look of pamela anderson.
There have been studies on this sort of thing.
Male libido may actually be lower on average now then it was due to synthetic endocrine disruptors, but I dont doubt WHAT turns one on is socially relative. When we see tribal people, we generally dont perceive the naked women to be attractive in the same way as women form on our own cultures.
Things like that show that the specifics of what is attractice are in fact culturally relative, although the basic desire it, and there are things that tend to be universal like relative facial symmetry.
This is very different from what Teach is saying though.
On a bit of a side note I do think proliferation of certain types of porn can be harmful.
For reasons that no one is super clear on, "incest" porn has absolutely exploded over the past few years, one is exposed to it even if one isnt looking for it.
This could lead to people who otherwise wouldnt have developing an interest in incest, which could obviously have very negative social consequences.
Is it possible that much of this can be nested in the framework of competing desires? For example, the lady with the submissive fetish could be considered as finding a compromise between her desire to have sex and her desire to be a good moral person; it just happens that her understanding of ‘good moral person’ does not include asking for sex, hence the fantasy.
Likewise, people that don’t act on their desires are simply balancing their desire for 'safety' with their desire for other things that require action with non-zero risk.
I think that you are right about competing desires, but it does not quite resolve the puzzle. Humans are very good at defense mechanisms, so the lady could probably convince herself that sexual desire is compatible with being a good moral person. But would the sex still be as pleasurable? Sexual submission strikes me as being way more about getting permission to enjoy the sex than about permission to merely have sex. Folks with fetishes probably just don't get the same thrill from vanilla sex.
Put another way, it would be very easy to convince myself that a diet of grilled chicken breast and steamed broccoli is the healthiest and, therefore, best way to live. I might even be able to force myself to stick to such a diet. But it would be much more difficult for me to convince myself that I really enjoy eating chicken and broccoli more than bacon and chocolate cake. It's probably impossible. The best I could do is to develop some sort of weird relationship with unhealthy foods where I fetishize the act of denying them to myself.
So maybe for people with submission fantasies, they feel that the best way to enjoy consensual sex is to deny themselves the consent, or at least to immerse themselves in an experience that simulates the denial of consent.
"Don't get the same thrill" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your theory. In my experience, which is both personal and based on the behavior of my friends, there are multiple forms of fetish-havers. There are those who need fetishistic sex to the point where they can't get aroused without the trappings of it; there are those who prefer fetishistic sex to "vanilla"; and there are those who are, point in fact, fine with either and don't NEED to have fetishistic sex, but do so because it spices things up. To use your metaphor: there are people who have some kind of eating disorder that makes them binge on chocolate, there are people who are sweet-tooths who prefer chocolate over a salad, and there are people who enjoy chocolate, but, without some gargantuan effort of the will, reserve it as an occasional treat instead of a major element of their diet.
Funny enough, I had this exact set of thoughts after posting my comment. As you say, there are fetish situations where the person needs the fetish just to get off and situations where the person merely finds the fetish more pleasurable. Is this a difference of degree or is it a categorical difference? I don't know. I don't claim to have any special insight.
What I was trying to speak to is the question of why people develop kinks to regulate their pleasure instead of just giving themselves permission to like what they like. I think the answer is that we simply cannot directly manipulate what we find pleasurable. Perhaps kinks are the mind using desire to try to solve an optimization problem between pleasure and pain, attraction and disgust.
It's like the wires transmitting the experiences of pleasure, disgust, cruelty, domination, humiliation, adoration -- like they're really close together, and for many people some wires have little areas where there's no insulation, and if the wire next to it has a gap in a nearby spot the electrical charge just crosses over.
My guess: Sex is very pleasurable, but it's also simple and predictable. If it didn't inherently feel good, it would be boring as hell. So what "kinks" do is make it interesting in ways that appeal to parts of your brain that care about things other than friction on genitals.
‘the unmediated experience of the world’ quoted in that Zen section…… Scott and everyone else, what is your response to this possibility of a way of experiencing life?
I've experienced it a couple of times- once through meditation, and once spontaneously. I cannot describe what it feels like beyond the cliche metaphor of "Seeing the world for the first time" (except even that's not really accurate), so I know it's really possible. If you want me to explain some rationalist benefit to it: there is none, it's nothing but a stupid trick, I discourage in the strongest terms any rationalists from trying to seek this state unless they're willing to commit to the framework around it, leave it to us stupid, gullible, demented spiritualists who don't think you need reams of equations to be a good person.
Thanks. I think it’s possible without a spiritual framework. Face the fear of not interpreting and stay with the experience sums it up for me.
I also think it's possible. I don't think it should be done without the spiritual framework, and in fact will cause grave spiritual and psychological harm without the framework- I am talking about a significant risk of someone actually having a psychotic breakdown here. To that end, in my day-to-day life, if someone who's an avowed materialist asks me about such things, I will first lie and say that such a state is impossible to actually attain and is just a metaphor for sorting out your mental baggage. If they continue to press, I'll claim that such a state DOES exist but that it has no practical value and is just a weird mental trick that takes far too much time to actually learn. If they continue to press, I will tell them what I am telling you, and then say "Begin by reading the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra. Then, read the Golden Lotus Sutra. If neither of these contain the truth to you, then you should just smoke cannabis instead."
I think very small children have it much the time. I still have dim memories of what it was like.
I don't get it.
So, this Teach says that just about everybody is sick. But does he have anything to say about whether there's a cure? Is becoming an obscurantist-psychoanalysis-conscious misanthrope good enough? Or it's good enough merely to became aware that everything is horrible and to derive pseudo-high-status from this understanding? Then I guess I'm there already, if having taken a somewhat different path.
As for porn, I always though that its main purpose (for males) was ersatz variety, which makes evo-psych sense. The same story/comic/video on repeated exposure do still arouse me, but less and less with each instance.
"Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese!"
He's wrong, see https://putanumonit.com/2021/05/14/sex-positivity/ and references therein
That's just a guy with an opinion, about bad sex.
I can see why people [can't remember who or where, off the top of my head] would hypothesize The Last Psychiatrist is C-rt-s Y-rv-n... except this is way worse than UR ever was.
There's no way I could handle that style of writing. Well done for reading that tosh
"a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about [...] playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me"
TIL Scott is mad jealous (though Teach might instead claim envious) of his little brother ;)
I remember, but can't find, a blog post on TLP is as an example of gaslighting. His writing is good at vaguely evoking bad feelings about yourself while never being concrete enough for you to critically evaluate.
His notion of 'narcissism' did seem to frame common features of the human experience as unusual pathology in 'you'.
I have to think if "Teach" read this essay he would be tickled, because (1) you seem frustrated by being not entirely sure you weren't just the victim of a truly moby prank, and yet (2) your writing style distinctly changed and it seems in a few places like your usual train of thought was derailed a bit and went off in a few novel directions.
Which means it *worked* and was well worth the $500. It does seem weirdly Zen, which is strange because I don't like Zen -- at least I think I don't -- but I find this highly amusing. Maybe actual Zen just suffers in translation and I need to learn Chinese.
What if the main theme in the book is some kind of intellectual cuckoldry analogue? "I, the author, have read all these hot sexy books, and you, pathetic reader with your limp and tiny below average IQ, has probably tried to read some of them, but did not achieve the understanding to satisfy the texts properly. Indeed, you'll never be able to do so, you weak-minded wage-slave! Let me proceed by explaining why your interpretation (and anyone else, in case you think this somehow doesn't apply to you) is WRONG while I insult and otherwise belittle you, you imbecile." This does appear to have decent anti-memetical potential, in the sense that I believe this is a very novel and rare kind of fetish.
Regarding "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.", I think I agree, if we allow that the two usages of fetish have a different meaning here. The first meaning is the now most common meaning of "paraphilia", while the second is sacred/magical idol, totem or focus. At the least, it seems there is some property of porn that is more than the titillating information it contains, why else would people commission pornographic artwork that depicts a (highly unique) scene entirely designed by the commissioner? Why would they do more of the same, to the point of obsession? Maybe it's a simple trick for the senses, who are probably evolved to assume purely mental constructs are of limited use in procreation. Similar to a prayer bead for meditation, perhaps.
Sounds like this is well and truly intertwined with our old friend, The Transgender Lobster, and I mean that in a good way for both of them.
Incidentally, I go to an ex-marine therapist who has never heard of either of them, and doesn't know quite what an odd duck he is, but does tell me it's best to [metaphorically] clean my room and [literally] sit up straight.
Biblical angels are a poor example of an anitmeme.
Most people who read the relevant parts of the bible can picture one. They might not get the one the author intended, but they'll picture something. They show up in various pieces of popular media like Kill Six Billion Demons or Bayonetta, and while they're not exactly as depicted in the bible fantasy fans have no trouble recognising the concept of Bible-style angels.
Basically, biblical angels are a regular meme outcompeted by a much stronger meme, not an antimeme.
This post was an excellent reminder to me that every writing style has a different intended audience, as well as some kind of payoff for the author based on their original intention.
I would be curious to hear from more people who are excited to read the book after reading this review. What is attractive to you about it? What's the expected value here? I'm experiencing such a strong negative reaction to the snippets that I don't think I can be at all objective and would like any experiential counter evidence you were maybe hesitating to share in the comments (which I'm also reading).
My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here. Choosing to put time into a work that forces me to take the risk that it might be a narcissistic mind game, or just generally a flop, isn't really high on my own priority list.
I'm also curious to consider the argument that it promotes critical thinking further, but my gut response isn't so much that it promotes it, more that it limits your audience to people who have a predisposition to enjoy intellectual masturbation of some kind. You're more likely to enjoy or get something out of a deliberately complex work if you're predisposed to enjoying challenge, study, etc. If anyone can point me directly to extra studies or writing on the subject of priming audiences to manipulate (assess, analyze, debate, etc.) input I'd be grateful. Search engines will get me there eventually.
I'm not attributing any value judgment to this confrontational author stance by the way. I think it's a valid choice, if made with a particular audience in mind - if it's an unintended side effect, then another editor experienced in your chosen target audience could be helpful. This audience can also be the author, who has their own relationship with the work, and by extension with their imagined audience. The adversorial tone of the writing is so pronounced that it's a great signal to the reader. In that sense, I'd consider the writing extremely efficient: the author immediately defines the audience as readers who are willing to submit themselves to the writing, and who are therefore either open to the message or stubborn enough to stay until the very end without any guarantee they'll have a workable way to process the information (see Scott's experience).
It seems there's a conscious framing of the author-reader relationship that lies in the hands of the author, and that leaves me feeling uneasy. There's a lot of trust involved in this process, and I'm personally not open to someone who outright challenges that trust and frames it as a power dynamic, where they are automatically on top. But the author isn't either, so win-win?
Because of this interpretation, reading the book would be tantamount to me consenting to a relationship with someone who seeks only to challenge me, compare me to them, and measure my value entirely against their own sense of self worth (not positive in my book). The latter is already established in the author's mind, and because they are removed from the process, unless I email them or they read my comments somewhere, etc. It's a dynamic that ironically reminds me of red flags in BDSM relationships: the person submitting has no option for aftercare, no avenue to have a discussion about consent on equal grounds. You take it or leave it, without any knowledge up front of what effect the experience will have on you. Perhaps this mindset is exactly what the author intends to challenge. But if you hold a particular disdain for a way of thinking/being/perceiving, and you consciously use tools that are NOT efficient in engaging the audience you'd like to affect, then what's your goal? Intellectual/experiential segregation?
Anyway this is a very emotional rather than evidence driven reaction to a review of a book I don't intend to read. But it's amusing to me that this kind of loose analysis is exactly what the excerpts trigerred in me, while a quick look at TLP's blog seems to indicate they'd find this kind of thinking lazy or that I'm someone who goes to a therapist for the type of psychoanalysis that is preventing any growth/change.
As someone who is interested in reading the book after reading this review, I think of it as a sort of drug—Teach’s writing style gives me a continual feeling of revelation or near-revelation, and even if I know in the back of my mind it’s all nonsense or useless, it still *feels* like I’ve gained profound insights into the world, which is a sort of “high” to me.
That definitely sounds like a great experience! Much more attractive than my gut reaction, haha.
I'm curious to hear more thoughts on how the feeling of insight registers even if in the back of your mind it's "nonsense"? I'm interpreting that as a contradiction and struggling to understand why you'd want to feel something that isn't "real" (real here meaning a definition you apply to the word profound, for example).
As in, somewhere you have a measure that helps you equate insight=profound, which results in a good feeling. So there's something about Teach's work that allows you to get the same reaction from insight=nonsense as insight=profound. That sounds dangerous to me and as if it might open you up to be receptive to nonsense, where you'd otherwise be more critical of it? Is it easy for you to differentiate between the nonsense and profound scenarios even with the good feeling present?
