This is sad, I'm so sorry this was your experience of analysis. Ironically this sort of issue is discussed occasionally in the psychoanalytic texts themselves, Annie Reich (Wilhelm Reich's ex-wife) has a very good piece about it, where she discusses "counter-transference" (i.e. the analyst's feelings about the analysand) and tries to understand "why are the analysts interested in doing analysis at all?"
One of her conclusions is that a subset are doing it as a power trip, so they can be seen as miracle healers, and get upset when their analysands don't "get better", because that means they're a failure, etc. She sees this as a terrible situation for the entire practice, one to be avoided if at all possible, and also it sounds like that was the situation you were in.
The ideal analyst is supposed to be a sort of "blank screen" who helps you see yourself by way of reflection, rather than pushing you to accept their interpretation of your events.
> 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?
Even back when he was TLP and I liked him, I hated this line. He has this illuminati-like view that some unnamed "them" is all-powerful and all-knowing in a way that lets them effortlessly manipulate everyone but him; it's weird.
Then the book came out and suddenly it was used as sort of this blanket thing to sort of throw out there in defense of the book. But even if you buy his god-like-government-and-advertisers view, it's like... wait, is he supposed to be one of them now? The ask is something like "take TLP's weird view that the all-powerful them exists and controls all that you do, and then ascribe their powers to him, and then assume he's using it to perfectly target a book".
I'm not saying you are doing this, it's just been weird to me that an essentially meaningless phrase got so much play in a situation it wasn't even meant to apply to.
I never once thought "If you're reading it, it's for you" implied the existence of some shadowy cabal masterfully targeting individuals with messaging. The illuminati is you. A combination of consuming content created, or recommended, by a society that raised you while your own biases do the job of curation for them.
Someone watches the news to stay current on world events. Another watches to ridicule the idiocy of the 'opposition'. Yet another watches to understand the narrative being pushed by the shadow government onto the unknowing population at large. All three think the other two are evil/stupid/crazy, and all three think they know who that particular brand of news is for. In reality it's for all of them.
"If you're reading it, it's for you" should be used the same way people repeat an action in waking life in order to try to catch themselves dreaming while asleep. An attempt to remind yourself that regardless of why you tell yourself that you're consuming something, or how far above something you think you are, it's far more likely that you sought out that content just to keep yourself from doing/changing anything. Even the content you don't 'actively' seek. The article your friend sent you that you collectively ridiculed/found insightful. You knows the type of content that your friend will send, that's why you is still friends with them. "If you're reading it, it's for you."
An implausible story. You might tell yourself that you're using the phrase to become more aware, but actually it's far more likely that you're only repeating it as a defence mechanism to keep yourself from doing/changing anything.
Yep. The text, it simply is. The fact that you keep reading it, is a fact about you. The fact that other people decided not to read it, or stopped reading it after the first few lines, is also a fact about them.
From my perspective, TLP has a few good ideas, but a horrible way to explain them, so I prefer someone else to extract them for me.
I think you're misreading him, and like Frogmentation's reply. My version, stated shortly, is that the "them" is the other half of your mind (like a Jungian shadow), and this mantra is a key that opens one of the locks on one of the doors in the mansion of self-knowledge.
The relevance here is that some people are trying to open that lock at this time, and others aren't (either because it's already open, or because they're focused somewhere else). There's not really a sensible way to "Aumann update" on "the reaction to the text" because the reaction to the text is not a proposition about shared reality, but instead cocreated by the text and the reader.
This is sort of one of my major complaints with the book (strongly) and all his work (weakly). You ask any ten people what it means, and all ten of them have a very strong opinion on the secret meaning it really does have. Or, here, that it's completely invented, ad-hoc, by the reader. Stuff like that. Like, see Trevor's interpretation above - distinct from Frogs, which is distinct from yours, if somewhat more similar.
In a situation like that, it's really, really hard not to conclude that whatever you are discussing is just gibberish. Like if I thought he was tapping into some deep, profoundly spiritual wellspring at the center of all things and then perfectly executing a beautiful, abstracted and scrambled dance that someone teaches you the perfection of the order of the universe, fine, whatever.
But I think it's probably MORE likely that he's just found an exploit where if he obscures what he's saying enough (1100 pages for three shaky, doubtful posits) some people will just assume he has the secret sauce.
> In a situation like that, it's really, really hard not to conclude that whatever you are discussing is just gibberish.
The last time I went to the beach, my experience of it was different from my husband's, and both of ours was different from the seagull's. Is the natural conclusion that the beach is just gibberish?
