> I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
The desire to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes and a piece of writing has literally no value is very strong in a particular type of person, but it's never a useful stance. I think I'd hate this book but it seems very interesting. That's most books.
Thanks for the shout out, I'm making my way through this book and my impression is that an editor could have cut 2/3 of it and, in the process, turned it into an international self-help bestseller and made TLP a massive fortune on the public speaking circuit, which he'd have hated. There's stuff in here that would be absolutely world-changing for a lot of people I know, there are lines that I think will stick in my head for years. But then he'll spend the next hundred pages diligently driving off the reader in clearly deliberate ways.
I'm trying not to rush through it, in true TLP style he'll pack seven fascinating insights into a single paragraph and then go off on a 50-page tangent about a movie/book/myth that he just assumes everyone knows intimately and has strident opinion about that he must debunk. I absolutely believe him when he says he wrote it in his car on his lunch breaks, purely to get the ideas out of his head so that he could move on with his life. No effort has been made to format this in any kind of intuitive way, or to build or reinforce arguments or to use analogies for clarity. He honestly doesn't care if the reader follows him to a conclusion, and he definitely doesn't care if the reader enjoys reading it.
He targets the entire book at a hyper-specific audience, routinely assuming the reader is male, straight, addicted to porn, unhappy in their relationship/marriage. He assumes you have specific thoughts and opinions and he's mad at you for having them. I love it, I can't even tell if he's doing a character.
To be clear: I believe he is a genius, I linked to his blog posts dozens of times in my columns and begged him to write for Cracked back when it was big (the site collapsed and laid everyone off in 2017/2018, I'm now a full-time novelist) but he was worried he wasn't funny enough. My last email was him insisting he'd write something for us and then I just never heard back (this was probably ... 2012 or so?).
PS: When I opened this book on my Kindle and looked down at the total page numbers, I laughed out loud.
I have a vague memory that many commenters on your original post argued that the book was so incoherent and impenetrable that it served as a kind of Rorschach test. Your curation has not dissuaded me of that.
Now, I could go back and check my memory, but do I really desire that?
I'm not saying people who loved TLP were pseudointellectuals to sneer, because, hey, I was a pseudointellectual at least in the sense that I read his stuff back then and got to pretend I was smart because his words were difficult to understand.
Instead, I was genuinely trying to give context to what it was like back then, to say that the kind of person who generally loved teach the most is usually the kind of guy who would be pretty sure he knew the contents of a book he hadn't read better than people who had, or who would say you couldn't possibly evaluate prose unless you had read several other obscure writers he'd be happy to name-drop, said "rather" rather a lot, etc. That kind of thing, the stuff everyone sort of silently cringes at.
In seriousness, I do need to actually correct part of Craig's claims: I *started* reviewing it at 20%, and then did two other entries in the same series as I worked through the book, which I read in its entirety and am *immensely* poorer for having read. I got a link-out from Scott for doing it, which is really nice and valuable, and I'd STILL go back and un-promise to review it if I could. It's that bad.
Oh hey, I missed out on writing a take back in February. As someone whose first (and likely last) impression of TLP was the book review, my boiling-down, looking for the forest and not the trees, interpretation is this:
A jackass made a compelling piece of Art.
And I mean every part of that sincerely and completely! He's not an asshole, or a dipshit, or some other portmanteau curse word, he's a *jackass*, saying clever things both to mess with you and because they're intrinsically fun to say. The book is not meritorious, magnificent, or even *good*, but it is definitely compelling, as in it compels you to consider and discuss it, like we are right now (I feel a similar way about The Last Jedi, incidentally). And it's not written to be a political manifesto (though certainly political), or a fun read, or a research paper, it's written to be Motherfucking High Art, the kind that Makes You Think and professors kick you out of English 597 if you're not "getting it".
I wonder if translating the book into Finnegans Wake dialect would even do anything.
Hypothesis: the divergence in opinions on TLP proves that p-zombies exist. Not philosophical zombies, but their even more insidious cousin, psychiatric zombies!
While normal people's minds are a whirling torment of hidden desires and suppressed thoughts, psychiatric zombies somehow manage to have a fundamentally different subjective human experience in which desires are straightforward. When they get compliments, they feel good. When they have sex, it's because they like sex.
Nobody ever really notices that these p-zombies walk among us until someone like TLP comes along and bravely talks about all these supposedly-universal human experiences of being constantly tormented by your own suppressed desires and all the p-zombies pipe up to say "Nah actually I don't feel like that at all".
"I agree that high school boys are the toughest case for the 'you have no desires' argument." This reminds me that the first girl I ever had sex with in high school has spent an entire 40+ year career as a practicing Wiccan. When I spoke to her many years later, she told me that the only reason I slept with her in high school was that she had cast some sort of spell on me back then involving candles and some other sort of claptrap. I told her: "You know far more Wiccan craft than I will ever know, and you are undoubtedly expert, but you betray a woefully bad understanding of teenage boy psychology."
I've been meaning to put this on reddit, but I'll put it here instead: the main thing I think Teach contributes to rationalism is a nifty explanation to a paradox Scott has pondered about before, ie, "If the brain is a prediction-optimization machine, why does it go outside?" Teach's answer is "because most humans surrender their responsibility for prediction-making to a higher power." Meaning, I don't have to update my predictions for what happens when I go to work very often, I can instead rely on the heuristical meta-prediction "I will go to work and do whatever the fuck my boss tells me to do." And that will turn out to be 100% accurate most of the time. Thus all religion, all human institutions, all of advertising and capitalism is just a way for human beings to bootstrap their way around the brain's tendency to get flustered when presented with new information. That's Somebody Else's Problem, as Douglas Adams put it, and that somebody is never you, because you gave your sense of self away a long time ago.
maybe there is something for someone in the book, but I found even the review of it so 'blech' that I barely managed to finish skimming the review of it. I suppose I'm not alone in that. But then, about the only thing I seem to have interest in reading these days are this blog, LessWrong posts about machine learning, and machine learning papers. I used to consume tons of sci-fi and fantasy, but then reality caught up to sci-fi and now I'm in the story, and help. Interesting times are a scary place to be.
After reading this book a significant number of changes took place in my life that have persisted, after a couple years of not changing. I don't feel like I understand anything better, it literally just changed what I do. He mentions this in the book and it seems to have happened to me, like the act of being repeatedly exposed to examples of the application of a framework of interpretation across examples rewired my perception. The porn story, with its banal and delusional inner monologue juxtaposed alongside the horrific reality of the situation actually unfolding, really served to illustrate to me just how much more important the latter was than the former when evaluating the events at hand, to the degree that I've seemingly gained a new ability to see things from an outside perspective objectively.
I quit smoking pot, stopped eating out and for the first time in years have been cooking breakfast and lunch for myself instead of buying it. I've begun to allow myself to need things from those around me in stark contrast to my long held belief in complete self sufficiency as a prime virtue, and it has improved my relationships both personal and professional.
I am getting my shit in order in a way that was totally unexpected to me, and this is all happening after reading this book, inexplicably. It isn't about any of the truth content of what he wrote, it's more like he has set up bas relief mental imagery that serves to elicit change or something.
I'm not sure, but I am thankful for it and for him.
I have found some of the conversations sparked by the reviews of this book fascinating.
Sort-of in response, a friend wrote this short story.. in which a wandering stranger with a tone that suspiciously alternates between condescending and cajoling offers you a mishmosh of wisdom he actually desperately wants to impart mixed in with, well... some measure of total sludge and just a bit of "what if I'm like this too?" self-doubt: https://quasilit.substack.com/p/youre-special (I think it's brilliant.)
The DataSecretsLox thread for Scott's review had some interesting things in it. One branch of the conversation began with: 'What is narcissism, according to TLP? Not grandiosity or arrogance but self-involvement, the idea that "I am the main character of my own movie". And this is the defining symptom of our age." ' (zerodivisor) A response that was kind of uncomfortable-to-hear was someone sincerely saying, basically: "People who think 'I am the main character of my own movie'? Isn't that everyone?" And then it was noted: "One doesn't have to believe life is actually a movie with an pre-written narrative and themselves in a star role in order to have their actions influenced by 'what course of action would make for the best story with me as its hero if looked back upon ?' style of thinking." (Argaman) And then he continued with a possible resolution... and this is the part I really can't get out of my head: "A pathology arises when one instinctively relegates other people in their lives to support or even antagonistic character roles and a group dysfunction when a critical mass of people in the group are doing that. A good life movie should be more of an ensemble cast I guess is what I'm saying."
Here's one comment on Scott's review that seemed fascinating to me: "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... 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..." I did not know about that. (Link: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5185236?s=r )
Overall, it's sounded to me like the book itself is not primarily about porn, but about AGENCY. And some of the conversations it's sparked are of the sort that provoke agency.
Snav's point ("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.") sounds like it's saying that Teach created the literary equivalent of the Rorschach test. It can be anything, anything at all - because the most important thing isn't it, but how you react to it. Or perhaps how you react to ambiguity in general. I still don't understand if this book was meant to accomplish anything at all beyond making the author money.
"...it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences."
Without reference to the book at all, I just really like this insight. I think it's where lots and lots of interpretive mistakes are made. Lots of things that are done are the result of system behaviours or group behaviours, not individual "choices."
(Or at least, so I tell myself... perhaps this is just my justification for various messed up stuff that I've done, though :-/ )
That Reddit poll may be a reflection of the characteristics of *Reddit users*. I'd be curious to see if a poll here would have a similar outcome (my answer is 'no', but I don't use Reddit)
Back when I had a much bigger anxiety problem than nowadays, one of the defense mechanisms to get me out of it was to focus on the immediate, the physical, the right there. This is a table. My hands feel the lining of my pocket. It is made of fabric. I have toes, I can move them. They stand on the ground. This ground is wood. Very, very simple sentences, giving me clarity, anchoring my mind in my body and my body in the world. These are what is true, was is relevant, everything else is on top. Sure, I can be filled with nameless dread by what I now know is IBS and a psychological symptom of a physical issue, but that doesn't change that this is a table, these are my hands, this is now.
One step further, I'd do the dishes, pet the cat, take a shower - take care of the immediate, the things that I'd need to do whether life is meaningless or not, whether everything I try is futile or not, whether my dreams matter or not. Somebody still needs to take the garbage out.
That can work in longer-term settings as well. After leaving the psychiatric hospital, in the worst year of my life for no particular reason except feeling like dying every morning, I volunteered at the local animal shelter, 7 days a week, 8 hours a day. I woke up, wanted to die, and fed cats that didn't, walked dogs that didn't, cleaned cages of rabbits that didn't. It was a lot of poop and goop, but it mattered. Someone else might've cleaned that cage that day if it weren't for me, but with fewer volunteers there's shorter rounds the dogs got to walk if at all, and the staff would be a lot more stressed, so it mattered, in a tangible way.