Thanks for indulging me if you care to extrapolate :)
To answer both you and Emma, I’d think of it in a similar manner to that “aha!” moment you sometimes get while reading well-written fiction during a satisfying plot twist (Brandon Sanderson is great at that, and Scott Alexander pulls it off multiple times in Unsong as well). The twist takes place in a totally fabricated world of the author’s imagining, but it still feels great to have that sense of the plot falling into place, of something that once didn’t make sense suddenly becoming clear. There’s a similar feeling obtained when solving a good puzzle/riddle/game, of course. The difference here is that the fictional world is one very closely resembling our own, with the slight difference that human beings act for different (and vastly simplified) reasons than they actually do, and that history and literature have been deformed a bit to fit the author’s “narrative”.
At the same time, I probably am more susceptible to infohazards and misinformation than the average person here, considering that I’m finding myself drawn “by logical necessity” towards some philosophies which I’m pretty sure are very dangerous, and which I haven’t seen discussed seriously within rationalist groups. Feel free to email me at yitzilitt (in the great land of gmail.com) if you want to discuss this particular aspect further, as I could honestly use someone to talk to about some of those thoughts (and don’t want to spread potential infohazards in a public forum).
How are you able to both feel that "I know in the back of my mind it’s all nonsense or useless" and "it still *feels* like I’ve gained profound insights into the world,". I find that totally perplexing!
Answered above in response to GG
I started reading the book after finishing the review. I have fond, but very vague memories of TLP's blog, which I'm sure played a part in my enthusiasm. I'm a little way into the book now and am finding it quite enjoyable.
I find Teach's acerbic style down-right hilarious at times, and I'm frequenting stopping and thinking about the ideas he's proposing. He has insights that ring true that I haven't come across elsewhere (thought that likely says more about me than him).
I find it a lot like reading Nietzsche, where one minute I'm laughing at the way he's flaying the Stoics (who I'm quite fond of) and the next minute wondering if all philosophy really does recast the world in its own image.
> My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here.
I may be misinterpreting you here, but personally I don't seek "value" when reading philosophy. For me it's about the experience of the reading, and any subsequent thoughts it might inspire. It feels good to have an idea up-end me momentarily, while I scramble to either integrate into my conception of the world or reject it.
Even if I think the idea is wrong, the process of working out why is worthwhile. As an example. I despise anitnatalism on a visceral level, but articulating to myself why (which took me quite a while to puzzle through) really clarified my thinking on a bunch of tangentially related areas.
For what it's worth, I don't think the book is particularly complex or obscurantist (at least not so far), nor do I get the feeling that Teach is being overly condescending. It's long and full of digressions, but some of those digressions are my favorite parts to date.
"So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves? I don’t really have an answer for this."
I do! Teach clearly hates himself, and is looking to share that pain and self-loathing with others.
I've recently finished reading a rationalist-adjacent story that seems to be "something almost, but not quite entirely unlike" *Sadly, Porn* :
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36676220-the-erogamer
It seems to be the polar opposite of *Sadly, Porn* in terms of (anti-)misanthropy. The internal conflicts of the characters are laid bare. Desire is of course addressed. What at first looks like superficial shallowness reveals exponential depths. I'm still reeling from the experience. As weird as it might sound, this feels to be the best piece of fiction that I have ever experienced. (And I'm not a teenager reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. Although I'm ashamed to admit that my fictional reading is probably lacking... *eyes the still unopened War and Peace on the bedside table*)
Oh, and it of course has plenty of hot sex, though YMMV in terms of specific kinks.
The Erogamer is indeed a brilliant piece of fiction that's impossible to discuss without admitting you read online erotica, but I'm not sure how it's related to this, except that I could see myself struggling to understand both of them on a deeper level for hours. Or I could, if I wasn't repelled by the way this book seems to hate me and everything I stand for.
This sort of reminds me how I defected from academic lit crit after tearing a Lyotard book in twain in the midst of reading it. I remember thinking -- enough is enough, I don't need this bullshit.
At the same time, some of the quotes (from Sadly, Porn; not that Lyotard book) were intriguing, if not exactly enjoyable. I haven't read anything lit crit adjacent for a while, I'm sort of curious how I'd react as a more mature person, and this sounds like a fun book to try on. If only to see whether my book-tearing skills are still sharp.
The story I'm using to wall off the part of myself with lit crit inclinations (so that I can productively focus on other things instead of agonizing over whether it was the right decision) runs something like this: French people like intellectual games. Sophisticated conversation, sleight of hand essays, it's all part of the culture. It's fashionable, it's social currency, it's a way of displaying that you are à la hauteur.
But it's still mainly a game. Think La Septième Fonction du langage -- you can imagine how reading that felt cathartic to me. This means you don't necessarily say things you believe to be true, but rather things that maximize your score, or at least compromise in that direction. Because unlike e.g. in the rationalist community (which is -- hopefully -- playing a different kind of game), just being right won't get you (as m)any points.
The trouble starts when all this theory is taken up by Anglo-Saxon literary departments, which put a Protestant, literal-minded twist on it, and with their unimpeachable work ethic, build an entire industry predicated upon the belief that all of this French intellectual frolicking was meant in earnest.
Forgive me if I sound facetious, I realize it's a caricature, as sweeping narratives tend to be. My own mindset is much closer to what I labeled Anglo-Saxon in the previous paragraph -- which is partly why I tore that Lyotard book in half. I'd finally had enough of trying to understand this stuff for real, wasting precious brain cycles on it. I'm still interested in how language works, I just switched to linguistics, where I found questions and approaches which are a better fit for me -- typically less frustrating, occasionally truly enlightening.
But the point is -- this story I'm telling myself means I've largely written off learning more about these French intellectuals at the source of it, Lacan included. And while it's helpful in practice (I'm free to think about other matters), it's also somewhat unsatisfactory, for someone who generally gets a kick out of understanding things. So if you ever dig deeper into Lacan, I'm genuinely curious to hear what you find there!
Also, looking forward to highlights from comments. If anyone has any useful Lacan resources, I hope they'll turn up!
Heh, made me think about a related misunderstanding :
"Historicizing with a Bulldozer
The misinformation of Jordan Peterson"
https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9moire-9aa3b6b3de04
(and especially the linked from there :
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/french-theory-how-foucault-derrida-deleuze-co-transformed-the-intellectual-life-of-the-united-states/
TL;DR - "French Theory" is not a French, but a USA phenomenon.)
TL;DR - We're *all* postmodernists here... (well maybe unless you're one of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim True Believers ?)
Thanks for sharing those links!
Thats literally why the aliens are coming to destroy us in Watts' "Blightsight", that all of consciousness is just pointless baroque bit twiddling who's only function is to waste compute cycles of anything listening to it. Talking to a sophont being is literally a infohazard DOS attack.
Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! I STRONGLY suggest you seek out interminable, inscrutable, possibly-nonsensical stream-of-consciousness miasma manifestos, read them carefully, and then post interpretations.
We may want to page Robert Wright, whose "Why Buddhism Is True" has obviously absolutely nothing to do with anything mentioned here.
I love (in a terrified sort of way) the insight that where status-seeking behavior is concerned, all that matters is the chemical response in the brain. Your anonymous philanthropic donation (or my slightly pseudonymous comment) is still a bid for status because all it has to do is please the audience in our minds. I mean ... now Twitter makes sense. This is the great hack of our technological era. "likes" turn out to be an in-kind substitute for resources and access to mates. This is way better than "42". Now I can enjoy the apocalypse.
I remember the Last Psychiatrist from Metafilter days. You take a very charitable view of him. Allow me to present a much less charitable view:
1. ‘Teach’ is a narcissist. Not in the bullshit cultural critique redefinition he constantly sort-of-half-gives-half-alludes-to but the more boring dark triad kind. He wants to feel intellectually powerful, dominant, the centre of attention. He wants people to see him as the smartest guy in any room. He wants your attention. It makes him feel good.
2. Everything he writes is a manipulative strategy designed to garner him this narcissistic supply. This explains everything about his prose style and ‘insights’. He makes sweeping Barnum statements that enough of his readers will agree with that some come away seeing him as insightful. He makes cultural references*, so his readers see him as well-read and intelligent. He associates himself with the high-status utopia of classical Athens. He actually is intelligent, at least enough to successfully pull off this strategy (unlike a less intelligent narcissist).
3. His writing has an unintended by-product: intelligent people who read it come up with intelligent interpretations, some of which have real value.
4. This is because his writing exploits the deep human desire to make sense of things. It does this in the same way as a cold-reading psychic - gaps, allusions, ambiguities, provocations. His writing certainly reveals a keen awareness of when people assume other people know what they are talking about.
5. He also uses highly impactful concepts (‘you know, like rape’, references to sex/death/parenthood). This serves to (a) get attention and (b) throw his readers emotionally off balance, so they are less likely to realise they are being played.
6. He may or may not realise he is doing this. He may think his pathological search for narcissistic supply is actually real reflection and insight. Nothing of his I have ever read betrays any real self-reflection, but not many people openly do that in writing and self-reflection =/= self-awareness.
7. The psychology he is describing is, fundamentally, his own: in playing his game he can only build his model of the other players out of the material to hand. This rule applies to him the same as it does to everyone.
8. Why do it anonymously? Because he suspects, probably correctly, that the sorts of things he knows will get him the results he wants will have bad consequences for him if he does them in real life, including possibly colleagues realising that he is a narcissist who should probably be kept away from vulnerable people. But online has the advantage of intimacy, and he doesn’t want political or physical power and attention, he wants interpersonal status and admiration.
Also, if you are using “800-page novels about English professors who have affairs and then feel guilty about it” as your definition of “Classical Literature” then it is hardly surprising that it baffles you that people like it. Tolstoy is “Classical Literature” and an awful lot happens in the 1200+ pages of War and Peace. So much so that it isn’t hard at all to see why people like it. The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”. I don’t much like that kind of book myself, but placed in historical context it again isn’t very hard to see why people read those kind of books, and unsurprisingly some of the ‘why’ is because they were frank about sexual experiences in an unprecedented or interesting way.
Some possibly presumptuous advice: if your map has a hole in it, don't waste time theorising about what *must* be over there or asking others what they think about it and trying to infer the hole's contents from their observations (they may be as ignorant as you or tell you lies). Don't put off action. Just go there any look for yourself.
Also, I’m more interested to know what you make of Lacan than I am in Lacan.
* TLA/‘Teach’’s cultural references are flashy bunk: for example the statement “This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves” is simplistic tosh. Even just for Athens, it doesn’t map on to any of the major classical thinkers, any account of Athenian life as we can reconstruct it (given the turbulent history of Athens) and that was just one city-state. He’s making Barnum statements trading on people’s vague awareness of the classics and a few Great Books, and constructing a fantasised pre-historic Athens corrupted by ‘Sophists’. This is not real expertise. Go and look at the things themselves - they are much more interesting to an intelligent person than anything a right-wing populariser or a narcissist with fascist sensibilities has pre-chewed for you.
Thank you for expressing a critique of TLP here- I'm a bit too ticked off by his writing for personal reasons to articulate my own feelings about him with this level of precision, so I'm glad SOMEONE is.
Perhaps this is the insight that Scott’s cult-leader friend has reached from the book—a reliable method to create Barnum statements which even very intelligent and self-aware people can fall for.
"The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”."
Philip Roth is the poster boy for this, and the first name brought to mind by Scott's description. DeLillo. Occasionally Bellow. The theme is... not uncommon in the post-war American novel. I think the jibe lands, but it could easily be recast to refer to any other kind of literature with meta-aesthetic appeal, where you might be bored by the subject but excited by the language and method.
Anyway, Teach extracting some narcissistic supply or ego feathering for himself just seems transactionally fair if the insight porn (or koan-esque rumination porn) he provides is otherwise worthwhile.
The whole "Dragon Tattoo" series is about a newspaper editor instead of an english professor, with a girl who walked right out of the Matrix. Completely by coincidence, the author is a newspaper editor...
Well done! The Athen quotes gave him away: "it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions" - pardon? No, no "fact" at all. If "lines", then both are a very, very crooked and interwoven with other "lines". The rest of "Athen": his fantasy-world. 3.: Yes, his writing does shake one's thinking up. Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” Actually, that sounds like a much better comment, than anything I could do. Will post it as a stand-alone. ;) https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
"But I agree with 3. -his writing does shake one's thinking up."
For me, it just makes me shrug at the absurdity of what is being said, without prompting me in the least to look for interpretations that would eventually make sense of the nonsense. There are so many great writers who are able to express complex ideas so clearly, Scott being an excellent example, that I don't see the point of reading texts that may be great but are much more likely to be nonsense.
" But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
What a sad quote. Why on earth should life-changing books be similar to grief or suicide? New ideas are often pure joy!
> Why on earth should life-changing books be similar to grief or suicide?