[Put less poetically, I think I was pretty clear in my comment that I was discussing "my version" and that meaning is co-created by text and author; I think it's pretty confused to think that communication operates by messages "really having" some "secret meaning".]
> But I think it's probably MORE likely that he's just found an exploit where if he obscures what he's saying enough (1100 pages for three shaky, doubtful posits) some people will just assume he has the secret sauce.
Sure, some people will enter with the conclusion that they can find meaning in something, as other people will enter with the conclusion that they can't find meaning in something. Why care?
The seagull thing is cute, but these are (often) massive disagreements. It's not that you and your husband went to the beach and had slightly different ideas of how nice sand is - this is much more similar to you two disagreeing about whether or not you went to the beach or Walmart.
In terms of the book, I've been told:
1. He means everything literally, and should be taken as such
2. Everything or at least much of the book is meant to be taken metaphorically; when he says that psychoanalysis of dreams means something, the actual story is not meant to be taken as true so much as the meaning you take out of it.
3. He wants you to acknowledge that you have no agency and give away your power.
4. He wants you to rebel against his teaching that you have no agency and give away your power to spite him by improving.
5. He's making broad statements aimed at everyone.
6. He's talking very much to a very specific audience of young men who masturbate to porn.
7. He really does have contempt for you.
8. He doesn't have contempt for you, he wants you to judge a hypothetical "other" he's really talking to.
9. He doesn't have contempt for you, but he wants to spur you to action through insults.
10. His writing style is on purpose because he's trying to jerk you out of inaction.
11. His writing style is on purpose because it is a planned method of teaching that inserts ideas into your brain on a deep subconscious level you couldn't otherwise actually learn
12. His writing style is free association and thus sort of on accident
And so on, and so on. I've had dozens of these conversations, all with very strident, very sure, absolutely conflicting reads on what the book is and is trying to do. They all come with very different expectations of how the book will help/hurt/change the reader. So I'm left to come to one of a couple and really only a couple of conclusions:
Either all these people are right, and he's a very deep genius who wrote a book that potentially has millions of infinite meanings, all of then legible, and that he did this on purpose and all those meanings are valid, even though the people *often can't even agree what the basic point of the book is on any level*
OR
He wrote a nonsense book that does a good job of convincing people that it's "difficult" instead of poorly written. Faced with a book that doesn't do a great job of explaining itself, they do the work he should have done and decide it means dozens of different thing.
I'm not trying to be insulting to any particular person here, but I've probably talked about this book longer and to more people than any other living human, unless it's Scott. And there's just no agreement at all on what the book even *is for*, let alone more granular elements. And I've read the thing, cover to cover, and found it to be just what I'd assume based on that - nonsense wordiness that looks like it might mean something profound, but never gets there.
It's possible someday someone will come to me with some explanation of what's going on here that completely up-ends what I think about the book. I hope so. But right now I'm a hard sell, and even if I could be convinced, everyone who is trying to do so is trying to convince me of entirely different things. Even if I *wanted* to think it was something different, I'd be picking an interpretation out of 10,000 explanation hat.
I agree that it can't be the case that all of those interpretations are correct; I think most of those interpretations could be supported / "are natural" in some way. [Like, I think I would word almost all of them in "I think" ways instead of "It is" ways; "I projected contempt onto him" and "I didn't project contempt onto him" both seem more accurate than "the writing is / isn't contemptuous".
[FWIW, I read TLP when it was live and haven't read the book, because I don't care about it / it's not for me; I'm just here because I at least start all of the ACX posts, and at least for this one made it to the end, and get emailed when people reply to my comments. I feel some desire to trollingly ask why you think and talk so much about this book if it's meaningless, but I don't have any felt sense that reflecting on that will or won't be useful for you.]
>Is the natural conclusion that the beach is just gibberish?
No, because gibberish is defined as being composed of words communicated through speech or writing, and the beach is not.
The appropriate comparison would be "is the natural conclusion that the arrangement of sand particles on the beach has no coherent meaning outside of the beach-goer's imagination?", to which the answer is obviously "yes".
Agreed, tho I think there's something interesting in the way that the distance between the features I'm building out of my sensations and the ones my husband is building out of his sensations is likely smaller than the distance between either of them and the features the seagull is building; something interesting about the way that the arrangement of sand on beaches is highly similar from beach to beach; and so on. I find that when I look, I see lots of things.
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.
I think there are some situations in which calling out a lack of meaning—or to be more precise, a lack of *intended* meaning— can be useful. For instance, if you are considering hiring someone as an analyst, it’s important to know if they are good at finding the truth or at finding the right words to say which feel truthful.