When I get confused about philosophy or psychology or what it all means, man, I clean my apartment and repair broken furniture. These things actually matter. Call me a materialist but matter matters, and eating, drinking, pooping, sleeping are all a lot more important than whether or not I am too stupid for my job or my friends secretly hate me. If I feel down, it probably has more to do with whether I got enough exercise or sunlight than - I can't even make up examples of the sort of high-level existencialism I mean.
People a lot stupider than you (any you reading this comment section) and me lead happy, meaningful lives. You can simply opt out of this sort of thing, stop bothering with writing and theories like this. If it doesn't help you eat, drink, poop, sleep better, the marginal gains to happiness aren't that great, if they exist at all.
You know those people who seem to be on a life-long soul-searching quest, digging deeper and deeper and deeper and come up with new ideas what's wrong with them all the time? Who are in therapy for decades and yet, their trauma seems to get worse and worse? Who regularly take the attitude that everything before was meaningless and superficial, but now, this time, they cracked some deep mystery and are turning everything around, but you see no difference in their behavior, just more of the same navel-gazing enlightenment that doesn't seem to ever reach the eating, drinking, pooping, sleeping level? This is not the sort of soul-searching I want to participate in.
This is the philosophical equivalent of the "this is a table, it has four legs" anxiety defense. If in doubt, go back to the basics, everything else stacks on top and you don't need to reach the top, not ever if you don't want to, because it's what matters least. I am very happy to not be interested in the sort of analysis that book seems to be about.
To answer the question: I haven't updated on it being obscurantist drivel after reading the above and comments here, but I *have* updated on maybe some people getting some value out of kinda-abusive relationships?
“someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!”
This is weirdly reminiscent of the way people used to think _litterally_ about things like gifts, sometimes with _litteral ledgers_. I remember an example in Grabers "Debt, the first 500 years": a recurrent theme in nordic Sagas is someone receiving a gift so beautiful he cannot reciprocate, and so has to *kill* the person who gave him the gift, for fear of dishonor!
If people think the same way they used to act, even a little bit, the "I hate people who are nice to me because now I forced in a moral debt situation I may not want / be able to reciprocate" seems like a pretty plausible mechanism of human though...
Pursuing the anti-meme argument: If I had tried to read that book, I would have stopped at the introduction telling me to stop. While reading Scott's review, it was one of the very few times that I TL;DR; on the whole thing. Today I also felt compelled to TL;DR; the comments about the review about the book.
Even now I have to force myself to post this, because I feel like I'm being Trolled and I shouldn't feed the Troll.
To me the structure of the book is very clear. Teach first tells a story featuring many behaviors that would seem strange or counter-intuitive to the average observer and then proceeds to very meticulously explain them bit by bit. Why would someone voluntarily give a blowjob to a guy they hate? Well, here's the logic ("I hate him but I'm going to make him cum so hard he'll just want more of me, which will be his punishment.") and here’s how one can shift their frame of reference using an aesthetic experience in order to not think like that anymore.
When Teach uses a book or a movie as an example, his interpretation of the work in question is nuts because he is doing a creative misreading, in a process Harold Bloom called Clinamen. The word comes from the Latin poet Lucretius, and refers to the swerving of atoms which enables the Universe to change. You read "badly" on purpose in order to produce the meaning you need, regardless of what was originally intended. It’s not important what Thucydides meant for you to process as information, as a set of data about a historic event he lived through. The important thing is how you can redeem the text in the form of a significant, participatory life experience. Nietzsche reads like this, Heidegger reads like this, Borges reads like this and many many strong writers and philosophers read like this. They read as an event of construction of meaning.
To add one more data point to Section 1: I thought your review was delightful, and I *hated* the book. I read about a third (before reading your review) and I just couldn't stomach all the endless hostility and 4D-chess mind games from Teach. I thought the contrast between your friendly, thoughtful style and his bitter ranting was great and helped me greatly to understand the actual insights the book was (maybe) supposed to impart. Teach might say I'm a terrible narcissist/Athenian/etc who's too weak to Read The Primary Source for that, but nevertheless I think your review is much better than the book itself.
There is a lot going on here, I'm only going to address one aspect 'Does anybody actually think like this?" A lot of people (perhaps including TLP) are experiencing the typical mind falacy. However your mind works there are likely many other minds that work similarly and there are difinitevly ones that are extremely alien to your own experience.
I was taken aback by the sheer audacity some had to heckle / complain of the material for a writer they're following and, presumably, generally like. I think it's poor form, but the lines seem to blur for people between criticism on public forums and directly disparaging creators/artists, owing to how accessible they are today. I was about to ask whether anyone would think it just fine to tell an band on release day that their album sucks, but I imagine this pretty much happens, on twitter or whatever. I can also recall as far back as the vbulletin days that some artists walked away from their private forums for the sake of their mental health.
"“Why so many footnotes???” Which is the same question as, “why are your sentences so long, why so many commas, what the hell is with you and semicolons?” It’s all on purpose, to get rid of readers. You’re stumped by the physical layout? This book is not for you, your brain is already set in concrete, it can never change, only crumble as it ages. Which is fine if your plan was to be a foundation for the next generation, but it isn’t; you’re the rotting walls that they have to knock down while you play the flute and pretend to give freedom to everyone else."
He secretly desires his book to be successful and wildly read and understood. But trying to write a best-seller might fail, and then he would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it. So instead, he spends all of his time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with himself (and the reader) whose goal is to briefly trick himself (and the reader) into believing he is high status.
His book isn't badly written: He deliberately made it like that to make it inaccessible to the low-status losers whose brains are set in concrete. Never mind the fact that even if he wrote the book the "normal way," these losers still wouldn't have read the book because they simply wouldn't be interested. This is, in fact, what the author fears the most.
The author is probably self-aware enough to realize that this is what he is doing. But he does it anyway. It reminds me of James Burnham's scathing critique of Dante, in which he draws the "formal vs. real" distinction, where the formal is the literal meaning of the text, and the "real" is based on the circumstances of the author's life. He advises the reader to consider the real meaning of texts, and through Jedi mind tricks, convinces the reader that the text they are reading is the sort of text where the formal and real meaning are the same. But if we examine the circumstances of Burnham's life as well as the text itself, it becomes clear that his scathing critique of Dante is really a scathing critique of Trotsky. We can see this by three facts: 1) The lives of Dante and Trotsky contain many parallels, 2) Burnham's whole thing at the time is that he was a follower-turned-critic of Trotsky, but the real giveaway is 3) Burnham directly leveled the same critiques nearly verbatim against Trotsky as he had against Dante in letters and other writing. So we should always consider the real meaning, even (especially?) when the author convinces us it is not necessary.
So the formal meaning of "Sadly, Porn" is that "psychologically unhealthy people spend all of their time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with themselves whose goal is to briefly trick themselves into believing they are high status." The real meaning is that the entire book is the masturbation fantasy of the author. He gives it away in the title. When he started, he wanted to write a manifesto that would finally explain himself to the world in one neat, summarized volume, that would earn him his place alongside Plato and the other great thinkers of history. But instead, sadly, porn.
Well, after reading these highlights, I did update a bit from my previous position of ""Sadly, porn" is just porn, sadly". Mostly on "just" part, which is mainly due to the following train of thought:
Many complained that Edward Teach is not taking this book-writing thing seriously, yet he nevertheless may be trying to teach the reader something. There have been enough comments trying to rigorously interpret this that I think that there indeed is something to be taught here, independent of whether the author intended it. (As commenter Craig noted: it doesn't matter what the author _intends_ to mean)
But what IS the lesson? I think this book is more of an exercise rather than a lecture. And as another educator aptly noted: "What makes you think the point of an exercise is its answer?"
But if you want my guess for what's "the point" of the exercise, I'd say Teach has playfully created a nebulous work, to put it in David Chapman's terms ( https://meaningness.com/nebulosity ). The work is not for everyone, likely because it seems Teach's idea of playing is rather vicious. Maybe David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" could be used as a less vicious substitute.
That said, I remain of the opinion that "Sadly, porn" contains not only literal, but also metaphorical cuckoldry (meta-cuckoldry?).
Scott, thank you so much! The audience in my head is going absolutely crazy...though on further reflection, you've cut out the most transcendent part of my comment. You must have known they'll never click through. They NEVER click through. And you placed me in the obviously lower-status section of your post. No love for the Douglas Adams reference?? Help! They're starting to throw tomatoes!
>I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
What exactly is the reason that being correct is a good thing, and does that reason apply here?
This book reminds me of the questions about wishful thinking and what causes it; both of them suggest that 'people are agents' is totally the wrong way of looking at people, and that instead we're optimizing for... something... else.. about our feelings.' But what is that something else, and why are we doing this instead of directly having goals and being more agenty?
I wonder if there's a solution somewhere in the space of the 'child / adult' distinction.
My kids, for example, are dependent on me and need my help. This means that i will often tell them 'this thing that you are afraid of, don't worry, it's not scary, i will keep you safe from it.' That re-assurance often helps them, not so much to 'not be afraid' , but to change topics and think about something else. This seems vaugely similar to someone ignoring a letter from the IRS: "future me will handle this" isn't that different from "mom and dad will handle this".
One of the most animating drives for a child is to feel _relevant_ to their parents and caregivers, because for a child, irrelevance is death. Is it possible that adult obsession with status - and the book review definitely made me realize how often i'm doing this - is because i still have this vestigial notion that i need to be important to the big people if i'm going to be well taken care of?
A 'ledger' mentality also makes sense in the mind of a child as like, it's scarier to believe that the world is fundamentally imbalanced and the only thing standing in the way of your life going really really awfully is _you_.
I am wondering if a bunch of people are in some state where they are 'expecting a parent to handle it' as an adult, and feeling like the neglected younger sibling when they see someone else whose life is going better.
Maybe the right question to ask here is, how are motivation and reasoning different between children and adults, and what mediates that shift?