Presumably because you're no longer the same person afterwards; your previous, more innocent self is dead. Melodramatic, but some people are into that kind of thing.
Thank you very much! The passages in the book quoted by Scott do sound like the ravings of a narcissist pretending to have genius ideas. And while they are quite fun to read, in moderate doses - I'm surprised anyone is able or willing to read the entire book - I'm not sure if it has any value other than entertainment, or indeed a kind of I Ching into which anyone can project their interpretations.
As far as classic literature is concerned, the absurdly long footnotes are strongly reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, whose story is told entirely in huge footnotes, written by a madman who makes a completely nonsensical (but wonderful!) interpretation of the main text. A great book!
I love it too. Why read Teach when you can read Pale Fire?
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
My favorite parts were the wild misinterpretations of Kinbote but the poem is beautiful indeed!
Yes, TLP seemed pretty narcissistic to me.
I'm reminded of Karen Horney's ideas about impossible standards. As I recall, she was writing about setting impossible standards for oneself rather than about setting impossible standards for other people.
In any case, she wrote about how children who've been neglected, abused, or pushed faster than they actually develop will decide that just being a human being isn't good enough, and set impossible standards for themselves.
In this case, the impossible standard is being authentic enough to satisfy TLP.
I am 65% of the way through the book.
Quite simply, I think you're wrong. At this point if I have a complaint about the book, it's that it is rather repetitive of the same thematic point, which is also advice, and the advice is fairly good. You've heard the advice, a thousand times before; it's still good advice, because somehow almost nobody ever actually hears it.
Condensing the basic point down to a simple statement which has been robbed of all value: "You" don't make choices, you run on autopilot, you leave choices for other people to make. Mostly it frames this in terms of sex, and how society thinks about sex, possibly because questions of agency in and around sex tend to be the areas people have the strongest opinions.
This takes the form, largely, of spending large parts of your life waiting for an excuse to act. Suppose you have trouble getting things done at work; you get put on medications. You start working. The medications might help, but the more important part is that it isn't you who chose to start working harder, it was the doctor who prescribed the medications.
Or - you haven't had sex in a while. Someone invites you to a party, you attend and drink copious amounts of alcohol somebody else provides, and have sex. "You" didn't choose to have sex; you safely avoided making any choices at all. Why are you reading this, instead of acting? Because reading this is a valid form of not making a choice; it's part of the autopilot.
Notice the passive voice, the absence of a goal or desire in the above; this is, Teach argues, the root cause of the absence of action, which is an absence of desire. In the second example, we might think of the person as a woman - she drinks because it's socially unacceptable to desire sex, but it's socially acceptable for her to have sex while drunk. She is trying to avoid agency. But to gender the problem is to misidentify it: Everybody is trying to avoid agency.
Something something repression, desire transforms into envy, and everybody is low-key angry that anybody else gets to exercise agency, gets to desire things, gets to be happy and fulfilled. This part is ... odd. It's correctly describing something, but in a strange uncanny valley kind of way. The ledger version is better.
The gist of it is broadly correct; it's also not a new philosophy, once you get what it is gesturing at. Moloch keeps eating it.
I really don't get it. Yes, it's trivially true that people sometimes avoid action and don't always admit their desire, even if it's a gross oversimplification to insist that this is the primary cause of everyone's actions.
It seems to me that this book is a kind of Jordan Peterson thing with a different wrapper: charismatically delivering an exaggerated and obvious message, with relative clarity in the case of Peterson and wrapped in manic rants for Teach. This could be very useful for confused youth, but more generally, it does not seem to me to be interesting.
It ultimately depends on what you find interesting; I find the style itself interesting. But also, any simple explanation of what the book is actually about will reduce down to something that sounds trivially true; oh, yeah, duh. Atlas Shrugged takes on the same basic problem; it's also insanely long, and has a not-at-all-accidental tendency to be misunderstood to be about how rich people are better than everybody else and we should just let them do what they want, which is almost exactly the opposite of the point of the book, in much the way that the Soviet Union is almost exactly the opposite of the point of communism. The trivial truth it is talking about can be found in Ayn Rand's work; Marx's work; Nietzsche's work. The author argues it can be found in the bible, as well; I'm not well placed to evaluate that claim.
At least one of the other reviews main comment is how it convinces you of something without having any factual basis; they see this as a problem. However, I'm somewhat more familiar with the basic kind of style here, and - this is entirely accurate, and also entirely missing the point. There's a certain kind of person who won't ever get the point; okay, it's not based on facts, it's not real. What kind of argument doesn't depend on the things it is saying being actually factually true?
An argument that isn't actually about the things it is saying, because what it is saying isn't about the literal things being discussed, it's about how the things being discussed would be understood in our shared cultural context. It's about how you react to them, how you imagine other people reacting to them.
SMBC has a comic in which the author responds to something like visceral horror to an argument the author of the comic encountered: A speaker, upon discovering that the factual basis of their argument is false, instead shifts to the argument that "It says something that I could believe that this false thing is true." To the author of SMBC, this argument is insane; what the fuck even is that?
If you understand what the actual argument is behind "It says something that I could believe that this false thing is true", if you understand what it means to say, about a false thing, that it is the sort of thing which could be true - then you'll find the book easy reading. If you can't, it will come across as impenetrable and insane, alternate between finding yourself convinced of something, and then realizing that you weren't convinced based on any actual facts or arguments.
That's not to say, if you understand it, that you will agree with it. Personally I find it to be slightly off; consistently almost hitting its mark, but missing a tiny bit of understanding. Like the cuckold porn - the husband needed to be awake for the sex scene, for the same reason, if the husband isn't there, the wife has to call him during the sex. That's not a small detail, it undercuts both the fantasy, and the point that the author is trying to make. Hell, it changes the genre of the porn into something else. The point still works, but it's a significantly weaker version of the point. (The husband must be awake, for the point to really work, in order to not act.)
That's basically the entirety of the book.
"It ultimately depends on what you find interesting; I find the style itself interesting."
Indeed! I think both E Teach and A rand deliver questionable messages in a relatively unreadable style. For my taste, Teach's message is somewhat true but so over the top that it becomes a caricature, and his style is ridiculously long and uncomfortable to read for me, as he seems to have some sort of painful mental disorder. Also for my taste, A Raynd makes little attempt to describe the world but gives prescriptions that are childish (all this fanning over übermensch!) and morally questionnable. And I find her style, or in fact her characters, quite bland and off-putting.
In both cases, I find the ratio of interestingness or enjoyment to length abysmally low!
I've always been very skeptical of these theories that claim to explain that all of human behavior emerges from a very small number of root causes. It feels like the creator found a few behaviors in a smattering of people that they could explain and then handwaved it over the rest of humanity.
My intuition is that humans are just way too dang complex for any single motivating factor to explain why we do what we do. So much goes into shaping a person, from their genetics, the culture they live in, their particular set of experiences, their peers, and on and on. Saying "well it's all just repressed desires" or whatever seems immensely simplistic.
Maybe I don't understand what these theories are actually saying. They've never seemed particularly interesting to me, so I've never had the curiosity to learn more about them.
I totally agree. I do not doubt that repressed status seeking is a frequent motivation of people but certainly not the only or primary one.
I just wanted to say that I discovered you, Scott, by googling 'blogs similar to Last Psychiatrist', some five years ago. And I'm really glad I did.
Oh, I was sure for months that it's TLP's new blog.
I wonder about the value of reading a book that seems to have been written by the genuinely schizhoprenic.
Teach seems to be making a criticism of modern culture (and if I may, looking more towards elite culture such that Woke/SJ and iterated irony are heavily included), rather than a criticism of all societies except Athens. It wouldn't even make sense to say that all cultures other than Athens failed to Act, as there have been many Active cultures. The inclusion of only Full Democracies seems contrived, as many societies have had partial or significant Active populations, even if not everyone was. I happen to think that there are conservative cultures in the US that are very Active and specifically reject the psychological defenses Teach is talking about. Christianity teaches humility and a denial of self with an imperative to Act, such that many Christians have a memetic defense against the things Teach is worried about. Many "Christians" are also just floating along with elite culture and don't necessarily live life any different from what we might call "standard US culture" or on the opposite end "Right Wing culture warriors" so just name-dropping Christianity certainly wouldn't be enough.
Jordan Peterson comes to mind as someone trying to fight against the same target as Teach, and with a moderate level of success. Telling someone to clean their room is enforcing Action. Take Responsibility. Take Ownership of your life and your choices. Peterson's target audience is pretty clear - disaffected young men. I'm not sure who Teach is trying to reach, but it sounds like Western cultural elites who are in or near the Woke bubble.
This was a wild ride and I'm living for it
Excellent post. The Zen comparison and the 'possibility of map-hole' thing are eye-openingly instructive about my enjoyment of The Last Psychiatrist's blog. I disagreed with Alone (or Teach, I guess - he always did claim to like his rum) on just about everything social and political, but it was always fun to think it through and reestablish why, and he always did seem to be driving at the Real.
Oddly, I rarely got the feeling of being berated and patronised by someone with superior insight or self-knowledge. It was more of a wistful 'we are all in this together, only I can see a bit further in the fog, and I'm by parts cranky about what I see and frustrated that you don't see it' kind of tone.
Plus, his diversions into psychiatry shop-talk were always cool, and his illustrations of narcissism, borderline, and other personality and mood disorders made good internal sense to me as a layman. But that could be just because I am a layman.
Might get the book. Probably won't read it through, but it'll sit there burnishing my self-image as someone who would read that kind of book, which is all that matters.
It seems rather in your benefit to understate the main theses of the book, which, are in no particular order: inability to fantasize, knowledge as a defense against impotence, lack of secondary source reading, envy and ledgers.
The audience you write for is the exact audience this is intended for. They will be happy to accept your secondary report, feel knowledgeable and give their power to you instead of wielding it themselves.
Your example on envy is a clear case. How many of us, consciously, believe we are envious and would think “I wish my friend didn’t have a hot wife” — we say to ourselves exactly as the pirate describes, “My wife isn’t hot because I’m ugly” — which means, “in [not] my fantasy of the world, I am ugly and that’s why I have an ugly wife [therefore in reality, my bitch wife is with an ugly guy and never will be satisfied, the “ledger” is even].
Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher.
On antimemes and Marx being insightful, but interpreted in a way useful as a defense: I get the same sense about Nietzsche, and he evidently got the same sense about himself. There's a passage - which I can't find but know exists - where Nietzsche is talking about his contempt for people who are joyfully enthusiastic about his work. He says something along the lines of "rather than showing you have understood my work, your exuberance shows precisely that you have not understood it at all. If you had, it would hurt you too much."
About the introduction to Lacan, I would suggest the first Seminar of Lacan himself, and then take it from there chronologically. That's the one - https://www.amazon.com/Seminar-Jacques-Lacan-Technique-1953-1954/dp/0393306976
For all the merit of secondary literature it is either for advanced use (like you really read Lacan before), or is just not anti-meme enough, so you would just learn watered-down version of concepts (all these Big Other, small a, the Real, and so on) without comprehending the logic and method behind it.
I don't know if there's anything here, but this review reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. One reason is the footnotes. Another is the non-linear storytelling and out-of-left-field detours into unrelated subjects. But the biggest reason is just the novelty. The main thing that interested me about House of Leaves is that it is so utterly weird and so different from everything else that it is fascinating for that alone. (It's the fictional product of people writing about a documentary about a movie that doesn't exist in-universe. It's got multiple narrators, about half of the text consists of footnotes, and it has pages that look like this https://i.ibb.co/w7JcTJX/xx.webp)
Given that I still like this book even though I ultimately found it disappointing as a horror story, I have to wonder to what extent Sadly, Porn is weird because TLP wanted to make something weird, for the sake of itself.
I immediately thought of HoL at the line “this book is not for you,” as that’s a direct quote from the book. HoL also has the actual (as opposed to merely possible) quality of requiring an understanding of the whole before being able to fully appreciate any individual part of the book, and the insights ultimately imparted seems (to me at least) to be vastly more powerful for that. I think HoL is an excellent case study of how to actually pull off what Teach seems to have been aiming for, albeit in a very different genre.
Can you briefly explain how understanding the whole of HoL made you appreciate parts better? (because I didn't have that experience, really.) I got that P. probably wrote TNR, that J.T. probably died in a miscarriage, and that the old man was P's husband; is this all you mean?
Sure! I wasn’t really talking about the *plot* of House of Leaves to be honest, though it is worth taking a moment to try to describe the interconnectedness there. For a simple example, the Whalestoe letters (in the appendix) dramatically influence how I read J.T.’s character, and almost all of the moments where he initially reads as rambling nonsensically (to the point that my eyes glazed over reading it for the first time), as well as his fantastical stories, can be understood very clearly in the second read. Within TNR, Navidson’s strange side comments require the (later) Delial story to understand, and that story itself requires the (earlier and later) understanding of Zampano’s blindness and history as a (probable) veteran to be able to understand how the story fits into Zampano’s understanding of conflict! (This in turn influences how the noted references to “basecamp” in the Great Hall are interpreted, etc….)