I mean, wouldn't it be useful if it were true? You might not think it's true in this case, but it seems pretty weird to say "hey, never say a book is bad" unless you ascribe to a view that no book could be bad in any case, that all of them are worth reading. In which case it starts to get dicey trying to explain why book reviews are useful at all, even when positive.
Worse, a common perception is that the book is manipulative, abusive, etc, so if true it's not just "lorem ipsum" time wasing bad, but harmful bad. I'd think throwing that observation out there is useful if true and detrimental if not true (like most observations).
I've talked to at least one person who got some value out of it, even while basically think it's garbage. So there's that. My main quibble is that no two blind men have the same impression of the elephant that is this book, but all of them swear they have the straight dope on what it "really means" and that it's genius.
My general impression on it is that it's hot nonsense, but that it's hitting a loophole/exploit in some people's brains where it seems like it *must* mean something (because how could someone they like write a super-long nonsense book), and they fill in the gaps the author couldn't.
Is it actively harmful? I don't know. I know it beat all the joy out of my soul reading it. To the extent I think it's harmful, I think I'd say it's because I saw a lot of people read a book that *merely asserts* things are true and avoids giving any real evidence or making any real arguments, who nonetheless treated it like a reliable source for reasons of style alone (in this case, that it was impenatrable and thus must contain great mysteries). I'd like that not to get more popular, but I'm not sure it's actively breaking brains or anything.
The sections quoted in Scott’s essay were enough to steer me away. The problem with doing a book review is the process is entirely subjective. I wouldn’t fret about some pushback on a negative review. From the excerpts, my internal take was “This guys seems like an asshole so I’m not going to read the book.” If I were trying to play it much safer I would say out loud “It’s not my cup of tea. “
To avoid a potential ban for a bit of harshness without a compelling reason, I’ll add that the reason the excerpts were so off putting is the whole, “Here is an abrasive 800 page Zen koan that only those on the very verge of enlightenment will understand” vibe. Sure looks like a sucker bet to me.
Very interesting. Personally, I find almost all books tedious and unworth reading, stuffed full of cliches, tribal signaling, shibboleths o' the day, and platitudes so shopworn I could only have found them interesting before the age of 15. Maybe that's why I almost only read technical books, though, ha ha.
But I actually often find the kind of response you mention useful, in the sense if someone writes angrily about a book that it's complete garbage, stupid, and incredibly wrong -- and, best of all, throws in a few quotes to illustrate his point -- these are signals to me that the book might be worth reading, because it suggests the book (1) *isn't* cliched shopworn primate hooting, since it enraged one of my fellow bonobos, but (2) had enough depth to get past the barriers to publication that weed out complete gobbledegook if the gobbledegook doesn't soothe tribal sensitivities.
It's a little weird that people still buy printed books. I would've given it fairly even odds 30 years ago that everyone would be reading e-books now, the way Jeff Bezos thought they would. But apparently not. I kind of get it, I have a vague aversion to e-books and prefer the real thing most of the time. But (1) I would've thought I'd be an atavistic fossil, not representative of the New Generation, and (2) I can't even explain why *I* prefer it. It's certainly not some artsy esthetic thing about loving the weight of the book, the smell of the ink and paper, or whatever. Couldn't care less about that. But I still like the printed physical page better.
I haven't read the book but I read Teach's blog religiously when I was younger. I was reminded of it slightly when you wrote a post last week about the fact that self-actualization is not the end-all/be-all of life, and sometimes we do owe a duty to others.
The writing style is self-impressed and focused on making you think he's erudite, but after reflection there are just three important things he said again and again that I actually found useful:
1) Self-fulfillment is a nonsense goal
2) You don't get to have a secret identity that is "who you really are" that's independent of what you do and say. What you do and say *is* your identity.
3) Occasionally you do things just because you are in a role where the person in that role does that thing. This is called "duty" and it's not always bad.
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.
Side note: Judging from the Amazon sales rankings, I suspect he has sold fewer than 500 copies of this total, and possibly much fewer. I get it, it's a tough book to recommend, but there's such a network of bloggers out there who I know for a fact are familiar with him that I'd have thought their various reviews etc would have moved more. But I also suspect TLP has no interest in selling lots of copies of this book and, in fact, if it started selling tons he'd probably pull it from the store. Again I think he just wanted it to exist so he could be done with it and move on.
That's interesting. I would think he would have sold more than that based on the buzz in the subreddit alone, much less Scott broadcasting it to his audience.
Any time Scott has shared numbers about his blog audience they have always been at least an order of magnitude less than I was expecting. For a certain kind of person (you and me) the Scott-o-sphere feels ubiquitous, but rationalism and everything rationalist-adjacent is actually a very niche community.