Most cultures throughout history had some 'now you are a grown up' type ritual, which involved, say, killing a slave or memorizing and reading and reasoning about some passages from an old book. But for most of history, these rituals were intended to make a young person feel more adult like. If we have one today, it's university, which is a four year long ritual involving huge amounts of debt, drinking and partying, as if the 'you are an adult' signal was somehow inverted, and being an adult means 'instead of listening to the high school teacher authorities, now you listen to the more aloof and distant university professor authorities, and you're heavily in debt but don't worry about that, it'lll take care of itself later, and also there are parties every weekend where everyone around you is intoxicated"
Humans have a set of basic desire categories resembling something like the ones in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the pyramid only represents what the stack ranking of preferences that a person has when quantity of those various goods are close to zero. When these goods are more available we need to look at an individual's utility function instead. People's utility functions for Physiological and Safety goods have relatively high decay constants and they can measure their current levels of resulting utility with high accuracy. This looks like "I'm thirsty / not-thirsty". Part of this accuracy derives from how simple these needs are, and part from how much training data we have. Every day you are alive you experience many instances of being satisfied / not-satisfied with all of your physiological needs.
For higher level needs, we have a lot less training data e.g. reputations are sticky and cumulative so you can't run independent experiments on interpersonal goods like love and status easily. In the ancestral environment this was particularly true. You only had potential relationships with a couple of dozen people so you naturally topped out as the most loved / admired / high-status individual out of ~100 people. Additionally, they all were in the same network, so your interpersonal relationship goods were highly correlated across all of edges in your network. This worked pretty well for people with varying decay rates of their utility functions. Those with high decay constants (satisfiers) only had to do a minimum amount of work to maintain good relationships. Those with high decay constants (maximizers) only had a handful of people they were competing so it was relatively easy to rise to the top of the pile.
The modern world has changed the cost for many of these goods and wastly widened the assortment of goods available to satisfy any particular need. Food is cheap and has endless variation, so now you have to expend a lot more effort to decide how exactly to satisfy your hunger. So many people seek to tie themselves to the mast with religious or fad diets and thereby reduce the cognitive cost of choice.
For interpersonal needs, we are now in a graph with billions of nodes. Satisfiers and maximizers both need to figure out what reference groups they want to measure themselves against. The unlucky/foolish choose all of humanity and are cursed to never be a part of an impossible universal in group or to fail to place in a 7 billion person race.
The larger the reference group a maximizer chooses, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied, but also the more likely they are to put a dent in the universe (for good or ill). That is where we get Lenin and Jesus, Napoleon and Steve Jobs.
Now there is one part of the pyramid that we haven't touched yet, self-actualization. This is usually only available to interpersonal satisficers. It only comes to the forefront for interpersonal maximizers when they win the race. At that point they, focus on staying on top, find a bigger race or have an existential crisis when they try to grapple with this new goal that they have no training data for. It is so elusive that many of these maximizers don't believe it even exists. They assume that everyone else is an interpersonal maximizer like them and claims to the contrary are just lies told by people competing in a particular status game.
The interpersonal satisficers with the steepest decay curves naturally deal with the self-actualization earlier and more frequently. But what are the goods that actually get you self-actualization? Well self-actualization is actually not the right term for these goods. Instead it is description of the boundary between interpersonal goods and the last category, kinks.
Fair warning, I am going to severely abuse the deffintion of kink. A kink is the narrow focus on a particular good that is emergent and non-universal. We can often see what broad category of desire that a kink falls into. Curiosity: for infovores/nerds (that includes people obsessing over both star wars or physics), pleasure: hedonists of every stripe, or Equanimity, enlightened people. But within all of those communities you also have posers. People seeking interpersonal rewards for pretending to be kinky. From the outside it is very hard to tell the difference between the kinky and the posers because the only difference is motivation. However there is one useful heuristic. Posers complain the loudest about other posers. As long as the posers aren't actively preventing the kinky from doing their thing they could care less about what anyone else is doing.
I think both of the comments listed in section IV get it *almost* right, but are missing one crucial detail.
Essex is right about everything except this last bit: "[Teach is probably] 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" It's not irony, and it's not a lack of self-awareness. Teach knows he's projecting his own neuroses onto you, and he knows that you know, and if you don't know yet, he's happy to tell you. He doesn't worry that this will drive you away, because he assumes his target audience are so insecure, and so desperate for someone to condescendingly feed them their opinions while reassuring them they shouldn't try figuring things out on their own because they're too dumb/broken for that to be a possibility, that they'll still hang on his every word even as he literally explains to them how he's gaslighting them.
Beleester also gets it 99% correct, but misses the mark with this bit: "Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth". Teach doesn't tell you you're special for figuring out that he's right, nor even that you could be special if you work harder at figuring out that he's right. The worldview he advocates is a strange mixture of Calvinism and nihilism, where everyone is predestined to be a piece of shit, but only the Elect (such as Teach) are able to become aware of and honest about both their own problems and yours, whereas "you" are by your intrinsic nature destined to be eternally stuck in delusion. You might *think* that by repeating the words of an Elect like Teach, you'll get to share in some of his Elect-ness, but really that's just another narcissistic defence mechanism.
This question may be ignorant, but how did people find out about this book? I know Teach had a section on TLP titled “Sadly, Porn” and he said he was writing a book on TLP; however, this book was released around 10-years later…did Teach himself promote this book?
You know that feeling? When you repeat a word over and over again and it stops having meaning? (A quick search says this is "semantic satiation")
Scott's review of this book pushed me into this semantic satiation territory for vast swaths of concepts, not just words and phrases. The comments on the review have me back there again.
Maybe this is a hand-wavy way of saying this stuff is exhausting.
>"Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job"
Aside: Analogies like these are *incredibly common* in Plato, to the point where he's been mocked because of it. He hammers it home whenever he's arguing ethics.
As an example, take Book 1 of the Republic. There, Socrates argues against Thrasymachus, who thinks there is no justice. To Thrasymachus, what we call "justice" is only "the advantage of the stronger", whereby the most powerful take what they want and call it "justice" after the fact. Socrates responds (something like), "is the aim of medicine to make money, or to heal? Is the aim of shepherding making money, or the good of the flock?" Admitting that these arts have purposes beyond their rewards, Thrasymachus is boxed in to also admit that there can be a purpose to the job of a politician beyond just the rewards they can win by oppression. That political purpose, Socrates contends, is "justice".
But it's not just there, it's *everywhere* in Plato. If anyone ever makes a drinking game for reading Platonic dialogues, "drink after a rhetorical question about the purpose of doctors/medicine" would have you under the table fast.
Just from the quoted portions I lean toward "obscurantist drivel." Does the book have any actionable advice one can implement in order to live a better, happier life?
Richard Dawkins wrote about Postmodernists:
"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
Glad to have a shout-out here. Especially since I can't seem to stop myself from getting into weird discursive rambles in these comments, and if I could share any one sentence with the world it would be the one you quoted.
Speaking of weird discursive rambles, the bizarrely polarized reactions to the review again remind me that the most influential/charismatic people I know do not speak in facts and conclusions. Instead, they either speak on a level other than the object level, or they speak at the object level but with statements so broad and un-nuanced that they clearly can't be meant literally. When I want to discuss something, it takes me a 10-minute prologue and about 15 caveats before I even get to my point. When a charismatic person wants to say something, they say about 6 words and none of them answer your question.
I suspect this is because when I speak, I want to literally take my thoughts and put them into your brain. I therefore seek to be well-grounded, well-understood, and unimpeachable to critics. I want to preempt counterarguments. I want to provide a lot of context.
When the charismatic speak, they are okay being interpreted. It is not a bug, it's a feature. The fact that their message is vague means that it can resonate differently with different people. It can map onto their experiences, and they can project their own ideas onto it. You find yourself agreeing with what they say, but that's because the call is coming from inside the house.
This isn't always used for evil. I know very little about therapist training, but this appears to be a big part of therapy, for instance. In Teach's case, his purposeful obfuscation and broad, unfalsifiable ideas about narcissism let him simultaneously accuse every reader of sins only they know about. Like a certain tree he discusses, he doesn't need to know what they are, just that you're seeking out his stuff so you probably have some. Import that into a different context and it's likely to resonate with some people, and much much less with others.
Like with the koan in the original review, it's easy to state the conclusion that helped me: "Happy people do not pursue happiness directly. Instead they have goals and priorities other than their own fulfillment/self-actualization. Figure out the person you want to be, imagine what kinds of things that person would do, and *actually do them* and one day you'll notice that you've become that person and are happy."
But also like the koan, if I said these three sentences to any person on earth they would probably agree, but probably would not do anything differently as a result of hearing them. I suspect getting a person to actually do it requires an inception-style psy-op. Hence TLP.
From this should we conclude that Teach is a super-genius cult leader, uniquely able to get inside people's heads, manipulate their thoughts and behavior, and ultimately change them for the better? No, I don't think so. People regularly have similar reactions to other charismatic speakers/writers. (Just one example: I know tons of people who swear by Jordan Peterson, and I get literally nothing out of anything he says).
The operative point is that the change comes from within, but the catalyst for the change comes from without. There's no such thing as a person so insightful that they can pinpoint the exact neurons they need to rewire in your brain in order to make you wake up every day and go to the gym or whatever, then say a sequence of words that causes that rewiring to happen. Thus, the person who speaks broadly and obscurely will have much more success here than the person who speaks in object level specifics.
>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.
>People getting aroused just by starting to browse porn sites just seems to me like typical classical conditioning - although I guess maybe that’s what a fetish is, so never mind.
I am like this too. I browse catalogs of porn videos, searching for the perfect one, more than I actually watch them. Sometimes I spend an hour or two browsing Steam's catalog of games, installing some of them, choosing the perfect game to play today and then not playing anything. Same happens with books, porn stories, and, rarely, movies. What the hell is this? My best two guesses are: 1. Catalogs make me addicted the same way gambling makes people addicted - by giving random rewards; 2. Browsing a catalog lets me imagine what it would be like to play/watch/read something really good and it lets me remember stuff I have played/watched/read in the past.
"This reminds me of some of my own thoughts on competing selectors. You hold onto ideas either because they’re true/useful or because they’re seductive. The study of which ideas are true/useful is science and rationality. I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive, but ideas that “sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies” seem to do really well, I think playing off a sort of anxiety that wait, maybe I actually am this bad a person, I should get really into this ideology in order to absolve myself of this guilt."
This resonates with me.
Generally speaking, when I read something I find distasteful, I'll try to give it the best benefit of doubt I possibly can. It makes for awkward reading when something is both distasteful and contradicts the body of evidence I've amassed, because I keep being tempted to ask myself if I missed something fundamental, while fighting through triggered emotions. For the Sadly, Porn review, after a lot of deeply unpleasant deliberation, I finally landed on that I had probably *not* missed anything important, and that I was absolutely going to warn my high-scupulosity, prone-to-self-loathing friends away from even the review as a memetic hazard.
(That sparked an interesting conversation on whether or not that designation is overkill, but also revealed that the warning had come too late for one of them and they would've preferred having been warned before they read the article. Some people really are prone to suffering easily through such thoughts, with no benefit at the end of the tunnel.)