The central idea which requires the entire book to understand, however, is, imo, the Minotaur. Speaking outside the confines of the plot itself, (and here this won’t make much sense without having read through both the book and having some background on the actual author’s life), the Minotaur is Redwood is family is the house on Ash Tree Lane is Yggdrasil is the concept of Myth (as understood by Zampano) is the reader’s (optimal) reaction to HoL (it could also *possibly* be a number of other different things as well, including God/the universe, the author, and/or the reader, etc.). I know that last sentence didn’t clear much up, but that’s why the entire book is necessary as it is lol.
You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel?
"Sadly porn" = "Sly pardon".
"Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
By what definition of healthy/normal?
It seems like both Teach and your cult-leader friend are utilizing a similar strategy of appearing misanthropic, but at the same time seemingly giving attention and respect to *you*. In Teach’s case, this is done through using sayings like “this book is not for” (a direct quote from the opening of House of Leaves, btw, another book I’d love to hear your thoughts on), while strongly implying that the “you” he is talking to is not *you*, the “true follower” of his work.
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, ..., like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Young Kafka to a friend - translation check: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
I'm pretty skeptical that antimemes are unknowable; it's a lot easier to believe that they're tawdry and sordid. "So and so from my tribe did the bad" is more recognizably an antimeme than whatever eldritch spookiness Teach is peddling; it's not just an idea you don't want to spread, it makes you less interested in talking about the whole category i.e. your tribe's moral fiber. Many people learn such antimemes without spreading them. Many more people suspect them or have heard a rumor of them based on the details of their non-spread. Most people would only reveal them reluctantly, and especially prefer to not actually say them but non-confirm them in a revealing manner when explicitly prompted. And we have memes reinforcing antimemes ("snitches get stitches", "loose lips sink ships").
I suspect "unknowable antimemes" are just a trap for very empathetic or curious people. They're baited with an interesting question and the parsimonious feeling of revelation while filtering out people who see intellectual abuse coming. You want me to subject myself to your haranguing for, <checks notes> zero or even negative return on investment? I bet you have a bridge to sell me too. But the reason the trap works is that you wouldn't dare subject yourself to the loss of perceived status of having wasted your time.
About 10 minutes after clicking away I got that kind of stiff back feeling as if someone kind of challenged you to a fight and you didn't flinch. A small rush of endorphins I think and a sense of proud resoluteness
He seems like someone who is gravely disappointed with being a human being and wants others to be even more disappointed while according him the status of Disappointed in Chief of a small elite band who are the least disappointing as a result of their self awareness of it
The theory of all things as preventative measures to the risk of actually trying to succeed is well represented in the form of the book itself. I can certainly think of examples in my own life. I choose no career partly because it represents a potential failure without sufficient reward. But most people aren't really usually like this. I feel pretty confident in saying I don't ask people out in person because I don't like the high probability of unhappy intermediate events rather than actually don't genuinely want happy eventual events
Disjointed thoughts:
1. Someone doesn't have to appeal to everyone to be a cult leader. If Lacan's pscyhoanalysis applies to 1% of people, then there are 3 million Americans who would potentially be attracted to a would-be cult leader who relies on Lacan's theories.
2. I also have long agonized over difficulty with relationships and asking girls out. But I think I can point to exactly why I did it--involvement in activities that were male-dominated, general social anxiety, etc. Sure, I didn't want to be rejected--but that seems like a totally normal and surface level response, not something deep and hidden. I'm not saying I behaved optimally, but it doesn't feel mysterious, it doesn't feel like it needs to be explained.
3. There is something more "real" about a video than a story or a fantasy in your head. This is important if part of the porn or porn-substitute is the other person being "into" whatever you're imagining. Obviously if you're watching a video, then they don't care about *you*. But "the other person is enjoying this" seems to be a common aspect or requirement, and I think there is something different about an actual person enjoying a thing (or appearing/claiming to).
There's alot of comments, but i did a search and see no one quoted the Zero HP Lovecraft Review. His answer to your question "Why did Teach write this book?" and the related question, "who is Teach talking to" is correct. This interpretation further helps clarify what the purpose of his methods are. The "you" in the book is Teach himself. TLP is doing Lacanian analysis on his (and his class's) own failings to act in the world.
"I mentioned already that psychoanalysis is geared towards women, but the book is written as if it’s addressing men, and that the venn diagram overlap of that is men who think like women. The way that cashes out is that the book assumes you have progressive (normie) politics, even though I suspect anyone online enough to read this book probably does not have normie politics, though it’s hard to be sure. One theory is that it’s written to normie because the dissident can handle normie content, but not the other way around, another theory is that if the writer and the reader both pretend we’re talking about a normie then it gives us a certain kind of breathing room to maintain a critical distance while assessing the ideas. You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, you aren’t a normie, it’s OK, we’re both just talking about an object that’s far away. But if you’re reading it, it’s for you. TLP pretends to assume the reader will have normal, progressive-ish opinions like "I believe people are inherently good." The third theory is that he himself holds these opinions (and I think he does), and that anyone who writes about “you” or “we” is writing about himself. And that’s how he comes to write the following..."
I hope you write a follow up after reading 0hp's review.
(fixed some spelling issue)
ZeroHP's review seems to be trying to out-Teach Teach, and in doing so neatly reveals that the last psychiatrist schtick isn't so easy to pull off.
The bit you refer to is a fine example:
Psychoanalysis isn't real. It's a scam targeted at women (weak, subconscious-buffeted women...), like fortune-telling. But Teach has the temerity to try to scam men (men! strong and sovereign!) with psychoanalysis. How do we resolve this troubling contradiction? Clearly there must be a category of girly men who are somehow susceptible. Who are they? Perhaps the psychiatrist himself belongs?
Come on. You wouldn't find TLP slinging something this primitive on his worst day.
Agreed: this is just projective abuse being applied to projective abuse, and the fact this poster is trying to preach an incoherent interpretation of an incoherent work as the One True Meaning is... really something.
The following are quotes from TLP:
"The interesting part of this deliberate self-deception is that he thinks that telling her they only wanted her body is going to turn her off. He hopes the lies he has heard from four generations of women and the current generation of men are true: that women don't like being objectified, that women really only want to be liked for their mind or personality. The result is he spends a giant amount of energy hiding the fact that all he sees of any woman is her sex; he is overly respectful, overly polite, hyper-cautious. So it is enragingly confusing to him when other men are able to objectify them right to their big ass boobies, and the women don't seem to mind. They giggle."
"…the primary problem is the inability to act on a desire. It doesn't matter what her desire is. For her, acts have to be impulsive, compelled, or for some other reason, other than desire. If the pre-modern problem was guilt, and the modern problem was the inability to feel guilt, then she exhibits the post-modern problem: the inability to act. “Because I would feel guilty.” Keep telling yourself that.
You might criticize not her but the movie’s script, the writing, it doesn’t allow its lead character to make her own choices but instead has her pulled along by the plot. That is a common critique of female lead movies, but it is absolutely also a defense. The aspirational quality of the story and her character is precisely that she does not act towards goals. She reacts to situations."
Surprisingly, TLP does use the (traditional) rhetorical device to associate the womanly with the passive and the masculine with the active. I think this rhetorical move is hard to deploy these days, as can be seen in your response and others. But you are focusing on the (tasteless, distracting) analogy rather than the underlying message.
Yeah. Maybe I should have skipped the sarcasm in brackets. It managed to distract from my point.
When I say primitive, I'm not referring to expressing the notion of the active masculine and the passive feminine, although (since we're doing Lacan today) I disagree with that notion as anything other than a signifier. I'm even okay with people using scandalous expressions like 'big ass boobies', if they really must.
The primitive part is the attempt to identify the writer's target and intent based on the reviewer's own unsubstantiated preconception ('psychoanalysis is meant for women/feminine thought patterns') about the writer's chosen method.
This reads like abuse, because it is. I guess I get to thank an abusive ex-friend for inoculating me against this particular kind of anti-thought. If the author expresses contempt and hate for the reader, I'm inclined to believe them and steer clear.
There's a blatant attempt to undermine your ability to take your own thoughts seriously here, and it's apparent in the passage where the author accuses literally everybody of not having desires (at least not of the sort he thinks are good) and only being interested in "status" (which is subtly being shifted around with "identity" or "self-image", but not the same thing). Boy, when you redefine words like that, you can make anything mean anything!
This book is weaponized gaslighting. The fact that Scott wrote an interesting review and drew useful insights is pretty much separate from that.
Consider that the "you" Teach uses is in fact "me" or "us" and then update your conclusion on whether Teach is acting in bad faith. Perhaps Teach truly is contemptuous of himself and all moderns. Perhaps there are reasons to be contemptuous of "our" (Teach = educated managerial class) inability to effectuate independent desires.
Let me step back here a bit: Teach is contemptuous of desires he doesn't consider valid. Whether or not they're valid has no bearing on what he says. "Independent Desires" is a smoke screen.
Isnt it reasonable to consider desires of different moral or practical worth? Consider that desires can and do become hacked.
No. I disagree with that statement, philosophically speaking.
If I did agree, there's a vast difference between the claim that "Desires can get hacked" which I agree is true, and "All modern humans desire is winning a status game, which is not a valid desire" which is provably false. Consider heroin.
you truly believe all desires are of equal moral and practical worth? How do you choose what desires to desire? Fascinating.
I disagree that SA's TLP or TLP himself would say the only desire modern humans have is winning status games. But he would say that "our" (i.e. Teach himself or the modern educated managerial class) desires are materially mediated ("hacked") to be status oriented. I dont know if that's true, but its an interesting explanation of the growth of social movements that explicitly advocate for the shackling of almost all human activity in bureaucracy that functionally prevents new things from occurring. I suspect the inverse, something is causing the bureaucratization of society which generates justifications for their existence and Teach has it backwards.
Ultimately framing TLP as "abuse" is a way to stop thinking about the above, which is unhelpful.
Choose desires to desire? The active choice component there is a little overestimated. We could ask a gay man why he chooses to desire men in a repressive homophobic regime. There IS an active choice component, but desires themselves aren't of any moral or practical worth other than as predictive mechanisms, by my estimation.
I call TLP's writing abuse because it literally is the form of abuse known as gaslighting. There's a big difference between the kind of healthy self-doubt that allows you to second guess your own thoughts, beliefs, and choices and the kind of self-doubt TLP seeks to induce, which is that everything you do is wrong and your mechanisms for finding out what are wrong will be more wrong.
Anything can ALSO mean anything when you project your own meaning on top of the text.
Doesn't most (good) philosophy undermine your way of thinking? Nietzsche, Camus, Epictetus and many others have done that to me.
I also think you're misinterpreting Teach on desire. He doesn't judge the content of your desires; rather the way in which you acquired them.
Good philosophy presents new ideas and frameworks that may be sturdier or more reliable than the ones we previously held, supplanting those. Crucially, it doesn't undermine, or seek to undermine our ability to make decisions. Good philosophy may point out the holes in your own understanding, not throw you in an epistemic black hole. If good philosophy helps tear out a rotting foundation, this tears out perfectly functional structure because the author doesn't find it aesthetically pleasing.
I think your interpretation is more valid than what I think Teach is actually saying. Saying "The process by which we come to desire things is subject to hacking and in put in pursuit of things that leave us with nothing we would consider worthwhile", while debatable, is a far more coherent thought than whatever Teach wrote.
> I think your interpretation is more valid than what I think Teach is actually saying
That's interesting, because I was almost directly paraphrasing Teach. The actual quote is:
"You're not taught what to want, but how to want, the modern innovation is to let you think you came up with you on your own."
And later on the same page (in reference to the porn story):
" I am not trying to turn you on, I am not trying to explain why it does or does not turn you on, I don't care"
At least the title “Sadly, Porn” serves as a funny reply to “What are you reading?” Scott is consistently more broad minded than I’ll ever be, and that’s one of the things I like about this blog: it’s interesting to see him engaging in good faith, though not uncritically, with ideas I’d reject out of hand (Teach, Lacan, Marx, Moldbug, etc.)
Way too long Scott.
Your description brought to mind: "Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire
Nabokov went several layers of meta deep in the novel. Not only that, but in its afterlife as the object of literary critical attention, the critics and literary people have continued the process. “Pale Fire,” the Poem: Does It Stand Alone as a Masterpiece?" By Giles Harvey | December 2, 2011
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/pale-fire-the-poem-does-it-stand-alone-as-a-masterpiece
So has Teach, whomever he she or it might be, decided to be an artist like Nabokov -- a not insubstantial goal -- or has his mind, such as it is, simply slipped the surly bonds of sanity?