I've never been able to interest anyone in Scott's blogging IRL, which surprised me the first few times I failed but now I've given up on it. I have a friend who is much deeper into rationalism than me (I'm really only adjacent-adjacent). He read through and loved the Sequences (something I could only bring myself to read in part) and HPMOR (something I can't bring myself to read at all).
Ah, I thought, someone I can talk to about Scott's blogging! I asked him if he read Scott -- he hadn't heard of him. I showed him some posts I thought he'd like. He had zero interest. And that was that.
But OTOH we know that a number of prominent figures do read Scott. Though the reason they're prominent is usually that they themselves do a lot of incisive writing, which makes them a highly unrepresentative sample, even of high-IQ people.
The print book ranking is much higher than the E-book ranking -- which could supress the number of ratings relative to an indie novel in KU -- and if something has sales driven in lumps by external reviews, rather than organically through Amazon also boughts it could be hard to tell how many sales something has had from its sales rank at a given moment in time.
Having said that, it is pretty clear it isn't selling a lot of books.
>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
The obvious interpretation here is that the reader he's targeting this at is himself. It's a description of one man's idiosyncratic psychological issues, written in the second person, and appreciated by people whose own idiosyncratic psychological issues just happen to overlap in parts.
I read maybe a hundred pages, realized the book wasn't for me, and put it down. But I was left with the nagging doubt that all men use porn, and I must be some kind of freak because I don't.
The men who don't are certainly a small minority, but my partner is one of them (not on some principle, he's just meh about it), you're not alone. I oscillate between daily consumption and months-long abstinences and utter disinterest.
I have a friend who cannot get through a work day without wanking. He thinks I jest when I say I'd consider that disabling.
It feels a bit about how people dance around talking money. We'd all be helped a lot by giving numbers and being precise so we learn how our experiences differ, because I've been to porn film festivals with that friend, talking about sexual experiences and fantasies a bunch for years, before we learned how large the gulf is between our respective libidos. You can easily have two people say the same things yet having vastly different internal experiences.
"Everyone's addicted to porn" can mean "I keep coming back to it every few months though I don't feel good about it" or it can mean "I have a tab running all day on my second display".
Cracked was my favorite truehardtalk site, back in the day. Which always astounded me, given that it was the webfront spinoff of a weak knockoff of Mad. But then it went Woke and then collapsed, which made me sad.
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.
> '...we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. If we have fantasies, he says, they are about this; we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance. Think “you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”.'
...which seems to insanely-well characterize the present-day Zeitgeist/struggles/people.
And this:
> 'Fourthly, he makes a nebulous claim about ledger-keeping in relationships; it’s unclear enough what exactly he’s trying to say that you should take my interpretation of it with a grain of salt. His claim seems to be that in a relationship, if someone gives you a lot of satisfaction you feel it creates an imbalance; ditto for you giving them a lot of satisfaction.
You respond to this by depriving, mainly; there’s an imbalance, so you fix it by stopping loving your wife, not taking care of your friends or other similar efforts to hurt people in pursuit of homeostasis. This leads to bad things, but seems in TLP’s view to be inevitable.'
...aka "the ledger problem." Which I got to mash my brain against for months, and will continue to!
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".
Are psychiatric zombies people who went to therapy? Or just people who got sick of overanalyzing things with no apparent solution or utility?
At some point in my anxious youth I had the specific thought, “Why am I torturing myself over getting a compliment? I think from now on I’ll just say ‘Thanks!’” This simplified my life considerably and represented a major savings in mental load.
I also had various people in college tell me that I didn’t really like hamburgers or sex, but thinking I did was all a ploy of capitalism or patriarchy or some other fiendish form of socialization. I meditated deeply on this, and decided, no, hamburgers really are delicious and sex really is fun.
P-zombies might just be people who perceived the whirling torment of their own minds, couldn’t find a good reason to leave that fan running, and for whom that machinery conveniently equipped with an “off” switch. This is not the same as living an unexamined life or burying one’s authentic self in false desires.
It seems like I'm a p-zombie, but I've never gone to any therapy, it has always sounded to me like a perfect example of a spurious first world activity designed to extract money from bored hypochondriacs. I've never felt tormented by desires, can't even imagine what it must be like. The "revealed preferences" framing always felt tautologically true to me, I always end up doing whatever I want the most on balance, and whichever stuff doesn't win out never particularly bothers me by virtue of being "suppressed". But then again, I suspect I'm atypically low on conscientiousness and status anxiety, and I can sort of abstractly guess that when people's revealed preferences happen to substantially differ from their chosen image of themselves, it can be a source of discomfort.