Somewhat apropos of the discussion of Coke, I was just talking with a friend in Shanghai who informed me that Coca-Cola has become a rare and sought-after commodity possessed only by the powerful. This seems to have happened because it is not considered an "essential good" and therefore you can't get it delivered. (On the other hand, you can get ice cream delivered. I don't know if the delivery landscape is shifting or ice cream is essential to life or what. My first guess would be that Coke is rare for other reasons and delivery is a red herring.)
Anyway, this development of Coca-Cola becoming a luxury good because it's difficult to obtain has one surprising aspect: Pepsi is widely available, but nobody cares. My friend volunteered that (a) there's a shop in her building selling Pepsi right now; (b) she refused to even consider buying it, because what she really wants is Coke; and (c) she cannot taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
"If Coke ads are woke today, it's not a strategy to appeal to wokeness, it is a reflection that "woke ad #27" outperformed "funny ad #16" in early tests."
I'm going to push back against this a bit because I worked in the online advertising industry for 5 years. Megacorp brand spenders have a reputation for being, frankly, idiots without good methodology for testing or refining their ad spend. I don't know Coke in particular, but it would definitely NOT be safe to assume that just because they have a huge advertising budget that they are rigorously testing all their ads. Career incentives can favor not testing. If you keep doing the same old thing without testing it, you don't get fired. But if you test it and it turns out you've been wasting zillions of dollars for years and you admit you were wrong, then you probably get fired, because the people running these companies are not good rationalists.
I can't recall any instance where I've fished for a compliment, nor any instance where I've been annoyed by a compliment.
Also thanks for reminding me to impulse-purchase The Great Divorce from audible. I really really liked the Screwtape Letters and Dante's divine comedy.
Both this post and the original remind me very much of Kierkegaard, who I've read an awful lot of, and I wish I had time to read the TLP book and write the Kierkegaardian analysis it desperately needs. He seems to be pretty much straightforwardly practicing what Kierkegaard scholars call "indirect communication", and seems to have the very Kierkegaardian goal of breaking readers away from the Crowd and compelling them to face reality as genuine individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if Sadly, Porn is a lot like Either/Or.
As I typed that, I had the thought that Zohar Atkins, if he's still around, would probably have something interesting to say about this.
> I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive
Not a study per se, but my first thought was that this seems to be a central project for religion. Can't recall who it was who posited that religion and agriculture arose around the same time to deal specifically with the challenges of "abundance/choice/leisure" and their theretofore unseen consequences, but it would seem relevant here.
If science is a set of communities and practices that seeks to select for true/useful ideas, then perhaps religion is a set of communities and practices that seeks to select for mores that provide a kind of Nash equilibrium. In theory, at least.
> I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
I didn't update much, because (based on your original review) I already believed something close to both.
If we let X = "a human takes an action in order to feel higher-status in their own head", then my credences are something like:
X has happened at least once in the entire history of humankind - 99.99%
Most ordinary people do X at least once in their lives - 90%
X plays a significant role in a nontrivial fraction of human social activity - 80%
X is the primary driver for most human social activity - 1%
All human social activity can be explained and predicted by X - 10^-9
This book is deliberately obscurantist - 99%
This book is mostly drivel - 95%
(To clarify, I haven't read the book, and have no information about it from any source other than ACX.)
> “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."
I've tried a few times to get into TLP and couldn't. But you've convinced me to get the book and see for myself. Some of the things mentioned are things that i USED to do, and don't do anymore, and a lot of them came after sudden realizations and epiphanies (the thing about compliments for example). And the things that triggered the epiphanies aren't things that it makes sense to expect to trigger it for everyone, or even myself if it didn't hit at the right time while i was in the right frame of mind.
It seems like the book is basically a massive pile of possible triggers, the TLP put in in the hope of at least one of them working for you. I haven't read the book yet but that's what i'm hoping for and why i bought it anyway. I'm basing this on the quote about one sentence engaging you and one sentence enraging you.
It's not trying to convince you of something by making an arguent, it's trying to argue with yourself and convince yourself, after having been triggered to do so by the book. Since the topic of fetishes came up, it's like a massive book full of examples of various fetishes, with the expectation that most won't do anything for you, possibly none will, but some people will come away from the book going 'oh huh, guess i've got a new fetish'. You get a few bits that stick with you and make you think, and the rest will seem like gibberish. But DIFFERENT PEOPLE will have DIFFERENT bits that stick with them.
WHAT the epiphany leads you to is probably different for everyone. Some of the epiphanies i've had i'm pretty sure other people just always knew (e.g. i had a MASSIVE upgrade to my theory of mind almost overnight after one epiphany, where previously i only had system 2 theory of mind but afterwards i had system 1 theory of mind). Actually the system 1 and 2 thing i think are good framings. The goal of the book (as it seems to me based on the review and what i'm hoping it is) is to induce system 1 epiphanies in people. The tools to do that are fundamentally different to what you would do if you wanted to convince people of things with system 2.
(possibly i'm being clouded from having just read that list of broken koans that you linked in one of the posts somewhere talking about zen stuff).
I also think you misunderstood the point from the person who said they've experienced the porn fetish thing. i'll use my own experience of what i've noticed about myself, which is that often i'll spend ages curating and downloading and saving porn and looking for porn that perfectly fits my fetishes, and then i'll only every get around to actually watching and masturbating to maybe 10% of it.
I don't think it's right to say that means the fetish itself isn't there, but i think 'porn is A fetish itself' can be true. I certainly also have actual fetishes IRL too.
I think WrongOnTheInternet's comment is the most important and insightful of the whole set.
The author doesn't ever support or even clearly communicate their arguments. They just state "not agreeing with me is a sign of a deep but unspecified failing" over and over with varying degrees of blatancy. This is classic cult indoctrination behavior.
I do not doubt that some people who read the book and spent a lot of time thinking introspectively about it found some insights. But that seems more likely to be due to "engage with a novel idea/stimulus, then think carefully and introspectively" is a pretty reliable way to find some insight regardless of what novel stimulus you use. Any benefit from reading this book could be just as easily gotten by reading the Principia Discordia, looking at a Salvatore Dali painting, pulling a couple cards from a tarot deck, or looking up three random words in a dictionary. And all those options come with the additional advantages of not being packaged with psychological abuse or supporting the type of person who thinks writing a book full of such garbage is a good way to feed their ego and/or pocketbook.
I keep coming back to one question when reading the book reviews, reading the book itself, re-reading my old favorite TLP posts.... who *IS* this guy??? What is he like, is he happy, is he miserable, is he actually an alcoholic, is this all a ruse, do his kids have a pleasant home life?
I'm aware that he was doxxed 8 years ago and that one can find out his name if they try hard enough, but I have no interest in that for obvious reasons. Really I am more attracted to the thought experiment of what the hell it would be like to spend 30 minutes having a conversation with him. Teach, to the extent that his persona matches the flesh-and-blood man whatsoever, must be one of the most bizarre people there is.
> Not sure I agree here. I’ve also encountered some of the “2D better than 3D” people, and I always interpreted them as saying that anime girls have more of the characteristics they’re attracted to than real women (and why shouldn’t they - they were designed as fantasies).
Be careful of applying Principle of Charity when it contradicts the immediate, straightforward interpretation of someone's words. Sometimes it's meant only as physical characteristics, but I know plenty of people who mean this in the wholeness of it: that 2D people are more moral, better friends, better lovers, just flatly better in general. Often, unsurprisingly, this comes from people who are surrounded by scum, for whom 2D media is a viewpoint into a world of coping skills, status, and proactive behavior they have not and may never get to experience. A world and people with less problems, less traumas, less social ticks, less complexity required to live in/with.
And yes, that includes sex, of course. When the barriers to sex are so high, it's unsurprising that people can solve their desires with other options through fetishes. That's as true of the 1800s sexuality of ankles as it is with your friend's rape fantasies as it is with 2D media. Sex desire is gonna go hyperfixate on something, it's gonna start evolving in the complexity of symbols it recognizes as hot, and the ultimate result from ankles is no more or less valid (on an individual level) than one for 2D media.
Just to say that reading Scott's original review and the long excerpts made me very uncomfortable, I felt fascinated but bad afterwards (having finished it quasi-compulsively) - and then had a boost of clarity and maturity, action-focus in the following ~24-36 hours.
An interesting Q for the ACX survey. I'm in the "awful book, how could you read all of it?! I could hardly tolerate the excerpts" camp. "Also," I continued, "screw poetry, which this book kinda is." So maybe ask whether people like poetry and correlate it to their feelings on this book.
This is not the USSR; if you want to say something, you can almost always just say it (which is not to say that stories, examples, and other diversions are unnecessary in an explanation, but that obscurantism and confusing statements are unnecessary).
Actually, I think I recognised some of the psychoanalytical mind games from Part 2 of Status Games (Breuning 2021). Breuning's book offers the biochemical explanation first (where do all these drives come from?) then dives into the common "status games" which would be psychoanalytical mind games. Breuning's theory is that mammalian psyche is designed to be literally insatiable for serotonin - the chemical of "winning" - because back in the bad old days it meant that you wouldn't just slay one lion and call it your crowning achievement and refuse to do anything else for the rest of your life because you won life completely - your brain gets the reward and then immediately starts looking for the next game to win at because that kept your limbs doing things actively contributing to survival and procreation. Of course, that's unnecessary now, so humans with their material needs met have resorted to inventing fun new status games to win at, and that keeps them ticking along doing things through school, jobs, dating, and marriage, until they invent one too difficult to win at and become chronically unhappy.
I kind of see psychoanalysis as the study of these specific self-inflicted status games - there's a lot of talk about wanting to be superior at the core of it which echoes my read of Breuning's book.
I'm extremely late to the party on this thread but for what it's worth - I enjoyed very much the review you wrote and the passages you quoted. I don't think there's anything which is a particular mystery to be solved in the obscureness or difficultness of the writing though. I think I just find it personally satisfying to wrestle with texts in order to produce ideas to consume. I'm not so different than a tiger who prefers meat seized from the inside of a tricky rolling barrel than meat dropped in the floor in front of him.
> I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
"If you're reading it, it's for you."
The desire to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes and a piece of writing has literally no value is very strong in a particular type of person, but it's never a useful stance. I think I'd hate this book but it seems very interesting. That's most books.
Thanks for the shout out, I'm making my way through this book and my impression is that an editor could have cut 2/3 of it and, in the process, turned it into an international self-help bestseller and made TLP a massive fortune on the public speaking circuit, which he'd have hated. There's stuff in here that would be absolutely world-changing for a lot of people I know, there are lines that I think will stick in my head for years. But then he'll spend the next hundred pages diligently driving off the reader in clearly deliberate ways.