I ask the question, but I am not sufficiently interested in the subject to try to answer it
You use a metaphor of puzzle pieces to understand an antimeme. I think that the “MVP Pyramid” makes more sense. This is a classic image used in business world, and while it’s aesthetically LinkedIn-y it’s useful.
Here’s an image: https://yoroy.com/sites/default/files/styles/width-640/public/mvp.jpg?itok=uRVuY5St
The relevant axes here are “Finished” and “Complete”. Something is finished if it has some shading on every level of the pyramid. Something is complete if the whole pyramid is filled in.
An MVP is finished but it is not complete. So, a meme is like an MVP. A classic meme in my world is “the administration doesn’t care about the students.” This is a meme that is so common that it seems to predict the world as much as describe it. However, it is not finished. It is a vast oversimplification, it’s only one sentence!
An antimeme is an idea that cannot be finished unless it is complete. It deliberately obscures itself so as to minimize simplification into an MVP. Therefore the pyramid must be filled from bottom to top, and it is not useful until it is finished.
"(people criticized the rationalists for a long time for using “status” as a generic term without specifying “status among who” or “status about what”, but I get the impression that this is the exact right way to use status if you want to understand Edward Teach’s school of psychoanalysis)"
That's exactly what I get stuck on. Sometimes people like things and hide the fact that they like that thing from others. You can only claim that they do so for "status" if status is divorced from other people, but I don't think that's possible. To have status is to gain social clout by doing the done thing. You can't gain status in your own eyes, without linking that concept of status to how others measure it. If some nerd (from the 70s before Marvel movies let's say) is ashamed they like comic books and they hide it from everyone else, they probably just really like comic books, and status has very little to do with it.
I'm confused. If you can predict that you would lose status by publicly liking (say) furries, why can't you avoid publicly endorsing furries in order to not lose the status?
Right, but that's the regular understanding of status, as in "status in the eyes of others". Status only makes sense when it's contextualized, whereas I'm getting the impression from your article that Teach is saying something more esoteric than that, which is harder to understand. He seems to be saying that people only like things for status reasons, but then this doesn't explain why people like low status things. Status (in the eyes of others) explains why they won't publicly endorse that thing, but it seemed like his argument is that status is why people are attracted to things in the first place. If so, why would people gravitate to low status things they are embarrassed about? Wouldn't they seek higher status things to like instead?
I suspect Teach thinks that people only like low-status things because they think they'll turn into high-status things later, or else that they can use the low-status thing to make themselves feel hated and persecuted, which gives them status through victim mentality.
From Letter XIII of "The Screwtape Letters":
"The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
Sometimes the 'low-status' thing is what you genuinely like and enjoy. Depending on how successful the appeal to turning you into a hag-ridden anxious heap about your perceived status is, the low-status thing may win out because you like tripe and onions even better than you like climbing the greasy pole.
How "openly" could Oedipus have married his mother when even he himself didn't know she was his mother?
Sorry, "openly" to the viewers, not to the characters. The idea is that the Oedipus play can't be pleasing to viewers as some wish-fulfillment about repressed incest, because it's not repressing the incest.
That makes sense, thanks. I was thinking about the STORY, not the performance.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense."
Strong echo from existentialism here. As I understand it, existentialism says that most of us live "unauthentic" lives where we constantly distract ourselves to avoid facing Reality. The distractions are not just stuff like TV or porn, they might be quite elevated and demanding. Proust wrote something on the lines of: some talented writers will rather go to war and die there than sit at the writing table and dig through their feelings.
But as far as I know, existentialists would not point to status games as a primary cause; they would probably see them as yet another distraction. The primary cause would be the fact that Reality is intrinsically alien and terrifying and we feel that we don't have any place or purpose in it, which is why, after Pascal, most of us cannot "sit quietly in a room alone". And that facing Reality means facing Death and what it says about us (we have an angel's mind, but we shit and die like worms). It's less a risk of failure than its absolute certainty.
In other words, carving our "authentic" purpose in this alien reality is a titanic task, beyond the means of most people; but as humans with a neocortex that demands meaning, we still have to justify our existence and give it some purpose. Hence the distractions.
This perspective resonates more with me because I find it really hard to do "actual stuff" in Reality, i.e. stuff that should be done because it's intrinsically valuable but does not have any immediate points attached to it and can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality.
As I see it, there's two ways out of this: the humorous, easy-going, dropping-all-pretense, relatively carefree attitude of some "enlightened ones" (mystics, daoist sages, zen masters), who seem to have found a sort of joyful nihilism in their appraisal of reality, or the titanism of individuals who manage to manifest their desires and their will-to-power in the world (I think of people like Napoleon, Musk and yes, even Kanye). Maybe their power and charisma, like your friend's aptitude to be a cult leader, comes from their ability to own and manifest actual desires, achieve individuation, and become a true personality, while their followers get to at least experience it vicariously and partially appropriate their personality through identification, like children who play at being adults.
But then again, can you tell if enlightenment is "the real deal" and not just another pretense? Is Musk manifesting his individuality, or is he running away like everyone else? It doesn't matter: it doesn't concern _you_, so asking these questions is just another distraction.
Categorizing zen masters as "joyfully nihilistic", "easy-going" or "humorous" shows a misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism so complete that it casts your entire summary into question. As someone who's had personal interaction with them, Zen monks are some of the most intense human beings you'll ever meet in your life. The air is on fire in the presence of a Zen master.
I qualified that I was referring to "some" of the people we usually see as enlightened; I did not mean to categorize all of them.
I have studied Buddhism and practiced meditation on my own, but I've never interacted with Zen monks. My personal impression is that wisdom (however you define it) tends to give people an aura of serenity and detachment, a "lightness" of being, and that many wise people are humorous. And meditative joy would go in that direction as well. That does not mean that they are frivolous or they lack compassion or intensity, quite the contrary. Does this not correspond at all with your experience?
That being said, I would love for somebody who knows more about existentialism to criticize my summary.
Maybe half of that corresponds to my experience. I wouldn't call a zen master "light".
In my case, *I* was the one who felt light. I distinctly felt less *real* in contrast to him.
This isn't something that reading sutras independently or trying to practice meditation on your own can convey. Some wise people are humorous, like Hotei. Others aren't, like Daruma. Since all people can attain enlightenment, it should not be surprising that there is no one "enlightened personality".
"Joyful nihilism" is the primary thing I object to in your description. It creates this insinuation that enlightened religious people don't ACTUALLY believe in their religion, they're ACTUALLY materialist nihilists like Existentialists are and their whole spiritualist framework is basically an elaborate practical joke. This is not only false, but intellectual arrogance at its finest.
> It creates this insinuation that enlightened religious people don't ACTUALLY believe in their religion, they're ACTUALLY materialist nihilists like Existentialists are and their whole spiritualist framework is basically an elaborate practical joke.
That's a pretty big, and uncharitable, inferential jump you did there. By the way, nihilism is not a dirty word in my book.
Large? Yes. Uncharitable? I'd strongly disagree. Words mean things, and being nihilistic means you don't have spiritual or moral beliefs (and in fact categorically reject the validity of the same). If you didn't mean this, I don't think it's particularly fair to expect me to guess you didn't mean nihilism when you said nihilism. Perhaps you meant fatalism in the sense of the acceptance of one's uncontrollable circumstances?
When it comes to what nihilism means, I don't care whether your opinion on nihilism is positive or negative. It still creates the implication that enlightenment involves discarding the spiritual framework that values it.
>Strong echo from existentialism here.
yeah i was like "oh wow lots of Sartre" through the whole summary
I dunno any zen guys, but the phrase “joyful nihilism” definitely resonates - there’s something of it in Camus’ version of Sisyphus. And “lightness” seems relevant as well - Italo Calvino talked about that: https://dtldobsvtn.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/italo-calvinos-memo-i-lightness/
Okaaaay, so I came back to this comment more than once at this point; thank you for putting these thoughts out there! I really -REALLLY- liked this part:
> 'This perspective resonates more with me because I find it really hard to do "actual stuff" in Reality, i.e. stuff that should be done because it's intrinsically valuable but does not have any immediate points attached to it and can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality.'
No reason for you expect it to be useful to be asked this by a rando on the internet (me), but... if you're up for it, what are some examples? Of stuff like this which you tend to get discouraged away from? (or intrinsincally-valuable-but-not-automatically-having-points-attached-to-doing-it things that you somehow were able to "push forward" with!) Feel free to not answer, because... internet + somewhat-personal-question!
(Also, fwiw, the part about how it "can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality" really sounds like the path of a leader.)
What a biblical angel looks like: [ https://www.instagram.com/p/CWmASzBFdXN/ ]
Sorry about the instagram link, I tried to find better.
This whole "fantasize that I'm famous". while I know it's common, is nowhere near universal.
I've been paid to do public speaking, enough that I got competently better than most people at it, even I few times I'm been able to pull with it, but it was never something to fantasize about, it was just a skill I practiced and did to do my job. If I could have shoved the world the directions I wanted to while completely off stage and known to only 3 people, I would have.
I know some people who have done musical performance and athletic performance as paid performance, and got some amount of fame for it, but being on stage for status was never the terminal goal, nor was it an instrumental goal to have sex with starfuckers. They instead worked on stage an an instrumental goal to made enough money to be able to practice their craft in private for their own enjoyment.
Starfuckers have something deeply wrong with their brains. Don't stick it in crazy, right?!
Going back to "dont assume fame desire is universal", one of the tools I learned long ago for understanding humans is "Everyone is driven by two of the Fs: force (the power to cause change), fame, fortune, family, fun, faith, fucking. Figure out each person's two, and you have their handle." Everyone has a major and a minor "F" terminal goal, and all the rest are just instrumental goals towards those two. They also change over time for each person.
Horny groupies today, who will trip over themselves in 20 years to cry #metoo. There are lots of people who do have standing to assert #metoo, but those groupies are the opposite of helpful. The attraction to fame is a mental illness, and it's really shitty that our society has entire industries that accelerate it.
I am actually famous, and fantasize about being famous in completely different ways; the fantasy seems to scratch a different itch than the reality. I agree that actually being famous in those ways would be terrible, in much the same way that actually dating most of the people you have sexual fantasies about would be terrible.
Why would people be driven by two of those? Wouldn't you expect everyone to be driven by all of them in some ratio?
I'm sure that everyone is driven by them all, but my observation and practical experience is that people have two that are primary, or are at least structured such that two of them are the key metrics to predict then, andor are the key handles to manipulate them. Maybe in their inner self, they think they have different drivers, but, does that really matter?
"But it’s more than this. It’s an obsession with what kind of person you are. Brand loyalty becomes a way to signal that you’re the kind of kid who buys their clothes at Hot Topic/Abercrombie & Fitch, not at Abercrombie & Fitch / Hot Topic. It’s not that one of these stores is more prestigious (= signals class) better than the other. It’s that they signal what makes you, you. If you shopped just the right combination of brands, you would really capture your uniqueness, and everyone would like you for being you, ie not for boring regressive contigent things like your job or your family (ie your accomplishments and social roles). Result: nobody respects anyone for their accomplishments, nobody wants to fulfill their social roles or do their duties, and everyone wants to be unique and individual = not buy store-brand."
This is a pretty awful description of most people in general, but a pretty good description of most adolescents. And I feel like to the extent that Edward Teach is trying to argue that this is a good description of everyone (allowing for all of Scott's caveats about his takeaways here), it tells you a hell of a lot about Edward Teach - but probably not so much about other people over the age of, say, 25ish.
At this point, the book is repeating itself a lot. I'll continue to read it, but I think I've gotten everything I'm going to get out of it.
So, I'd say my biggest argument about the book is that it feels like it is seeking to pathologize laziness. It's telling me my problem isn't that I'm lazy, my problem is that I don't know what I want, I won't admit to myself what I want, and if only I could admit to myself what I want, I'd stop being lazy and start pursuing that.
And, like. Sure, if there was something I wanted, I'd probably be more motivated to pursue it. But, like ... when I want something, I just get it. It's not a super-complicated process; I've set up my life so that I can satisfy my desires, and none of my desires are very complicated. Which is frequently unsatisfying, if I'm brutally honest, but I don't think I could hook my motivational drive to a hedonistic treadmill that I can just keep grinding at. If I was starving, that would be one hell of a motivation, one hell of a desire, one hell of a thing to want. If this phenomenon is a pathology, it already has a name - affluenza. And if the book is talking about how ill-prepared we as a species are for prosperity, well, yeah. I agree.
Also - the entire book is, basically, Atlas Shrugged. You're not pursuing what makes you happy. You want to tear down the happiness of others. But where Atlas Shrugged is aimed at "heroes", this is aimed at "villains".