I'll add another data-point here that I'm in both categories: I got therapy (which helped a bit) and then, about six months after therapy ended, decided to stop fucking torturing myself for no reason and used some basic meditation techniques to break the cycle (which helped immensely).
Right, and that's what makes them so insidious! Because a normal person full of psychological torment is also going to want to pretend to be a psy-zombie, which makes psy-zombies externally indistinguishable from normal people.
The only way you could know for sure if psy-zombies exist is if you are one yourself, and you find yourself thinking "I can't relate to any of this, my interior life is actually pretty straightforward".
But then again, you could also just be lying to yourself, which is exactly what a normal person would do.
I’m a little frustrated by the use of “normal” here. We all know that “normal” and “typical” are two different things, but who decided that torment was any kind of default?
I think I pulled that line from Kinsey back in the day. I think there are some senses where it applies, eg fetishes that are not a “norm” but which are not uncommon, and which are good examples of the thing itself (foot fetishes, BDSM, etc.)
I think I’m applying it in the sense of “being a functioning adult and not in a constant state of internal self-immolation.” But TLP and a lot of other people seem to find that state of being deeply suspect or outright pathological. If you’re not self-immolating, you’re not paying attention or suffering from false consciousness.
Reality is indeed filled with paralyzing, formless terror, but I think nature and society both do a lot of work to help us avoid wallowing in that as a failure mode. So of course anyone who sees themselves as exceptional or smarter-than-the-system will want to take a sledgehammer to all that, because how else would they know they’re exceptional? How could anyone who really understand what surrounds them not be a tortured mess? But then you’re left with “normal” meaning “a chronic mess”. I don’t believe following that to its conclusion is a more desirable outcome than using whatever mental hacks permit satisfaction and happiness. I think I experience those things, and that they’re real no matter what TLP tells me. But my main beef with TLP is that I can’t imagine a world of people he would deem “psychologically healthy” not being objectively *worse* than this one in quite a few ways.
Based on what meaning I could wrest from the soup of crap that was his writing, he thinks "psychologically healthy" people are some kind of Nietzschean ubermensch who have made it to the far shore of the paralyzing formless terror and are now self-actualizing heroic demigods- but he also thinks that there's basically 1,000 psychologically-healthy people in all of human history. The Alexanders, Caesars, and Napoleons of the world are what "psychologically healthy" looks like to him, and everyone else is a degenerate untermensch that is both fit only for and desires subjugation to the will of the strong (can you tell that I think this book has strong fascist undertones?)
That being said, I overall agree that a world where Teach got his wish and annihilated everything he saw as a "crutch" preventing people from confronting their narcissism/degeneracy would be pretty awful.
I'm pretty sure most people younger than 70 or whatever would agree, if the topic comes up, that having some fetish is normal, and at the same time not discussing them in polite company is also normal.
>“being a functioning adult and not in a constant state of internal self-immolation.”
Well, since nobody has direct access to other people's internal state it's hard to judge what's typical here, but I'll grant that for status reasons its plausible that those who experience this state would downplay it. Yep, I guess a qualifier that makes sense is that "normal" is the commonly acknowledged subset of "typical".
"Because a normal person full of psychological torment is also going to want to pretend to be a psy-zombie, which makes psy-zombies externally indistinguishable from normal people."
Has it occurred to you that if you can't distinguish "psy-zombies" and "normal people" by any observable physical or behavioural attributes, then maybe being a "psy-zombie" is in fact normal?
I think there are fairly effective counter-memes to a lot of things like this, and once you have them the problem kind of looks silly? For example I read a fair amount of sex positive feminism in my youth and so got ideas like "If you always jerk off in the same way you'll become desensitised to other kinds of stimulation, but this is a fairly temporary effect and stopping that for a couple of weeks will let you learn to enjoy other kinds of stimulation" instead of developing a guilt complex around porn dick.
Basically I tend to blame a lot of this on society unnecessarily assigning moral values to things, and I think that people probably have varying susceptibilities to this and aptitudes at realising it's going on, as well as just luck at being exposed to this idea.
I think I got this idea from this guys sex blog. I can’t be bothered finding the exact post. http://pervocracy.blogspot.com
This also matches my experience with things like learning to jerk off left handed, or reach orgasm during PIV sex with a new partner. The later may be down to trying to have sex before I was sufficiently emotionally comfortable with the person instead of sensitivity issues, it’s hard to tell.
- Immediacy: Your p-zombies. They like what they like, uncomplicatedly. They don't reflect on it. Young children are like this.