I'm trying not to rush through it, in true TLP style he'll pack seven fascinating insights into a single paragraph and then go off on a 50-page tangent about a movie/book/myth that he just assumes everyone knows intimately and has strident opinion about that he must debunk. I absolutely believe him when he says he wrote it in his car on his lunch breaks, purely to get the ideas out of his head so that he could move on with his life. No effort has been made to format this in any kind of intuitive way, or to build or reinforce arguments or to use analogies for clarity. He honestly doesn't care if the reader follows him to a conclusion, and he definitely doesn't care if the reader enjoys reading it.
He targets the entire book at a hyper-specific audience, routinely assuming the reader is male, straight, addicted to porn, unhappy in their relationship/marriage. He assumes you have specific thoughts and opinions and he's mad at you for having them. I love it, I can't even tell if he's doing a character.
To be clear: I believe he is a genius, I linked to his blog posts dozens of times in my columns and begged him to write for Cracked back when it was big (the site collapsed and laid everyone off in 2017/2018, I'm now a full-time novelist) but he was worried he wasn't funny enough. My last email was him insisting he'd write something for us and then I just never heard back (this was probably ... 2012 or so?).
PS: When I opened this book on my Kindle and looked down at the total page numbers, I laughed out loud.
I have a vague memory that many commenters on your original post argued that the book was so incoherent and impenetrable that it served as a kind of Rorschach test. Your curation has not dissuaded me of that.
Now, I could go back and check my memory, but do I really desire that?
LOL Nav_Panel is my reddit name, honored to be cited twice in a row lmfaooo (and then again later!).
I feel that this excerpt from Burn After Reading nicely encapsulates this entire escapade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VjPM5CeWs
Having been slightly called out, a response
I'm not saying people who loved TLP were pseudointellectuals to sneer, because, hey, I was a pseudointellectual at least in the sense that I read his stuff back then and got to pretend I was smart because his words were difficult to understand.
Instead, I was genuinely trying to give context to what it was like back then, to say that the kind of person who generally loved teach the most is usually the kind of guy who would be pretty sure he knew the contents of a book he hadn't read better than people who had, or who would say you couldn't possibly evaluate prose unless you had read several other obscure writers he'd be happy to name-drop, said "rather" rather a lot, etc. That kind of thing, the stuff everyone sort of silently cringes at.
In seriousness, I do need to actually correct part of Craig's claims: I *started* reviewing it at 20%, and then did two other entries in the same series as I worked through the book, which I read in its entirety and am *immensely* poorer for having read. I got a link-out from Scott for doing it, which is really nice and valuable, and I'd STILL go back and un-promise to review it if I could. It's that bad.
Oh hey, I missed out on writing a take back in February. As someone whose first (and likely last) impression of TLP was the book review, my boiling-down, looking for the forest and not the trees, interpretation is this:
A jackass made a compelling piece of Art.
And I mean every part of that sincerely and completely! He's not an asshole, or a dipshit, or some other portmanteau curse word, he's a *jackass*, saying clever things both to mess with you and because they're intrinsically fun to say. The book is not meritorious, magnificent, or even *good*, but it is definitely compelling, as in it compels you to consider and discuss it, like we are right now (I feel a similar way about The Last Jedi, incidentally). And it's not written to be a political manifesto (though certainly political), or a fun read, or a research paper, it's written to be Motherfucking High Art, the kind that Makes You Think and professors kick you out of English 597 if you're not "getting it".
I wonder if translating the book into Finnegans Wake dialect would even do anything.
Hypothesis: the divergence in opinions on TLP proves that p-zombies exist. Not philosophical zombies, but their even more insidious cousin, psychiatric zombies!
While normal people's minds are a whirling torment of hidden desires and suppressed thoughts, psychiatric zombies somehow manage to have a fundamentally different subjective human experience in which desires are straightforward. When they get compliments, they feel good. When they have sex, it's because they like sex.
Nobody ever really notices that these p-zombies walk among us until someone like TLP comes along and bravely talks about all these supposedly-universal human experiences of being constantly tormented by your own suppressed desires and all the p-zombies pipe up to say "Nah actually I don't feel like that at all".
"I agree that high school boys are the toughest case for the 'you have no desires' argument." This reminds me that the first girl I ever had sex with in high school has spent an entire 40+ year career as a practicing Wiccan. When I spoke to her many years later, she told me that the only reason I slept with her in high school was that she had cast some sort of spell on me back then involving candles and some other sort of claptrap. I told her: "You know far more Wiccan craft than I will ever know, and you are undoubtedly expert, but you betray a woefully bad understanding of teenage boy psychology."
I've been meaning to put this on reddit, but I'll put it here instead: the main thing I think Teach contributes to rationalism is a nifty explanation to a paradox Scott has pondered about before, ie, "If the brain is a prediction-optimization machine, why does it go outside?" Teach's answer is "because most humans surrender their responsibility for prediction-making to a higher power." Meaning, I don't have to update my predictions for what happens when I go to work very often, I can instead rely on the heuristical meta-prediction "I will go to work and do whatever the fuck my boss tells me to do." And that will turn out to be 100% accurate most of the time. Thus all religion, all human institutions, all of advertising and capitalism is just a way for human beings to bootstrap their way around the brain's tendency to get flustered when presented with new information. That's Somebody Else's Problem, as Douglas Adams put it, and that somebody is never you, because you gave your sense of self away a long time ago.
maybe there is something for someone in the book, but I found even the review of it so 'blech' that I barely managed to finish skimming the review of it. I suppose I'm not alone in that. But then, about the only thing I seem to have interest in reading these days are this blog, LessWrong posts about machine learning, and machine learning papers. I used to consume tons of sci-fi and fantasy, but then reality caught up to sci-fi and now I'm in the story, and help. Interesting times are a scary place to be.
After reading this book a significant number of changes took place in my life that have persisted, after a couple years of not changing. I don't feel like I understand anything better, it literally just changed what I do. He mentions this in the book and it seems to have happened to me, like the act of being repeatedly exposed to examples of the application of a framework of interpretation across examples rewired my perception. The porn story, with its banal and delusional inner monologue juxtaposed alongside the horrific reality of the situation actually unfolding, really served to illustrate to me just how much more important the latter was than the former when evaluating the events at hand, to the degree that I've seemingly gained a new ability to see things from an outside perspective objectively.
I quit smoking pot, stopped eating out and for the first time in years have been cooking breakfast and lunch for myself instead of buying it. I've begun to allow myself to need things from those around me in stark contrast to my long held belief in complete self sufficiency as a prime virtue, and it has improved my relationships both personal and professional.
I am getting my shit in order in a way that was totally unexpected to me, and this is all happening after reading this book, inexplicably. It isn't about any of the truth content of what he wrote, it's more like he has set up bas relief mental imagery that serves to elicit change or something.
I'm not sure, but I am thankful for it and for him.
I have found some of the conversations sparked by the reviews of this book fascinating.
Sort-of in response, a friend wrote this short story.. in which a wandering stranger with a tone that suspiciously alternates between condescending and cajoling offers you a mishmosh of wisdom he actually desperately wants to impart mixed in with, well... some measure of total sludge and just a bit of "what if I'm like this too?" self-doubt: https://quasilit.substack.com/p/youre-special (I think it's brilliant.)
The DataSecretsLox thread for Scott's review had some interesting things in it. One branch of the conversation began with: 'What is narcissism, according to TLP? Not grandiosity or arrogance but self-involvement, the idea that "I am the main character of my own movie". And this is the defining symptom of our age." ' (zerodivisor) A response that was kind of uncomfortable-to-hear was someone sincerely saying, basically: "People who think 'I am the main character of my own movie'? Isn't that everyone?" And then it was noted: "One doesn't have to believe life is actually a movie with an pre-written narrative and themselves in a star role in order to have their actions influenced by 'what course of action would make for the best story with me as its hero if looked back upon ?' style of thinking." (Argaman) And then he continued with a possible resolution... and this is the part I really can't get out of my head: "A pathology arises when one instinctively relegates other people in their lives to support or even antagonistic character roles and a group dysfunction when a critical mass of people in the group are doing that. A good life movie should be more of an ensemble cast I guess is what I'm saying."
Here's one comment on Scott's review that seemed fascinating to me: "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... 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..." I did not know about that. (Link: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5185236?s=r )
Overall, it's sounded to me like the book itself is not primarily about porn, but about AGENCY. And some of the conversations it's sparked are of the sort that provoke agency.
Snav's point ("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.") sounds like it's saying that Teach created the literary equivalent of the Rorschach test. It can be anything, anything at all - because the most important thing isn't it, but how you react to it. Or perhaps how you react to ambiguity in general. I still don't understand if this book was meant to accomplish anything at all beyond making the author money.
These comments have convinced me to read the previous post.
"...it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences."
Without reference to the book at all, I just really like this insight. I think it's where lots and lots of interpretive mistakes are made. Lots of things that are done are the result of system behaviours or group behaviours, not individual "choices."
(Or at least, so I tell myself... perhaps this is just my justification for various messed up stuff that I've done, though :-/ )
That Reddit poll may be a reflection of the characteristics of *Reddit users*. I'd be curious to see if a poll here would have a similar outcome (my answer is 'no', but I don't use Reddit)
Back when I had a much bigger anxiety problem than nowadays, one of the defense mechanisms to get me out of it was to focus on the immediate, the physical, the right there. This is a table. My hands feel the lining of my pocket. It is made of fabric. I have toes, I can move them. They stand on the ground. This ground is wood. Very, very simple sentences, giving me clarity, anchoring my mind in my body and my body in the world. These are what is true, was is relevant, everything else is on top. Sure, I can be filled with nameless dread by what I now know is IBS and a psychological symptom of a physical issue, but that doesn't change that this is a table, these are my hands, this is now.
One step further, I'd do the dishes, pet the cat, take a shower - take care of the immediate, the things that I'd need to do whether life is meaningless or not, whether everything I try is futile or not, whether my dreams matter or not. Somebody still needs to take the garbage out.
That can work in longer-term settings as well. After leaving the psychiatric hospital, in the worst year of my life for no particular reason except feeling like dying every morning, I volunteered at the local animal shelter, 7 days a week, 8 hours a day. I woke up, wanted to die, and fed cats that didn't, walked dogs that didn't, cleaned cages of rabbits that didn't. It was a lot of poop and goop, but it mattered. Someone else might've cleaned that cage that day if it weren't for me, but with fewer volunteers there's shorter rounds the dogs got to walk if at all, and the staff would be a lot more stressed, so it mattered, in a tangible way.