Rand's heros were unrealistic and boring. However, her villains were utterly true to life and remain depressingly common. One of Rand's many mistakes was trying to valorize her heros, when the world is better served trying to trick Randian villains into being less Randian villain like.
Personally, I found Rand's heroes depressingly realistic, at least at first; the aspirational stuff as the story went on less so, but that was kind of the point, I think: The mundane worker, unshackled from the parasitic rentier class and their manipulations, becomes heroic.
As for tricking the villains, that's the thematic arc of the journalist CEO in The Fountainhead; it didn't end up working out for him.
The Fountainbeadt - maybe, sure I could see that.
But in Atlas Shrugged?
Francisco (I think?) D'Latinoname being immediately and effortlessly good at everything, including casually deriving rudimentary Calculus as a 12 year old (or smth) to construct some pulley system or smth?
Who becomes a true believing follower of Galt because *that guy* is just EVEN MORE AMAZING and good at everything?
Or do you classify those not as "heroes" here? I mean, Galt seems clearly intended as an aspirational example of The Perfect Man, not really a person; Francisco to a lesser extent (to kick-start the "Why would someone with this level of ability all of a audden decide to destroy all of his (including inherited) accomplishments?!!!" mystery.
I could see what you mean when understanding "heroes" more closely as "protagonists", ie Dagny and Rearden. Probably a lot more realistic, as an example of 3> sigma driven and also gifted entrepreneur-types, which clearly exist irl, including the presence of psychopathy traits channeled into economic (& productive) achievement.
Is that more what you mean by calling the "heroes" realistic, wrt Atlas?
Thanks for reading it. I for one would never have made it through. This is an essay I’ll have to read a couple of times and ponder.
The status seeking archetype reminds me of the do-gooder characters in Ayn Rand novels. Barely anyone in real life is actually like that, and it seems like a terrible caricature (as I’m actually bad and painful to read). But if you do meet one of them, hopefully you can just run away. And it is a universal element of our psyches, and it’s worth remembering to check whether you’re going astray. I wonder, I sn’t it a lot like the idea of memetic desire?
As for the contempt for self-knowledge, it seems like Teach is performing a baroque version of reverse psychology. He can’t tell us the answer, but maybe if he ridicules us for looking for it, we’ll react against that and try to actually figure things out. When somehow telling us to figure ourselves out would just go horribly wrong, for not entirely clear reasons.
still reading but dropping down here to say: teach paints the giving tree like louis wain painted cats.
(am now done reading)
"While we’re asking crazy questions eight thousand words into an almost-unreadable essay,"
you might find this exasperating but for the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years.
Ohh, the warm feeeliiingsss... I always felt like the worst possible version of myself when I helped my kid with his math homework... and my father was a regular dragon when he helped me with mine... But now I know it's love! Pure love! Whew, thanks so much, TLP.
Could it be that he is doing exactly what he says people wants done to them and then tries to use that to get you to understand the thing he wants you to understand?
(From the review, haven't read the book)
He sets himself up as an authority, and makes it a status mind game to understand what he has to say (using the methods/mechanisms he describes) and this seems to work! You want to figure out what he has to say (which is entirely an action-less status mind game).
Also, anecdotally, (and this would be hard to believe, status mind games, etc) my mental model of how I work is pretty close to what he describes, and I am spending lots of effort recently to break out of it. I hit on this mental model when I was trying to figure out and track what I want, and realized that in many cases, at some level, all I'm trying to do is win a status mind game with myself. The only solution I've found is to just try and not think or think less in general, which is actually pretty amazing and I recommend it.
But don't people realize they used to have a desire if some specific thing they had expected didn't happen, causing them to feel regret? (Which is when they decide it wasn't worth it, anyway.)
(x-posted from rationalist house slack)
The problem with worshippers of Lacan and “irrational psyches” is that everything looks like a nail. (True of most groups, but anyways…) Some parts of the psyche are pretty straightforward. Other parts are riddled with one or more PARADOXes. If you look for PARADOX everywhere, you can hardly proceed. It is one place where you cannot let the obstacle become the way.
I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology.
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One theme I like around all the ideologies grappling with PARADOX is that they help with some deep version of the virtue of lightness. At least for someone bound up in rationalism habits of thought like myself, there is a deep relief I get when briefly immersing myself in places with acknowledged PARADOX, like Zizek or the TV show Legion. You can’t just keep clenching forward or you’ll get burned by your own pigheadedness, so you have to do an extremely central version of “going with the flow”.
(Lacan: “ah, so you’d like to do this more often but are unwilling to go out on a limb because you’d lose status in the eyes of your culture, so instead you like to use the cover of ‘truth-seeking’ to put yourself in situations that will demand deep unclenching from you?” “yes Lacan, but it’s a fine patch :face_with_rolling_eyes:”.)
Has anyone brought up Christianity in regards to The Giving Tree? I think that's a major vector for the idea that giving, almost regardless of consequences, is virtuous and how you get into Heaven.
I say "almost* regardless of consequences because at least feeding the hungry and clothing the naked gets them food and clothes.
As for TLP, part of what's wrong with his approach is the black and whiteness of it-- there's no hint that if people fall short of his standards, they can make any degree of improvement. (From causal reading, there may be some exceptions in his writing.)
Okay, I have been thinking a lot about The Giving Tree and I'm continually running things through a "how does this interact with Christianity?" processor.
This one especially pinged "coming from Christianity?" as this would be the sort of thing that probably wouldn't very much occur to people to do without some of the words from The Sermon on the Mount:
> "The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done out of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be?"
("Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing" and stuff.)
First, I am going with a model of, "The Christian Ideal... has been tried and found difficult"! (ripping that from Chesterton.) I think that the warped versions of "trying to 'do Christianity' according to 'what the words say,' but not actually wanting 'the real thing' because that is too hard" is responsible for a lot of messes. (My hubbie calls one version of this the "Let's not and say we did" model of doing things. American Evangelical churches do this a lot: Planning accountability groups for people to talk about their struggles--except, in practice nobody wants to share deep, frightening stuff with people you barely know. Doing evangelistic campaigns--except having NO IDEA what will help your target audience because you don't know them. Running church youth group programs that nobody wants to go to.)
My reasoning is that there's a large pool of people who have "wanted in" to the large cozy community that Christianity built. But not all of them "want in" because they are excited about transforming their lives to line up with the high standard of True Christianity. Some didn't understand what was being asked of them. Some were kids of people who were Christian, and thought that "gets them in." Some wanted their neighbors to think well of them. (not to mention being justified in their own eyes!) Some wanted the "nice cozy community." (But that's become less of a draw recently!)
So elaborate "self-sacrifice" that RESEMBLES the true beauty of the Christian ideal of sacrifice is a target that lots of people (and communities!) are motivated to pursue. The other option takes longer and will cost more. (On further contemplation, I should say, "and will cost everything.")
I read about ten pages before I realized the point of the book is not to read it.
Scott, I know you're familiar with Strauss. I'm surprised you didn't invoke him when interpreting this book. Maybe that gets old if you do it too much, but this seemed very much an "esoteric text " type of territory. When an author says that an anagram of "The Giving Tree" is "I get even, right?" when the author obviously didn't intend that, the author is pretty clearly using a book like tea leaves to talk about whatever the hell he wants to talk about. Death of the author, by nefarious means if necessary.
I'm not saying that this is a good work or worthy or whatever, but the notion that indirect speech avoids outsider criticism of philosophical ideas seems too obvious to pass up.
Strauss was where my mind went too; but it’s sort of reverse esoteric writing in a way; rather than appear milquetoast and acceptable to disguise an unpalatable truth, you appear unpalatable and histrionic to disguise a well reasoned argument. I’m not sure what conclusions you should draw about the respective of authors opinions or methods based on which approach they choose.
I feel pretty special and high status for reading this review
Oh this is interesting:
> Something I learned when writing this review: Lacan admitted to being deliberately obscurantist. He said Freud was easy to understand, so everyone read the text without deep thought, then misinterpreted it. Lacan figured if he was hard to understand, people would think about it, let the ideas float around a while before forming an opinion on them, and maybe get them right.
since it's almost exactly the same defense Judith Butler gives why her books are unreadable. I wonder if she straight up took that from Lacan.
From what I can gather, TLP is down on people because they have desires, don't act on them, and make up reasons for not acting on them. Does he talk about how one chooses between desires, or whether some desires (aside from the desire to not do things) are not worth pursuing?
This is my big issue with a lot of psychoanalysis: It treats repression of desire as the root of all problems, and implicitly assumes that one we get rid of all repression, whatever remains will be the best of all psychic conditions.
This extends to social movements that were somehow inspired by psychoanalysis, which includes 60s counterculture and therefore the ethos of the modern American left: The problem is always repression of some kind, and the solution is to remove it. But are we sure that when all social norms have been upended, what remains will be functional?
Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience. That made me feel satisfied, that I was the type of person willing to notice this and admit it to myself. But wait... isn't that itself a defense mechanism?
I think the point of the unfalsifiable claims like: "there's always a repressed desire" and "everyone is playing status games in their head" isn't that they're necessarily true; it's to make the acid more potent.
Regarding the voice of the book: you're supposed to apply the type of analysis advocated in the book to the book itself. The author is abusive towards me, and yet I'm enjoying it and thinking more highly of him. What does that say about me?
I'm definitely going to read this book.
Wow! I also have been extensively testing my ways of thinking & doing things (and what things I choose to focus my thinking & actions on) against these ideas. (...from this review, and one of the other two Scott linked to.)
I -THINK- it's been really productive for me. (I also have something like the "imaginary audience" problem, real bad.)
RE: TLP's use of "always" and "never"... Yeah; I was thinking something like that. When people normally use "everyone," they never really literally mean "everyone"!! Also, there's this: "But you didn’t mean it literally. You never mean anything literally. Try it. You can’t." <-- I mean, he said that in the same work! XD
BUT I do think Teach's point is that people do these things (let our desires be determined by things as dumb as "large-scale vibe," seek glory through fake "self-sacrifice" while rejecting our actual responsibilities, etc.) WAAAY more than is reasonable. Shockingly so. And it's more frequent, more unquestioned, and more pervasively-woven-into every area of our lives than we'd imagine.
> "I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning." <-- Also, I liked this.
I haven't much considered whether envy and narcissism are the disguised core of my thinking. Confronting such an argument sounds like a good challenge to complacency regardless of whether it is true. From that perspective, reading the book would have a purpose.
But a different writing style than what Scott quotes above would be a lot more convincing. Couldn't TLP express his challenging ideas clearly in the text, let these ideas fail to breach readers' defense mechanisms (whatever those are), and *then* blame the readers for not getting it, at the end of the book?
Another problem is that obscure writing means the writer himself can't check if his ideas cohere. Isn't this TLP avoiding responsibility himself?
Anyway, the review did what book reviews are meant to do. I hope Scott posts more reviews of similar polemics/rants that might or might not have some insight hidden away.
Where can I read the most comprehensible case for the unrecognized centrality of narcissicism and envy to our thinking? (Key word: 'comprehensible'.) Perhaps a primary source, but ideally a steelman summary to start with?
"Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
[A bit later, the cure is described.]
"...it will be cured when you come to the fountain."
"What fountain's that?"
"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."
-"The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis
To want to be the person who wrote the music, or who would skillfully play it before a huge audience, to great acclaim... yeah, that is common to this time. The self-forgetfulness is much to be hoped for.
>Immediately afterwards, the narrative breaks off for a thirty page cuckold porn story
Could he possibly be the author of the Arabian Nights?
I don't think everyone lives for envy/jealousy, but have the story of a woman who was punished for a kidney donation by her writers' group and then by the ....wait for it.... New York Times.
https://www.insider.com/bad-art-friend-kidney-donation-nyt-dawn-dorland-sonya-larson-2021-10
> I mean why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?...But lots of people like story porn
Is this actually surprising? Most of us can't tickle ourselves either. Some part of the lizard brain needs to believe that the stimulus is coming from the outside world, or else it gets suppressed somehow.
This is true of all sorts of sensations. Why do we watch any movies at all, instead of just imagining the action or the romance or the drama or whatever in our own heads? Even before people invented movies and books they enjoyed hearing storytellers tell stories, even when they'd heard the story before. Some children love hearing the same stories over and over again. Why can't they just tell the story to themselves? I think the most important factor is clearly that the stimulus needs to come from outside.
I think the premise is simply false and thus trying to explain it is futile. As a teenager I watched porn because I had no real sexual experiences to base imagination upon, but once I did I lost all interest in watching badly acted bad sex on my computer screen, and written sex scenes are interesting only insofar as they are part of a meaningful story and not purely porn (there's an excellent 'definition' I read years ago that "it's 'porn' if you stop watching/reading it once you orgasm")
Seems to me that The Last Psychiatrist is a cranky old man complaining about "kids these days"; except as a psychiatrist, instead of complaining about "music, these days" or "fashion, these days" he prefers complaining about "human psyche, these days". He is smart and educated, so you can enjoy reading his contempt of others if you don't mind that almost in every paragraph he reminds you that he *also* despises you... maybe less than the others, but still.