- Aesthetically Qualified: Your normal people. They reflect on their desires, which produces a hall-of-mirrors whirlwind of tormenting hidden desires and suppressed thoughts. They are in despair.
- Ethically Qualified: Mostly religious people. They reflect on The Good / The Universal; they recognize that the torments of the aesthetically qualified life are not good. They fall back on a rigid orthodoxy and authoritarian mindset. Pillars of society, they are often ridiculous and/or secretly in despair.
- Faith: A higher immediacy. Faith has genuine desires (immediacy), recognizes them (satisfying aesthetics), recognizes that they're impossible to fulfill (satisfying ethics), and knows that it will get them anyway. How? Miraculously. These people behave like the ethically qualified, dream like the aesthetically qualified and enjoy their lives like they live in immediacy. From the outside, it is impossible to tell whether a person has faith.
Just thought since you identified 2/4 categories pretty on-the-nose, the other 2 might be interesting.
Plotting the aforementioned stages, p-zombies and the Faithful both end up in the tail ends as they are the rare people with uncomplicated world views. Meanwhile, most of us end up suffering near the middle.
A similar classification is proposed by the Buddha after living through these stages. Those who live for the body and material things (most people, Aesthetically Qualified) and those who live for the soul (ascetics, Ethically Qualified) exemplify two extremes that perpetuate suffering. Rather it is those on "the Middle Path", the ones with self awareness and acceptance of the absurdity of the human predicament, that live a life with less suffering.
That's really interesting. I've always been turned off by the Buddhist idea that suffering comes from desire. But Zen has always seemed to be getting somewhere productive, with its focus on absurdity. I'll bet there are a ton of parallels between Kierkegaard and Buddhism.
"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."
Well, n=1 here, but I can definitely tell you that I spent my high school years feigning ignorance of any interest a girl showed in me because I was worried that if anyone got too close to me they'd realize I wasn't actually ingroup material.
I certainly *thought of myself as* lacking desire at the time, but it probably wouldn't be completely accurate to say I actually did. In any event, I think the TLP reading - that keeping to a role and maintaining status are even more compelling forces than teen hormones - resonated with me.
Maybe the reason older men are confused about the "desire for desire" bit is because for them, those two forces were in concert - getting laid all the time both satisfied your urges *and* raised your status - whereas today it's a fair bit murkier. There's that infamous Scott Aaronson post where he talks about his own high school experiences as a nerd socialized into thinking that being attracted to girls made him a selfish pervert rather than, like, a normal person. Some key quotes:
"My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did."
"At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself."
In other words, he didn't fantasize about having his desires *fulfilled* but rather *removed*. I think this maps kind of well onto the TLP thesis that people often self-sabotage and rationalize failure rather than work toward success.
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.
Good insight -- the Fristonian way of putting it is that predictions exist in a neural hierarchy, where the highest level priors take precedence over lower ones as determinants of behavior. So we are invested in high-confidence "predicting ourselves" first (which may include some entanglement with ideology, authority, etc), and then behaviors follow.
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.
That is realllly incredibly wonderful; thank you for sharing that.
"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 love this description. That's awesome. Who knew that willingness to acknowledge that we of need things from others... was what we needed more of? But I think it is... or, some version of that, anyway!
"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." <-- This sounds really plausible to me!
For what it's worth, the single best piece of advice I've gotten as a new parent was "Accept help from others when offered." It was life changing, and actually improved my relationships with the helpers
> 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.
This is an idea I've come to recently myself and it is great. My route to this was more via noticing I was hugely anxious about asking for things, and also thinking about how I reacted to opportunities to do things to help people.
An idea that seems closely related to me is that it's ok to have different goals and preferences to other people, and people who have similar preferences to you in who they want to spend time with probably exist, though finding them can be hard. Which I'd kind of been exposed to before but it took a kind of similarly indirect path for me to actually grok and believe fully.
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.
The science fiction writer, renaissance history professor, and musician Ada Palmer has written some some essays about protagonism and the inverse problem of feeling like you're not a protagonist so nothing you do matters, so you don't do anything. She is also known for running a LARP of the papal election that produced one of the really bad popes for her students.
I greatly enjoyed her Terra Ignota series, and reading it has probably contributed to me thinking a lot about agency for the last few months. It is also challenging in some ways, and fairly dense and long, but I suspect it is a much more pleasant exploration than Sadly Porn based on the reviews.
Fans of Unsong might enjoy her clever ideas about the problem of evil and why a god might make a universe where suffering happens. I have also heard it described as "the most serious book containing a battle between a twink and a giant mecha you'll ever read".
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.