When I get confused about philosophy or psychology or what it all means, man, I clean my apartment and repair broken furniture. These things actually matter. Call me a materialist but matter matters, and eating, drinking, pooping, sleeping are all a lot more important than whether or not I am too stupid for my job or my friends secretly hate me. If I feel down, it probably has more to do with whether I got enough exercise or sunlight than - I can't even make up examples of the sort of high-level existencialism I mean.
People a lot stupider than you (any you reading this comment section) and me lead happy, meaningful lives. You can simply opt out of this sort of thing, stop bothering with writing and theories like this. If it doesn't help you eat, drink, poop, sleep better, the marginal gains to happiness aren't that great, if they exist at all.
You know those people who seem to be on a life-long soul-searching quest, digging deeper and deeper and deeper and come up with new ideas what's wrong with them all the time? Who are in therapy for decades and yet, their trauma seems to get worse and worse? Who regularly take the attitude that everything before was meaningless and superficial, but now, this time, they cracked some deep mystery and are turning everything around, but you see no difference in their behavior, just more of the same navel-gazing enlightenment that doesn't seem to ever reach the eating, drinking, pooping, sleeping level? This is not the sort of soul-searching I want to participate in.
This is the philosophical equivalent of the "this is a table, it has four legs" anxiety defense. If in doubt, go back to the basics, everything else stacks on top and you don't need to reach the top, not ever if you don't want to, because it's what matters least. I am very happy to not be interested in the sort of analysis that book seems to be about.
To answer the question: I haven't updated on it being obscurantist drivel after reading the above and comments here, but I *have* updated on maybe some people getting some value out of kinda-abusive relationships?
“someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!”
This is weirdly reminiscent of the way people used to think _litterally_ about things like gifts, sometimes with _litteral ledgers_. I remember an example in Grabers "Debt, the first 500 years": a recurrent theme in nordic Sagas is someone receiving a gift so beautiful he cannot reciprocate, and so has to *kill* the person who gave him the gift, for fear of dishonor!
If people think the same way they used to act, even a little bit, the "I hate people who are nice to me because now I forced in a moral debt situation I may not want / be able to reciprocate" seems like a pretty plausible mechanism of human though...
Pursuing the anti-meme argument: If I had tried to read that book, I would have stopped at the introduction telling me to stop. While reading Scott's review, it was one of the very few times that I TL;DR; on the whole thing. Today I also felt compelled to TL;DR; the comments about the review about the book.
Even now I have to force myself to post this, because I feel like I'm being Trolled and I shouldn't feed the Troll.
Is the idea of antimemes a meme? An antimeme? Is it a good idea to spread it? I feel like I knew the answers once but I don't remember.
To me the structure of the book is very clear. Teach first tells a story featuring many behaviors that would seem strange or counter-intuitive to the average observer and then proceeds to very meticulously explain them bit by bit. Why would someone voluntarily give a blowjob to a guy they hate? Well, here's the logic ("I hate him but I'm going to make him cum so hard he'll just want more of me, which will be his punishment.") and here’s how one can shift their frame of reference using an aesthetic experience in order to not think like that anymore.
When Teach uses a book or a movie as an example, his interpretation of the work in question is nuts because he is doing a creative misreading, in a process Harold Bloom called Clinamen. The word comes from the Latin poet Lucretius, and refers to the swerving of atoms which enables the Universe to change. You read "badly" on purpose in order to produce the meaning you need, regardless of what was originally intended. It’s not important what Thucydides meant for you to process as information, as a set of data about a historic event he lived through. The important thing is how you can redeem the text in the form of a significant, participatory life experience. Nietzsche reads like this, Heidegger reads like this, Borges reads like this and many many strong writers and philosophers read like this. They read as an event of construction of meaning.
To add one more data point to Section 1: I thought your review was delightful, and I *hated* the book. I read about a third (before reading your review) and I just couldn't stomach all the endless hostility and 4D-chess mind games from Teach. I thought the contrast between your friendly, thoughtful style and his bitter ranting was great and helped me greatly to understand the actual insights the book was (maybe) supposed to impart. Teach might say I'm a terrible narcissist/Athenian/etc who's too weak to Read The Primary Source for that, but nevertheless I think your review is much better than the book itself.
There is a lot going on here, I'm only going to address one aspect 'Does anybody actually think like this?" A lot of people (perhaps including TLP) are experiencing the typical mind falacy. However your mind works there are likely many other minds that work similarly and there are difinitevly ones that are extremely alien to your own experience.
I was taken aback by the sheer audacity some had to heckle / complain of the material for a writer they're following and, presumably, generally like. I think it's poor form, but the lines seem to blur for people between criticism on public forums and directly disparaging creators/artists, owing to how accessible they are today. I was about to ask whether anyone would think it just fine to tell an band on release day that their album sucks, but I imagine this pretty much happens, on twitter or whatever. I can also recall as far back as the vbulletin days that some artists walked away from their private forums for the sake of their mental health.
"“Why so many footnotes???” Which is the same question as, “why are your sentences so long, why so many commas, what the hell is with you and semicolons?” It’s all on purpose, to get rid of readers. You’re stumped by the physical layout? This book is not for you, your brain is already set in concrete, it can never change, only crumble as it ages. Which is fine if your plan was to be a foundation for the next generation, but it isn’t; you’re the rotting walls that they have to knock down while you play the flute and pretend to give freedom to everyone else."
He secretly desires his book to be successful and wildly read and understood. But trying to write a best-seller might fail, and then he would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it. So instead, he spends all of his time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with himself (and the reader) whose goal is to briefly trick himself (and the reader) into believing he is high status.
His book isn't badly written: He deliberately made it like that to make it inaccessible to the low-status losers whose brains are set in concrete. Never mind the fact that even if he wrote the book the "normal way," these losers still wouldn't have read the book because they simply wouldn't be interested. This is, in fact, what the author fears the most.
The author is probably self-aware enough to realize that this is what he is doing. But he does it anyway. It reminds me of James Burnham's scathing critique of Dante, in which he draws the "formal vs. real" distinction, where the formal is the literal meaning of the text, and the "real" is based on the circumstances of the author's life. He advises the reader to consider the real meaning of texts, and through Jedi mind tricks, convinces the reader that the text they are reading is the sort of text where the formal and real meaning are the same. But if we examine the circumstances of Burnham's life as well as the text itself, it becomes clear that his scathing critique of Dante is really a scathing critique of Trotsky. We can see this by three facts: 1) The lives of Dante and Trotsky contain many parallels, 2) Burnham's whole thing at the time is that he was a follower-turned-critic of Trotsky, but the real giveaway is 3) Burnham directly leveled the same critiques nearly verbatim against Trotsky as he had against Dante in letters and other writing. So we should always consider the real meaning, even (especially?) when the author convinces us it is not necessary.
So the formal meaning of "Sadly, Porn" is that "psychologically unhealthy people spend all of their time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with themselves whose goal is to briefly trick themselves into believing they are high status." The real meaning is that the entire book is the masturbation fantasy of the author. He gives it away in the title. When he started, he wanted to write a manifesto that would finally explain himself to the world in one neat, summarized volume, that would earn him his place alongside Plato and the other great thinkers of history. But instead, sadly, porn.
Well, after reading these highlights, I did update a bit from my previous position of ""Sadly, porn" is just porn, sadly". Mostly on "just" part, which is mainly due to the following train of thought:
Many complained that Edward Teach is not taking this book-writing thing seriously, yet he nevertheless may be trying to teach the reader something. There have been enough comments trying to rigorously interpret this that I think that there indeed is something to be taught here, independent of whether the author intended it. (As commenter Craig noted: it doesn't matter what the author _intends_ to mean)
But what IS the lesson? I think this book is more of an exercise rather than a lecture. And as another educator aptly noted: "What makes you think the point of an exercise is its answer?"
But if you want my guess for what's "the point" of the exercise, I'd say Teach has playfully created a nebulous work, to put it in David Chapman's terms ( https://meaningness.com/nebulosity ). The work is not for everyone, likely because it seems Teach's idea of playing is rather vicious. Maybe David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" could be used as a less vicious substitute.
That said, I remain of the opinion that "Sadly, porn" contains not only literal, but also metaphorical cuckoldry (meta-cuckoldry?).
Scott, thank you so much! The audience in my head is going absolutely crazy...though on further reflection, you've cut out the most transcendent part of my comment. You must have known they'll never click through. They NEVER click through. And you placed me in the obviously lower-status section of your post. No love for the Douglas Adams reference?? Help! They're starting to throw tomatoes!
>I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
What exactly is the reason that being correct is a good thing, and does that reason apply here?
This book reminds me of the questions about wishful thinking and what causes it; both of them suggest that 'people are agents' is totally the wrong way of looking at people, and that instead we're optimizing for... something... else.. about our feelings.' But what is that something else, and why are we doing this instead of directly having goals and being more agenty?
I wonder if there's a solution somewhere in the space of the 'child / adult' distinction.
My kids, for example, are dependent on me and need my help. This means that i will often tell them 'this thing that you are afraid of, don't worry, it's not scary, i will keep you safe from it.' That re-assurance often helps them, not so much to 'not be afraid' , but to change topics and think about something else. This seems vaugely similar to someone ignoring a letter from the IRS: "future me will handle this" isn't that different from "mom and dad will handle this".
One of the most animating drives for a child is to feel _relevant_ to their parents and caregivers, because for a child, irrelevance is death. Is it possible that adult obsession with status - and the book review definitely made me realize how often i'm doing this - is because i still have this vestigial notion that i need to be important to the big people if i'm going to be well taken care of?
A 'ledger' mentality also makes sense in the mind of a child as like, it's scarier to believe that the world is fundamentally imbalanced and the only thing standing in the way of your life going really really awfully is _you_.
I am wondering if a bunch of people are in some state where they are 'expecting a parent to handle it' as an adult, and feeling like the neglected younger sibling when they see someone else whose life is going better.
Maybe the right question to ask here is, how are motivation and reasoning different between children and adults, and what mediates that shift?
Most cultures throughout history had some 'now you are a grown up' type ritual, which involved, say, killing a slave or memorizing and reading and reasoning about some passages from an old book. But for most of history, these rituals were intended to make a young person feel more adult like. If we have one today, it's university, which is a four year long ritual involving huge amounts of debt, drinking and partying, as if the 'you are an adult' signal was somehow inverted, and being an adult means 'instead of listening to the high school teacher authorities, now you listen to the more aloof and distant university professor authorities, and you're heavily in debt but don't worry about that, it'lll take care of itself later, and also there are parties every weekend where everyone around you is intoxicated"
I've got an MVP theory
Humans have a set of basic desire categories resembling something like the ones in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the pyramid only represents what the stack ranking of preferences that a person has when quantity of those various goods are close to zero. When these goods are more available we need to look at an individual's utility function instead. People's utility functions for Physiological and Safety goods have relatively high decay constants and they can measure their current levels of resulting utility with high accuracy. This looks like "I'm thirsty / not-thirsty". Part of this accuracy derives from how simple these needs are, and part from how much training data we have. Every day you are alive you experience many instances of being satisfied / not-satisfied with all of your physiological needs.