TLP is definitely *not* an aspiring rationalist. He does not let any fact check spoil his favorite game of "Blemish" (as they call it in transactional analysis). Hey, it's not like he owes his readers anything, including the clarity or the factual correctness of text; he has made this quite clear in his texts repeatedly. If you keep reading regardless, you get exactly what you deserve, and what you were told you will get.
His vision of human psyche is literally diabolic (as in "diabolos" = slanderer); he looks at a half-empty glass and calls it completely empty. Yes, humans can be manipulated about what they want. Yes, humans are often afraid to act according to their desires (this is sometimes a good thing, by the way). Yes, humans want to be high-status, daydream about being high-status, and are afraid to do things that might reveal their weakness. Yes, they sometimes want to hurt their competitors. Yes, they are often confused about altruism and reciprocity: they try doing things for other people "selflessly", and then resent them for failure to reciprocate properly. Yes, sometimes they wish for a strong alpha male to come and solve their uncertainties by telling them what to think and what to do (hopefully the same thing they already wanted to do, except now they would have the permission to actually do it).
However, taking it to the absolute extreme is so absurdly bleak that it even contradicts itself. Do the humans *desire* high status (in eyes of their imaginary audience) and *act* accordingly, or are they unable to desire anything? Make up your mind! Obscurantism is a weak idea's camouflage against falsification -- no one can debunk your theory if no one actually understands what your theory *is*. Trying to impress myself (or the imaginary audience, for the religious people) is a component of conscience. Narcissists do *not* need to impress themselves; they are already deeply impressed, regardless of their actions. Etc. Believing that men want sex only because the television told them to... well, maybe they also breathe only because some advertisement told them so, have you considered this? (Perhaps Peterson should teach you a thing or two about narcissistic lobsters and their status hierarchies. With the exception of the noble lobsters in Ancient Greece, of course, those have never did any of this.)
Maybe the exaggerated language is good to make you notice some things you would not have noticed otherwise. And that's probably where the usefulness ends. Everything else is, sadly, fake insight porn.
My other question is whether your interest in analytical psychology, Scott, is a common phenomenon among biological psychiatrists?
My own psychiatrist has treated me for about 25 years. I have always been depressive, and many years ago, I did see an analyst in New York. But, when my father died, and firm of which he had been the founder and leader, and in which I was a partner, collapsed, I fell into a deep funk. I looked for and found a biological psychiatrist. He successfully treated me then with SSRIs. I really liked him because he was cheerful, upbeat, and helpful, and he was undoubtedly the only psychiatrist in the world with Ron Paul swag in his office.
In more recent years I noticed a number of books of analytic theory in his office. When asked about them he commended them highly (I think he said said: "that's the real stuff"). But, they did not alter our semiannual meetings, nor his prescriptions for my treatment.
My question is why. Biological psychiatry has had the upper hand for the last 40 years. Analytic psychiatry could neither explain nor could it treat many obvious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness. Even mild discomforts such as mine that could be trivially explained by life history were seldom palliated by talk therapy.
My hypothesis is that in our conscious waking lives we do not perceive mental phenomena to be derived from the underlying biology, even though it is perfectly obvious that biological facts like exhaustion, intoxication, and fever can and do have such effects. All of us are unconscious dualists. This the energy behind the current mania for the idea that being men or women is a choice that is made for us or by us on a non-physical basis.
Another manifestation of dualism is that unshakeable commitments to biological psychology are fundamentally unsatisfying. Biology may explain mental disease and provide avenues for cures, but we are not happy to stop there.
Yet I continue to see staements such as: SSPIs do not treat the root causes of depression.
Let me put in a good word for porn. I have sadly learned, as I am in my eighth decade, that men and women commonly lose one or more physical attributes necessary for fully satisfying participation in erotic activities due to age, illness, or medical treatment. But, those loses do not deprive us of memories, nor do they extinguish desire in proportion to capability.
For many of us in those circumstances, porn can refresh our memories and allow us to slake our desires. The availability of porn over the internet in HD and color in the convenience of our own homes has been an unmitigated blessing. Further my son will be spared the difficulty I encountered in cleaning out my father's stash without attracting my mother's attention. I had to perform some slight of hand, but for him it will be a couple of key strokes.
Please spare me stories about your Aunt Tilly who at 80 was cougaring in the clubs, or Uncle Joe who married a 27 year old pole dancer when he was 74 and sired 4 children children by her. Somebody is always going to be 3 sigmas above average but 99.7% of us won't be. For us, the only thing that is going to be in our laps is our laptops.
This book sounds like straight up trolling to me. The author *admits* that he wrote it in order to piss people off!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrollFic
> I mean why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?
Why is reading a book better than forming sentences in your head?
I'm probably too late to the party here to get much of an answer, but isn't the kleroterion a giant spike in Teach's idea of Athens? The Athenians literally had a device at the soul of their democracy which used randomness to determine the distribution of power. I'm not even sure it would hold up to true randomness in the mathematical sense, as I'm not sure Athenians had such a concept, but then it seems obvious that the kleroterion serves only to create the illusion that power is distributed randomly and not in any biased sort of way. In other words, they have a technological device that decides what position in society that they act from, thus removing their own actions from the remit of personal choice and placing it in the hands of the machine god.
This gets into two of my pet peeves with this style of writing. One is people who are obsessed with ancient democracy but don't realize that Aristotle straightforwardly said that "[i]t is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." Another is people who engage is this Adorno-style torturing of the meanings of every public action to determine its most cynical reading but then defend unthinkingly the things they have decided are good.
'So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves?'
Because he can't act on his desire to tell them to fuck off, quit his psychiatrist job or just stop thinking about them. Because he's one of them.
If you are looking for the holes in your map that explain why some people have power and you don't, consider Pfeffer's book "Power". He did and perhaps still does real research on the topic at Stanford.
With regard to the powerful people who think Lacan is useful, page 11 of Pfeffer's book with the heading "Beware of the Leadership Literature" is perhaps relevant. It claims that powerful people have power in part because they can present themselves well, so the stories they tell about why they have power are self-serving and unreliable. Perhaps the species of powerful person you are looking at presents themselves well by occasionally espousing incomprehensible claims and by that means intellectually intimidating everyone else. Citing Lacan could be an instance of that.
With that said. I must admit that I don't understand Lacan. Lacan claimed to do psychoanalysis and make people more sane. I cannot find research claiming that Lacanian psychoanalysis actually does that, so I am reluctant to invest the effort.
Dylan Evans couldn't make sense of Lacan either, despite writing a book on the subject and attempting to make a career out of doing Lacanian psychoanalysis. He describes his journey in "From Lacan to Darwin", which is 16 pages. http://freudquotes.blogspot.com/2016/02/dylan-evans-lacans-ideas-are-hopelessly.html?m=1
Have a look at the fourth of the four principal landmarks of Lacanian psychoanalysis, on page 3 or so: "subject-supposed-to-know". The therapist is apparently supposed to deceive the patient into believing the therapist knows the hidden meaning behind the patient's words, and therapy is over when the patient stops believing that and believes instead that the patient is the only one who knows what their words mean, and the therapist knows nothing.
This is entirely consistent with there being no coherent meaning behind the various concepts Lacan espoused. We are supposed to reject them and come up with our own story about what is going on.
However, it isn't consistent with Dylan Evans voluntarily going to a Lacanian psychoanalyst when, presumably, Dylan knew all this.
I was a student of Dylan's and co-authored a paper with him once (though it never got published). He's a really smart guy and I hope to read his book on Lacan at some point.
This is truly wonderful. That is all.
Can I meme your summary of Teach’s anti meme? We learn pretty early on in childhood that being completely authentic in all situations is going to make living in society more difficult. Later on, we learn to be disciplined for its own sake. Hoping somebody else does the dirty work so we can realize a desire we have but kind of also don’t have, because rider and elephant/amygdala and prefrontal cortex , is maybe more a fixture of that duality than of not being purely authentic. In truth, we learn to “code switch” a lot with our authenticity. But we mostly don’t actually do antisocial or sadistic things, and sometimes the upkeep necessary for all this code switching causes us to be neurotic and uptight, and it’s probably important to have safe spaces to be more authentic, which is to say more in touch with the id, or kahnemann’s system one.
"Needless to say, this is not how Teach thinks of it; he suspects socialists (and lots of other people besides) would gladly see Elon Musk reduced to penury if it never helped a single soul, or even if it actively made the poor poorer."
Reading this, I immediately imagined myself in a dialog with -- someone, a Teach stand-in maybe -- saying that given this option I would leave Elon Musk's wealth untouched as diminishing without a corresponding gain accomplishes nothing worthwhile. I was suffused with a glow of self-satisfaction.
finding antimemes is a puzzle game. the book is written for avid gamers and no one else. there is precisely one interpretative lens that makes the whole thing make sense, makes every word in the book true. if you could inhabit the position that makes the book shine, you've become Edward Teach, and you'd be as good a psychoanalyst as he is. Edward Teach must be a very skilled and wise psychoanalyst because he wrote such a delightfully impenetrable puzzle!
i think you must have gotten at least some of it because the ending quote looks spot on to me!
“If your writing is easy to understand, the reader immediately gets (some possibly slightly-flawed version of) the first piece, then uses that to produce a (even more flawed) version of the second piece, and so on.”
For me, this does not describe interconnected insight but a stack of speculation.
With interconnected knowledge, trying to understand the second piece will shed light on our mistakes in the first. Then making sense of the third piece will consolidate our understanding of the first two ones, etc. It happens like that all the time in math.
What makes the difference, I think, is whether there is a process of validation. In math, once you understood the bits, you can prove things, and check in another way that your result is true. In sciences, you can predict things and confirm them through experiment. As far as I know, psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, not only does not have such a mechanism but actively rejects it by principle.
"There are aspects of my experience that sort of fit with what Teach is selling. How do I judge this? Maybe if I really understood the antimeme instead of muddled-understanding it, my experience would match it perfectly. Or maybe we should expect all fake psychoanalytic theories to vaguely remind you of true things, ... Or maybe Teach planted one or two real insights as honeytraps in the middle of his web of pseudo-profundities.
My current plan is to try to be more sensitive to the way my brain plays status-related mind games with itself"
Or, hear me out, some people are just different? A theory that describes 90% of humans doesn't describe the other 10%!
There is, of course, always a temptation to categorize oneself as special in some way, but I think there's ample evidence that you (and me, and a few of the other commenters) just don't view the social world around us as do most people. We are the ones who care a lot more about Truth than about tribal loyalty, who care more about the positions than the horse race, who care more about why <insert bad guy of the week> is doing what he is doing than in condemning his badness.
To me Teach's analysis pretty much all rings true -- Rene Girard-like "people don't know what they want, just that they want to copy and be copied", "Elephant in the Room"-like obsessing over *being seen* to love/care/help as opposed to any interest in actual outcomes, porn as fetish; it all seems correct insofar as I look at the behavior of other people.
You can view this at various "higher" levels -- woke and many other religions as essentially resentment regardless of the details (was it Andrew Sullivan who said, very cruel, and probably true, that the only single constant in the writings of feminists is, come whatever revolution it is they are pushing, they will be considered hotter than they are today?), virtue politics, and so on; but this psychological level (Teach and Girard) seems close to the bedrock.
(Not quite bedrock, there's still the question of "but why behave this way?" and my best answer to that is that this is tied up with sociability and language. For language and sociability to work, you need everyone to be on the same page, to copy aggressively and to punish people who innovate and/or refuse to copy, and it seems mostly a short step from that to Girard and Teach, perhaps with a short detour through Trivers -- best way to ensure that you copy everyone else perfectly is to have no pre-existing desires to impede the copying.)
To put it differently, Teach's analysis is similar to a huge amount of stuff by other people, but other people generally considered IDW (ie they refuse to buy into the mainstream analysis of how society or individuals work).
Jordan Peterson is an obvious one, but compare, eg, https://scholars-stage.org/thoughts-on-post-liberalism-i/
Hotel Concierge writes after a reader asks why they and TLP always repeat the same thing in almost identical phrasing...
> This is a specious reading for which I accept full responsibility. I know my style sometimes distracts from substance. I promise my intent is not to obfuscate or show off. This is just how I think when I think out loud. I’ll try to enunciate my words.
Either both TLP and Hotel Concierge write that way because they are just thinking as they write (and if they had to clean their thinking/writing, the book/post would never be published) or they obscure their writing afraid that there may not be a real insight, so they have some sort of protection against a reader claiming this, "You did not get it."