Rorschach tests are explicitly underspecified in terms of content, whereas Teach is trying to get you to project yourself into the text by *triggering* you, and to that end he tries many possible ideological "hooks" (like if a Rorschach test showed you little movie clips and asked you "how does this one make you feel?" rather than just "what is this?"). That's why he emphasizes the importance of the line that enrages you, as it says a lot about where you're at ideologically.
"...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.
> 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.
This is what made me not kill myself once, when I was closest to doing so, and marked the beginning of my recovery from depression. It's literally a spiritual experience if you have enough of an inner turmoil to contrast it with.
The "I can move them" part is the secret sauce, I think - noticing that there exists a reality (in the Dickian sense - "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away") and _you have agency in it_, on the most basic level.
"that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - I don't think I've heard this quote before, but I love it and will cherish it.
That's kinda what I'm getting at - if I don't believe in these frames, don't notice these allegories, don't understand this analysis, then it's not true for me, right? I can just make it not true by not bothering in the first place. Like how modern poetry is only accessible to those studying modern poetry so it's basically a conlang for literature nerds. It's fine for people to look for layers upon layers and weird interpretations of stuff but I don't believe all this supposedly subconscious stuff is actually going on unless you look for it.
That might be unjustly dismissive, but unless there's some strong empirical proof coming its way I don't bother with inaccessible media analysis, unless it's for fun.
Thanks for this comment. Had I not read it, I would have continued day-dreaming my way through the comments here. As it is, I'm going to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen.
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.
> I see no issue in pointing out that if the thing I was getting from them goes away, I will cease giving them my attention and money
Well it's fundamentally impolite. It's both unprovoked and immediately follows consumption of labored content. Even in a long-form review, it would be quite a conceit, even after a negative impression, to directly threaten to withhold support because a piece of entertainment wasn't entertaining enough.
Conceited too because you don't make up the entire audience. This is not a commission work; it's not up to you to steer creative direction. Transaction with creators and the cloak of rationalism isn't carte blanche to be rude, and my understanding of social grace is that certain users being demanding in such a fashion is rude.
"“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.
This comment actually blew my mind. I think a lot about the avant-garde in art: artistic innovation seems like it's caused by beating your predecessors (maximizing), but most art is necessarily made by people who are not trying to redefine art, primarily because it is a lot easier to make art when you're not trying to be the best (satisfiers). This gave me better language to think about that with than I had before. What do you think determines whether someone is a maximizer or a satisfier? And why might one person be a maximizer in some domains, but a satisfier in others?
no clue! I guess everything is some mix of genetics and environment. Maybe you could tease out some of this with twin studies but it would require a really clever experimental design since maximizers so often pretend to be satisfiers
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.
...Christ, and I thought *I* was being hard on him.
So, since you clearly think you've cracked the cipher here better than I have: who the hell are the people who get something out of this WHILE ALSO thinking Teach is some profound deep thinker who isn't projecting more than a cineplex whenever he talks about other people?
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?
This is sad, I'm so sorry this was your experience of analysis. Ironically this sort of issue is discussed occasionally in the psychoanalytic texts themselves, Annie Reich (Wilhelm Reich's ex-wife) has a very good piece about it, where she discusses "counter-transference" (i.e. the analyst's feelings about the analysand) and tries to understand "why are the analysts interested in doing analysis at all?"
One of her conclusions is that a subset are doing it as a power trip, so they can be seen as miracle healers, and get upset when their analysands don't "get better", because that means they're a failure, etc. She sees this as a terrible situation for the entire practice, one to be avoided if at all possible, and also it sounds like that was the situation you were in.
The ideal analyst is supposed to be a sort of "blank screen" who helps you see yourself by way of reflection, rather than pushing you to accept their interpretation of your events.
> 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."
Even back when he was TLP and I liked him, I hated this line. He has this illuminati-like view that some unnamed "them" is all-powerful and all-knowing in a way that lets them effortlessly manipulate everyone but him; it's weird.
Then the book came out and suddenly it was used as sort of this blanket thing to sort of throw out there in defense of the book. But even if you buy his god-like-government-and-advertisers view, it's like... wait, is he supposed to be one of them now? The ask is something like "take TLP's weird view that the all-powerful them exists and controls all that you do, and then ascribe their powers to him, and then assume he's using it to perfectly target a book".
I'm not saying you are doing this, it's just been weird to me that an essentially meaningless phrase got so much play in a situation it wasn't even meant to apply to.
Accept his own admission that he is a narcissist? Shouldn't you take every statement with that in mind? He isn't exactly coy about what he is about.
Serious people have already thrown his friends like Freud in the trash can, despite Freud not ever admitting guilt like TLP.