For higher level needs, we have a lot less training data e.g. reputations are sticky and cumulative so you can't run independent experiments on interpersonal goods like love and status easily. In the ancestral environment this was particularly true. You only had potential relationships with a couple of dozen people so you naturally topped out as the most loved / admired / high-status individual out of ~100 people. Additionally, they all were in the same network, so your interpersonal relationship goods were highly correlated across all of edges in your network. This worked pretty well for people with varying decay rates of their utility functions. Those with high decay constants (satisfiers) only had to do a minimum amount of work to maintain good relationships. Those with high decay constants (maximizers) only had a handful of people they were competing so it was relatively easy to rise to the top of the pile.
The modern world has changed the cost for many of these goods and wastly widened the assortment of goods available to satisfy any particular need. Food is cheap and has endless variation, so now you have to expend a lot more effort to decide how exactly to satisfy your hunger. So many people seek to tie themselves to the mast with religious or fad diets and thereby reduce the cognitive cost of choice.
For interpersonal needs, we are now in a graph with billions of nodes. Satisfiers and maximizers both need to figure out what reference groups they want to measure themselves against. The unlucky/foolish choose all of humanity and are cursed to never be a part of an impossible universal in group or to fail to place in a 7 billion person race.
The larger the reference group a maximizer chooses, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied, but also the more likely they are to put a dent in the universe (for good or ill). That is where we get Lenin and Jesus, Napoleon and Steve Jobs.
Now there is one part of the pyramid that we haven't touched yet, self-actualization. This is usually only available to interpersonal satisficers. It only comes to the forefront for interpersonal maximizers when they win the race. At that point they, focus on staying on top, find a bigger race or have an existential crisis when they try to grapple with this new goal that they have no training data for. It is so elusive that many of these maximizers don't believe it even exists. They assume that everyone else is an interpersonal maximizer like them and claims to the contrary are just lies told by people competing in a particular status game.
The interpersonal satisficers with the steepest decay curves naturally deal with the self-actualization earlier and more frequently. But what are the goods that actually get you self-actualization? Well self-actualization is actually not the right term for these goods. Instead it is description of the boundary between interpersonal goods and the last category, kinks.
Fair warning, I am going to severely abuse the deffintion of kink. A kink is the narrow focus on a particular good that is emergent and non-universal. We can often see what broad category of desire that a kink falls into. Curiosity: for infovores/nerds (that includes people obsessing over both star wars or physics), pleasure: hedonists of every stripe, or Equanimity, enlightened people. But within all of those communities you also have posers. People seeking interpersonal rewards for pretending to be kinky. From the outside it is very hard to tell the difference between the kinky and the posers because the only difference is motivation. However there is one useful heuristic. Posers complain the loudest about other posers. As long as the posers aren't actively preventing the kinky from doing their thing they could care less about what anyone else is doing.
Fine I'll read the damn book
I think both of the comments listed in section IV get it *almost* right, but are missing one crucial detail.
Essex is right about everything except this last bit: "[Teach is probably] 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" It's not irony, and it's not a lack of self-awareness. Teach knows he's projecting his own neuroses onto you, and he knows that you know, and if you don't know yet, he's happy to tell you. He doesn't worry that this will drive you away, because he assumes his target audience are so insecure, and so desperate for someone to condescendingly feed them their opinions while reassuring them they shouldn't try figuring things out on their own because they're too dumb/broken for that to be a possibility, that they'll still hang on his every word even as he literally explains to them how he's gaslighting them.
Beleester also gets it 99% correct, but misses the mark with this bit: "Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth". Teach doesn't tell you you're special for figuring out that he's right, nor even that you could be special if you work harder at figuring out that he's right. The worldview he advocates is a strange mixture of Calvinism and nihilism, where everyone is predestined to be a piece of shit, but only the Elect (such as Teach) are able to become aware of and honest about both their own problems and yours, whereas "you" are by your intrinsic nature destined to be eternally stuck in delusion. You might *think* that by repeating the words of an Elect like Teach, you'll get to share in some of his Elect-ness, but really that's just another narcissistic defence mechanism.
Parts of that last section needed an NSFW warning.
This question may be ignorant, but how did people find out about this book? I know Teach had a section on TLP titled “Sadly, Porn” and he said he was writing a book on TLP; however, this book was released around 10-years later…did Teach himself promote this book?
You know that feeling? When you repeat a word over and over again and it stops having meaning? (A quick search says this is "semantic satiation")
Scott's review of this book pushed me into this semantic satiation territory for vast swaths of concepts, not just words and phrases. The comments on the review have me back there again.
Maybe this is a hand-wavy way of saying this stuff is exhausting.
If Craig writes a review of Sadly, Porn, I'd love to read it.
>"Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job"
Aside: Analogies like these are *incredibly common* in Plato, to the point where he's been mocked because of it. He hammers it home whenever he's arguing ethics.
As an example, take Book 1 of the Republic. There, Socrates argues against Thrasymachus, who thinks there is no justice. To Thrasymachus, what we call "justice" is only "the advantage of the stronger", whereby the most powerful take what they want and call it "justice" after the fact. Socrates responds (something like), "is the aim of medicine to make money, or to heal? Is the aim of shepherding making money, or the good of the flock?" Admitting that these arts have purposes beyond their rewards, Thrasymachus is boxed in to also admit that there can be a purpose to the job of a politician beyond just the rewards they can win by oppression. That political purpose, Socrates contends, is "justice".
But it's not just there, it's *everywhere* in Plato. If anyone ever makes a drinking game for reading Platonic dialogues, "drink after a rhetorical question about the purpose of doctors/medicine" would have you under the table fast.
Just from the quoted portions I lean toward "obscurantist drivel." Does the book have any actionable advice one can implement in order to live a better, happier life?
Richard Dawkins wrote about Postmodernists:
"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
Glad to have a shout-out here. Especially since I can't seem to stop myself from getting into weird discursive rambles in these comments, and if I could share any one sentence with the world it would be the one you quoted.
Speaking of weird discursive rambles, the bizarrely polarized reactions to the review again remind me that the most influential/charismatic people I know do not speak in facts and conclusions. Instead, they either speak on a level other than the object level, or they speak at the object level but with statements so broad and un-nuanced that they clearly can't be meant literally. When I want to discuss something, it takes me a 10-minute prologue and about 15 caveats before I even get to my point. When a charismatic person wants to say something, they say about 6 words and none of them answer your question.
I suspect this is because when I speak, I want to literally take my thoughts and put them into your brain. I therefore seek to be well-grounded, well-understood, and unimpeachable to critics. I want to preempt counterarguments. I want to provide a lot of context.
When the charismatic speak, they are okay being interpreted. It is not a bug, it's a feature. The fact that their message is vague means that it can resonate differently with different people. It can map onto their experiences, and they can project their own ideas onto it. You find yourself agreeing with what they say, but that's because the call is coming from inside the house.
This isn't always used for evil. I know very little about therapist training, but this appears to be a big part of therapy, for instance. In Teach's case, his purposeful obfuscation and broad, unfalsifiable ideas about narcissism let him simultaneously accuse every reader of sins only they know about. Like a certain tree he discusses, he doesn't need to know what they are, just that you're seeking out his stuff so you probably have some. Import that into a different context and it's likely to resonate with some people, and much much less with others.
Like with the koan in the original review, it's easy to state the conclusion that helped me: "Happy people do not pursue happiness directly. Instead they have goals and priorities other than their own fulfillment/self-actualization. Figure out the person you want to be, imagine what kinds of things that person would do, and *actually do them* and one day you'll notice that you've become that person and are happy."
But also like the koan, if I said these three sentences to any person on earth they would probably agree, but probably would not do anything differently as a result of hearing them. I suspect getting a person to actually do it requires an inception-style psy-op. Hence TLP.
From this should we conclude that Teach is a super-genius cult leader, uniquely able to get inside people's heads, manipulate their thoughts and behavior, and ultimately change them for the better? No, I don't think so. People regularly have similar reactions to other charismatic speakers/writers. (Just one example: I know tons of people who swear by Jordan Peterson, and I get literally nothing out of anything he says).
The operative point is that the change comes from within, but the catalyst for the change comes from without. There's no such thing as a person so insightful that they can pinpoint the exact neurons they need to rewire in your brain in order to make you wake up every day and go to the gym or whatever, then say a sequence of words that causes that rewiring to happen. Thus, the person who speaks broadly and obscurely will have much more success here than the person who speaks in object level specifics.
>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.
>People getting aroused just by starting to browse porn sites just seems to me like typical classical conditioning - although I guess maybe that’s what a fetish is, so never mind.
I am like this too. I browse catalogs of porn videos, searching for the perfect one, more than I actually watch them. Sometimes I spend an hour or two browsing Steam's catalog of games, installing some of them, choosing the perfect game to play today and then not playing anything. Same happens with books, porn stories, and, rarely, movies. What the hell is this? My best two guesses are: 1. Catalogs make me addicted the same way gambling makes people addicted - by giving random rewards; 2. Browsing a catalog lets me imagine what it would be like to play/watch/read something really good and it lets me remember stuff I have played/watched/read in the past.
"This reminds me of some of my own thoughts on competing selectors. You hold onto ideas either because they’re true/useful or because they’re seductive. The study of which ideas are true/useful is science and rationality. I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive, but ideas that “sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies” seem to do really well, I think playing off a sort of anxiety that wait, maybe I actually am this bad a person, I should get really into this ideology in order to absolve myself of this guilt."
This resonates with me.
Generally speaking, when I read something I find distasteful, I'll try to give it the best benefit of doubt I possibly can. It makes for awkward reading when something is both distasteful and contradicts the body of evidence I've amassed, because I keep being tempted to ask myself if I missed something fundamental, while fighting through triggered emotions. For the Sadly, Porn review, after a lot of deeply unpleasant deliberation, I finally landed on that I had probably *not* missed anything important, and that I was absolutely going to warn my high-scupulosity, prone-to-self-loathing friends away from even the review as a memetic hazard.