I think there's a middle point in this which is true, because I find myself thinking about ideas that HC & TLP wrote long ago, and I read long ago. So there may be real substance after all, but you just have to untangle it. I think it's the trade-off you have to accept for the content being written.
As someone just like your "cult leader" friend, I will say this: some things cannot be put into words, modeled, or "mapped" by humans. I know that this is hard to accept for rationalists, but it is the case nonetheless. Social intelligence cannot be quantified, dissected, or understood, so those of us who are uniquely gifted in that aspect often seem quite inscrutable.
"Haven't yet"<>"cannot."
Having read like one book on Lacan (Fink's The Lacanian Subject), the reason why Teach is so 'abusive' in his writing fits the methodology outlined in that book to a T. From what I understand, Lacan viewed the unconscious as a language that merely does whatever it's programmed to do. For Lacanian Analysis to be successful, it doesn't require the analyst to do all that stuff like making the analysand feel good or feel the warm cuddliness of self-understanding. All the analyst does is follow the 'rules' of the language and while remaining distant and inexplicable (something like this allows the analysand to project his desires on the analyst more strongly and not see him as some other human twerp with the same broken human stuff any other human has). Thus all the anecdotes of Lacan doing weird inexplicable things in his practice as well. One video I remember seeing that's quite interesting is a woman who survived a Nazi concentration camp or something going to Lacan for therapy. During one session he stroked her face gently and she realized something like the French phrase for 'a gentle stroke' punned off 'gestapo' and this allowed her to reconfigure her feelings towards her trauma and baggage. Seems like Teach is more or less just following those Lacanian ideas all the way with his antimeme.
Reading this blog almost exclusively to fantasize about arguing ("discussing") things with the author. Editing this comment to change "your blog" to "this blog" to avoid the fantasy of having this comment read or responded to. I think I would disagree with the author of this book on mostly everything. I would probably enjoy the read. Fun stuff.
In case there was any doubt Teach was making things up, I went searching and as it turns out, this post is the #5 Google search result for ["Shel Silverstein" "And He Was Never Heard From Again."]...
...out of 5.
The other 4 results also did not contain any evidence that the comic referenced in that excerpt exists.
I had to Google “I hope the scent reminds you of me.” It's not in the book; the only result is…this review.
A review of the book I imagine Scoot read, since my wife took our copy because I could read it:
The author has, correctly, identified the same point that Harry mentioned to McGonagall in HPMoR chapter... 3ish. That, for much of the world, people operate based on appearance, roles, signal games, and the trappings of status. This complex, easy-to-convey heuristic on how to live has gapping holes in its ability to handle many scenario. Because it is so easy to teach, it is near universal, and thus a high utility target for those attacking bad heuristics.
He attempts to break readers of this behavior via habit-breaking tactics like: A) a promise of inscrutable knowledge, B) a promise of life changing knowledge, C) a multipronged attack on possible base beliefs that might be holding up that behavior or D) holding back exploration of other behaviors, E) constant insults and other tactics to lower the reader's self-perceived status, F) raising his perceived status above the reader. All in the service of taking those who do think in role-base, status-based, signal-based ways and breaking them with the tools they use most often, so that they can begin to learn other tools.
He occasionally mentions some of those other tools, various abilities the reader does not have, again in an attempt to hit upon one that they are missing and thus drive further interest from them. It doesn't matter if he's wrong nine times out of ten. That tenth time will hit were you are weak, where you are missing tools, and thus achieve his goal regardless. From descriptions of individual failings to descriptions of societal problems, all are an attempt to find a hook that works on the reader, to break them open, to get them to question if they have all the answers.... and then leave them too it, because he doesn't have the answers per say. He points to what they do not have and that's enough to achieve the goal of the book.
From memory: he said the goal of psychoanalysis shouldn’t be for the patient to gain a better understanding of themselves, but to take power over their situation. And that the pursuit of information/“knowledge” is a defense against impotence.
How can you tell a psychic defense is successful? Because they were satisfied and nothing changed.
Maybe he’s trying to deprive you of information/satisfaction, so you’ll be forced to wallow in your impotence. It’ll either motivate you to go out and do something with your life, or at least stop infecting others with your nonsense.
I think in most cases when a person writes that the world is like this, or people are like that, they are really telling the truth about themselves.
"And yet nobody’s mental image of an angel, nor any popular artistic depiction of an angel, has anything in common with the Biblical description."
For some crazy reason this fact has been trending lately, along with artist's/AI's depiction of actual Biblical angels.
…did this post do that??
>porn is the defense against noticing you don’t have an interest in real sex. You don’t actually want things, you can’t actually fantasize (because fantasy is a step between desire and action, neither of which you’re capable of), so you download mass-produced fantasies from our corporate overlords in order to, essentially, fantasize about fantasizing. “Human beings,” he says “have abdicated moral, social, and political power to the technologies, much as you’ve done with your sexuality.”
I feel that Ayn Rand could have written this passage.
I'm unfamiliar with both Lacan and the author of this book, but a big thread of the criticism read bizarrely to me.
People who enjoy Lacan are painted as "manipulative" in a charismatic "cult leader" way because they will complain about most other people, but be nice to the person they're talking to, thus the person they're talking to feels special and wants to talk to them more.
But... they're not manipulating anyone? Everyone has people/groups/behaviors they're critical of, and will tend to discuss those with people who aren't that. Rather, it's the insecure, validation-thirsty types who are even more guilty of this behavior because they're too chickenshit to be openly critical to anyone's face! I would bet nearly 100% of the insecure people's conversations follow that pattern, whereas the Lacan-enjoyers -- who I understand to basically have manifesto energy? -- actually do say stuff directly to people they're criticizing, or in digital earshot. That type will actually engage with detractors and even push back against the pushback of their own admirers; they are not simply flattering people.
Those types are not trying to manipulate anyone, they are simply expressing sincerely held convictions to people who seem interested! A person does not build up longwinded byzantine theories criticizing the world if their priority is to be charismatic. Are we to blame them if unusual and sincerely held convictions are attractive? Are we to pathologize expressing sincerely held convictions?
What is the expectation of people who have widespread critical thoughts about society? That they should never talk to anyone because, if their ideas are received with interest, it's inherently manipulative? That they should express these ideas in a way that denigrates the curious people who engage with them, even if those people do not exhibit the traits they find objectionable? (The author overtly does this and yet gets lumped in!) That if a person is critical of enough of society, they must be a raging asshole to everyone they meet -- even if they rationally feel this makes society worse, even if it goes against the philosophy they're espousing -- or else they're a bad actor playing some sort of mind game?
And to what end? It's not explicitly suggested that they're doing anything other than getting attention for their ideas, which is what every writer or thinker aims to do. It would not be fair or healthy for me to allege the popularity of this very Substack is evidence of manipulative intent, rather than a healthy urge to spread ideas and connect with others.
In other words, what is anyone supposed to do? It suggests that a person's ideas are sincerely held only if no one else likes them, that the reactions of others can somehow retroactively change one's intentions. (It sounds like maybe the author would agree with that, that he thinks it's impossible to act without being motivated by social capital, but I don't.) And even being deliberately abrasive is no defense against being accused of manipulative flattery, apparently. I dunno, when people set impossible traps for others in their mind like that, it's a clue to me that their thinking is compromised.
And what if it simply makes sense to want approval from someone whose insight you value? Should we encourage people to seek approval from people whose insights they don't value? Obviously not, and that's because the core issue starts not with wanting validation per se, but the lack of self-awareness in the people seeking and experiencing the validation! To some extent it's healthy to look around the world at all the competing ideas and want to reciprocally vibe with some people. What's not healthy is acting like others have done something negative by merely vibing with you or not vibing with you. What if it's every individual's responsibility to assess whether the ideas they admire are good for them, and what if that process is arguably the work of navigating life itself? What if it's bad for everyone to pretend otherwise?
(cont...)
Actual cult leaders are overtly controlling. They deliberately manipulate. They aren't simply expressing ideas near people with neuroses. What is the utility in framing self-expression or charisma as "manipulative" or "cult leader" behavior? What is the harm being done here that justifies such loaded terms? No one is being forced to do or think or even feel anything.
What, we're afraid one day they'll find the object of their admiration may not have 100% positive thoughts about them, and they'll... feel bad, and like they've been manipulated into liking them? That should be no surprise: almost no one has 100% positive feelings for anyone in their life, and no one should expect the people they admire to only ever feel positively about them to begin with -- or to care much about what they think or feel at all, when it comes to more distant relationships. It's infantilizing people to say those they admire are manipulating them in some sort of cult leader way.
Again, I haven't read this book and I don't know anything about Lacan or the author, but the perspective of charisma-is-manipulation seems to emblematic of the author's apparent argument that most people live in resentment of those who have something they don't -- in this case, charisma I guess -- and so inevitably want to win a weird secret mind game against them by pathologizing their motives, rather than confronting and taking responsibility for their own insecurities. I mean, isn't it saying, "oh, I'm not like those charismatic people because the kind of person I am isn't manipulative, so that's good, actually?" Isn't it a smokescreen to feel the issue has been examined and put to bed in a way that's favorable to oneself, when the truth is there are actually ways to be more charismatic but no one wants to fail in the attempt? Or perhaps one thinks charisma can't even be learned, and so feels even more certain they would fail to raise their status.
When I read these excerpts and find them interesting or funny, I don't feel manipulated. I don't feel like it's not okay for me to disagree, and when I disagree with some of it I don't feel conflicted or wounded. I don't feel like he's flattering me by expressing ideas "near" me. It feels quite the opposite. It feels like his ideas have little to do with me, unless I feel like some do, and I consider the ideas on their own merit, independent of their source.
He's not manipulating anyone any more than a painting in a gallery is manipulating anyone: either something there sparks interest, or I am free to look at something else. How the originator of an idea and I might feel about each other as people is a level of neuroses I'm dismayed to observe is common. I genuinely feel it would be something approaching psychosis to feel manipulated, to feel flattered or insulted, because it ignores the reality that the locus of control lies entirely with me and most people do not care one way another what I think or feel -- even if i know they would tend to hope I agree with or understand them as a sort of default, a constant underlying motive of self-expression.
The locus of control literally cannot lie anywhere else, and I know it's unhealthy to live in a world where I cast others' self-expression as inherently manipulative; at least to me, that would be an obvious indicator that I am putting others down to flatter myself. Clearly there must be a lot more criteria met for "manipulative" to have any useful meaning. It must mean something more than "persuasive" or "compelling" or "people tend to express things in hopes that it will impact others' thinking." It's far more easy to "manipulate" others with familiar, accessible ideas that do not challenge them.
I mean, is it charismatic to smear the exterior of one's home in shit and hope it attracts others who are willing to look closely enough to "get it?" Or is that a weird form of self-actualization, and that's inherently compelling to a subset of people somewhere who are looking to find themselves too? And on the flipside, can we not admit that many people resent others for their self-actualization, and that's it? Doesn't it just make a lot of people feel upset when they see someone else getting admiration by not doing the done thing?
Can't weird people just be compelling without that being malignant? Can't it just be that most people have a sense of society not being ideal in some way, and so we're drawn to people who have novel frameworks for why we feel unhappy, and invigorates us to think of how things could be different? Can't it just be prudent that people expressing iconoclastic ideas appeal to others as if they're not so different than they are deep down, rather than treating them as so hopelessly tainted by society that they won't even engage with them civilly?
Shit, can't it just be that people with iconoclastic ideas are often quite idealistic and actually want people to be happier, and genuinely believe in a purer human spirit that is quickly twisted by people's environment and bad luck, and so don't have the disposition to be mean to people in person? Can it not be that they criticize humanity because they love it, and hate that others are caught in traps rather than meeting their potential, and see that bad ideas make life worse for everyone?
It's that they're manipulative cult leaders? Really? Okay.
This just seemed like a weird thread, to say people like types like this author because they're... so nice to people who listen to them? And then all we see is the opposite?
So maybe I would like the book, I don't know. The author's arguments made more sense to me than the criticism because the criticism seemed to support the author's ideas, or what it seems those ideas are anyway. Maybe I would find the book validating, or interesting enough to learn more about him. I don't know if I have the patience to mine insights from something that sounds so scattered. But if I did, it would say nothing about the author's motives to manipulate me in any meaningfully negative sense of the term.
If anyone's read this far, feel free to tell me if I'd enjoy Lacan, lol.
Anyway, I still enjoyed reading these thoughts about it, so thank you.
When he and his pirate mates were sitting at a large mess table getting uproariously drunk, didn't the original Ned Teach have an alarming habit of firing a couple of fully loaded flintlocks at random under the table, to keep everyone on their toes, well anyway the ones who didn't hobble out with a wounded leg or worse?
I haven't read "Sadly Porn", and (I'm ashamed to say) only skimmed the review, but it sunds like this author is figuratively doing much the same! :-)