(That sparked an interesting conversation on whether or not that designation is overkill, but also revealed that the warning had come too late for one of them and they would've preferred having been warned before they read the article. Some people really are prone to suffering easily through such thoughts, with no benefit at the end of the tunnel.)
I'm having a hard time understanding why any serious person would read something with this title. The title itself is a big red flag.
I skimmed through the meta Meta commentary just to see if any one else had this same thought about the title.
Somewhat apropos of the discussion of Coke, I was just talking with a friend in Shanghai who informed me that Coca-Cola has become a rare and sought-after commodity possessed only by the powerful. This seems to have happened because it is not considered an "essential good" and therefore you can't get it delivered. (On the other hand, you can get ice cream delivered. I don't know if the delivery landscape is shifting or ice cream is essential to life or what. My first guess would be that Coke is rare for other reasons and delivery is a red herring.)
Anyway, this development of Coca-Cola becoming a luxury good because it's difficult to obtain has one surprising aspect: Pepsi is widely available, but nobody cares. My friend volunteered that (a) there's a shop in her building selling Pepsi right now; (b) she refused to even consider buying it, because what she really wants is Coke; and (c) she cannot taste the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
"If Coke ads are woke today, it's not a strategy to appeal to wokeness, it is a reflection that "woke ad #27" outperformed "funny ad #16" in early tests."
I'm going to push back against this a bit because I worked in the online advertising industry for 5 years. Megacorp brand spenders have a reputation for being, frankly, idiots without good methodology for testing or refining their ad spend. I don't know Coke in particular, but it would definitely NOT be safe to assume that just because they have a huge advertising budget that they are rigorously testing all their ads. Career incentives can favor not testing. If you keep doing the same old thing without testing it, you don't get fired. But if you test it and it turns out you've been wasting zillions of dollars for years and you admit you were wrong, then you probably get fired, because the people running these companies are not good rationalists.
I can't recall any instance where I've fished for a compliment, nor any instance where I've been annoyed by a compliment.
Also thanks for reminding me to impulse-purchase The Great Divorce from audible. I really really liked the Screwtape Letters and Dante's divine comedy.
Both this post and the original remind me very much of Kierkegaard, who I've read an awful lot of, and I wish I had time to read the TLP book and write the Kierkegaardian analysis it desperately needs. He seems to be pretty much straightforwardly practicing what Kierkegaard scholars call "indirect communication", and seems to have the very Kierkegaardian goal of breaking readers away from the Crowd and compelling them to face reality as genuine individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if Sadly, Porn is a lot like Either/Or.
As I typed that, I had the thought that Zohar Atkins, if he's still around, would probably have something interesting to say about this.
> I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive
Not a study per se, but my first thought was that this seems to be a central project for religion. Can't recall who it was who posited that religion and agriculture arose around the same time to deal specifically with the challenges of "abundance/choice/leisure" and their theretofore unseen consequences, but it would seem relevant here.
If science is a set of communities and practices that seeks to select for true/useful ideas, then perhaps religion is a set of communities and practices that seeks to select for mores that provide a kind of Nash equilibrium. In theory, at least.
> I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
I didn't update much, because (based on your original review) I already believed something close to both.
If we let X = "a human takes an action in order to feel higher-status in their own head", then my credences are something like:
X has happened at least once in the entire history of humankind - 99.99%
Most ordinary people do X at least once in their lives - 90%
X plays a significant role in a nontrivial fraction of human social activity - 80%
X is the primary driver for most human social activity - 1%
All human social activity can be explained and predicted by X - 10^-9
This book is deliberately obscurantist - 99%
This book is mostly drivel - 95%
(To clarify, I haven't read the book, and have no information about it from any source other than ACX.)
> “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."
How about testing that claim?
This is apparently roughly the same spread of reactions that people have to the book Chaos: Making a New Science
I've tried a few times to get into TLP and couldn't. But you've convinced me to get the book and see for myself. Some of the things mentioned are things that i USED to do, and don't do anymore, and a lot of them came after sudden realizations and epiphanies (the thing about compliments for example). And the things that triggered the epiphanies aren't things that it makes sense to expect to trigger it for everyone, or even myself if it didn't hit at the right time while i was in the right frame of mind.
It seems like the book is basically a massive pile of possible triggers, the TLP put in in the hope of at least one of them working for you. I haven't read the book yet but that's what i'm hoping for and why i bought it anyway. I'm basing this on the quote about one sentence engaging you and one sentence enraging you.
It's not trying to convince you of something by making an arguent, it's trying to argue with yourself and convince yourself, after having been triggered to do so by the book. Since the topic of fetishes came up, it's like a massive book full of examples of various fetishes, with the expectation that most won't do anything for you, possibly none will, but some people will come away from the book going 'oh huh, guess i've got a new fetish'. You get a few bits that stick with you and make you think, and the rest will seem like gibberish. But DIFFERENT PEOPLE will have DIFFERENT bits that stick with them.
WHAT the epiphany leads you to is probably different for everyone. Some of the epiphanies i've had i'm pretty sure other people just always knew (e.g. i had a MASSIVE upgrade to my theory of mind almost overnight after one epiphany, where previously i only had system 2 theory of mind but afterwards i had system 1 theory of mind). Actually the system 1 and 2 thing i think are good framings. The goal of the book (as it seems to me based on the review and what i'm hoping it is) is to induce system 1 epiphanies in people. The tools to do that are fundamentally different to what you would do if you wanted to convince people of things with system 2.
(possibly i'm being clouded from having just read that list of broken koans that you linked in one of the posts somewhere talking about zen stuff).
I also think you misunderstood the point from the person who said they've experienced the porn fetish thing. i'll use my own experience of what i've noticed about myself, which is that often i'll spend ages curating and downloading and saving porn and looking for porn that perfectly fits my fetishes, and then i'll only every get around to actually watching and masturbating to maybe 10% of it.
I don't think it's right to say that means the fetish itself isn't there, but i think 'porn is A fetish itself' can be true. I certainly also have actual fetishes IRL too.
I think WrongOnTheInternet's comment is the most important and insightful of the whole set.
The author doesn't ever support or even clearly communicate their arguments. They just state "not agreeing with me is a sign of a deep but unspecified failing" over and over with varying degrees of blatancy. This is classic cult indoctrination behavior.
I do not doubt that some people who read the book and spent a lot of time thinking introspectively about it found some insights. But that seems more likely to be due to "engage with a novel idea/stimulus, then think carefully and introspectively" is a pretty reliable way to find some insight regardless of what novel stimulus you use. Any benefit from reading this book could be just as easily gotten by reading the Principia Discordia, looking at a Salvatore Dali painting, pulling a couple cards from a tarot deck, or looking up three random words in a dictionary. And all those options come with the additional advantages of not being packaged with psychological abuse or supporting the type of person who thinks writing a book full of such garbage is a good way to feed their ego and/or pocketbook.
does anyone have an english translation of this book?
I keep coming back to one question when reading the book reviews, reading the book itself, re-reading my old favorite TLP posts.... who *IS* this guy??? What is he like, is he happy, is he miserable, is he actually an alcoholic, is this all a ruse, do his kids have a pleasant home life?
I'm aware that he was doxxed 8 years ago and that one can find out his name if they try hard enough, but I have no interest in that for obvious reasons. Really I am more attracted to the thought experiment of what the hell it would be like to spend 30 minutes having a conversation with him. Teach, to the extent that his persona matches the flesh-and-blood man whatsoever, must be one of the most bizarre people there is.
"I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive"
Isn't that just memetics?
> Not sure I agree here. I’ve also encountered some of the “2D better than 3D” people, and I always interpreted them as saying that anime girls have more of the characteristics they’re attracted to than real women (and why shouldn’t they - they were designed as fantasies).
Be careful of applying Principle of Charity when it contradicts the immediate, straightforward interpretation of someone's words. Sometimes it's meant only as physical characteristics, but I know plenty of people who mean this in the wholeness of it: that 2D people are more moral, better friends, better lovers, just flatly better in general. Often, unsurprisingly, this comes from people who are surrounded by scum, for whom 2D media is a viewpoint into a world of coping skills, status, and proactive behavior they have not and may never get to experience. A world and people with less problems, less traumas, less social ticks, less complexity required to live in/with.
And yes, that includes sex, of course. When the barriers to sex are so high, it's unsurprising that people can solve their desires with other options through fetishes. That's as true of the 1800s sexuality of ankles as it is with your friend's rape fantasies as it is with 2D media. Sex desire is gonna go hyperfixate on something, it's gonna start evolving in the complexity of symbols it recognizes as hot, and the ultimate result from ankles is no more or less valid (on an individual level) than one for 2D media.
Just to say that reading Scott's original review and the long excerpts made me very uncomfortable, I felt fascinated but bad afterwards (having finished it quasi-compulsively) - and then had a boost of clarity and maturity, action-focus in the following ~24-36 hours.
Medicine
> The Duality Of Man
An interesting Q for the ACX survey. I'm in the "awful book, how could you read all of it?! I could hardly tolerate the excerpts" camp. "Also," I continued, "screw poetry, which this book kinda is." So maybe ask whether people like poetry and correlate it to their feelings on this book.
This is not the USSR; if you want to say something, you can almost always just say it (which is not to say that stories, examples, and other diversions are unnecessary in an explanation, but that obscurantism and confusing statements are unnecessary).
Actually, I think I recognised some of the psychoanalytical mind games from Part 2 of Status Games (Breuning 2021). Breuning's book offers the biochemical explanation first (where do all these drives come from?) then dives into the common "status games" which would be psychoanalytical mind games. Breuning's theory is that mammalian psyche is designed to be literally insatiable for serotonin - the chemical of "winning" - because back in the bad old days it meant that you wouldn't just slay one lion and call it your crowning achievement and refuse to do anything else for the rest of your life because you won life completely - your brain gets the reward and then immediately starts looking for the next game to win at because that kept your limbs doing things actively contributing to survival and procreation. Of course, that's unnecessary now, so humans with their material needs met have resorted to inventing fun new status games to win at, and that keeps them ticking along doing things through school, jobs, dating, and marriage, until they invent one too difficult to win at and become chronically unhappy.
I kind of see psychoanalysis as the study of these specific self-inflicted status games - there's a lot of talk about wanting to be superior at the core of it which echoes my read of Breuning's book.
I'm extremely late to the party on this thread but for what it's worth - I enjoyed very much the review you wrote and the passages you quoted. I don't think there's anything which is a particular mystery to be solved in the obscureness or difficultness of the writing though. I think I just find it personally satisfying to wrestle with texts in order to produce ideas to consume. I'm not so different than a tiger who prefers meat seized from the inside of a tricky rolling barrel than meat dropped in the floor in front of him.