I never once thought "If you're reading it, it's for you" implied the existence of some shadowy cabal masterfully targeting individuals with messaging. The illuminati is you. A combination of consuming content created, or recommended, by a society that raised you while your own biases do the job of curation for them.
Someone watches the news to stay current on world events. Another watches to ridicule the idiocy of the 'opposition'. Yet another watches to understand the narrative being pushed by the shadow government onto the unknowing population at large. All three think the other two are evil/stupid/crazy, and all three think they know who that particular brand of news is for. In reality it's for all of them.
"If you're reading it, it's for you" should be used the same way people repeat an action in waking life in order to try to catch themselves dreaming while asleep. An attempt to remind yourself that regardless of why you tell yourself that you're consuming something, or how far above something you think you are, it's far more likely that you sought out that content just to keep yourself from doing/changing anything. Even the content you don't 'actively' seek. The article your friend sent you that you collectively ridiculed/found insightful. You knows the type of content that your friend will send, that's why you is still friends with them. "If you're reading it, it's for you."
An implausible story. You might tell yourself that you're using the phrase to become more aware, but actually it's far more likely that you're only repeating it as a defence mechanism to keep yourself from doing/changing anything.
That's the spirit!
Deflecting counterarguments with ironic agreement. Another classic defence mechanism to keep yourself from doing/changing anything.
Yep. The text, it simply is. The fact that you keep reading it, is a fact about you. The fact that other people decided not to read it, or stopped reading it after the first few lines, is also a fact about them.
From my perspective, TLP has a few good ideas, but a horrible way to explain them, so I prefer someone else to extract them for me.
I think you're misreading him, and like Frogmentation's reply. My version, stated shortly, is that the "them" is the other half of your mind (like a Jungian shadow), and this mantra is a key that opens one of the locks on one of the doors in the mansion of self-knowledge.
The relevance here is that some people are trying to open that lock at this time, and others aren't (either because it's already open, or because they're focused somewhere else). There's not really a sensible way to "Aumann update" on "the reaction to the text" because the reaction to the text is not a proposition about shared reality, but instead cocreated by the text and the reader.
This is sort of one of my major complaints with the book (strongly) and all his work (weakly). You ask any ten people what it means, and all ten of them have a very strong opinion on the secret meaning it really does have. Or, here, that it's completely invented, ad-hoc, by the reader. Stuff like that. Like, see Trevor's interpretation above - distinct from Frogs, which is distinct from yours, if somewhat more similar.
In a situation like that, it's really, really hard not to conclude that whatever you are discussing is just gibberish. Like if I thought he was tapping into some deep, profoundly spiritual wellspring at the center of all things and then perfectly executing a beautiful, abstracted and scrambled dance that someone teaches you the perfection of the order of the universe, fine, whatever.
But I think it's probably MORE likely that he's just found an exploit where if he obscures what he's saying enough (1100 pages for three shaky, doubtful posits) some people will just assume he has the secret sauce.
> In a situation like that, it's really, really hard not to conclude that whatever you are discussing is just gibberish.
The last time I went to the beach, my experience of it was different from my husband's, and both of ours was different from the seagull's. Is the natural conclusion that the beach is just gibberish?
[Put less poetically, I think I was pretty clear in my comment that I was discussing "my version" and that meaning is co-created by text and author; I think it's pretty confused to think that communication operates by messages "really having" some "secret meaning".]
> But I think it's probably MORE likely that he's just found an exploit where if he obscures what he's saying enough (1100 pages for three shaky, doubtful posits) some people will just assume he has the secret sauce.
Sure, some people will enter with the conclusion that they can find meaning in something, as other people will enter with the conclusion that they can't find meaning in something. Why care?
The seagull thing is cute, but these are (often) massive disagreements. It's not that you and your husband went to the beach and had slightly different ideas of how nice sand is - this is much more similar to you two disagreeing about whether or not you went to the beach or Walmart.
In terms of the book, I've been told:
1. He means everything literally, and should be taken as such
2. Everything or at least much of the book is meant to be taken metaphorically; when he says that psychoanalysis of dreams means something, the actual story is not meant to be taken as true so much as the meaning you take out of it.
3. He wants you to acknowledge that you have no agency and give away your power.
4. He wants you to rebel against his teaching that you have no agency and give away your power to spite him by improving.
5. He's making broad statements aimed at everyone.
6. He's talking very much to a very specific audience of young men who masturbate to porn.
7. He really does have contempt for you.
8. He doesn't have contempt for you, he wants you to judge a hypothetical "other" he's really talking to.
9. He doesn't have contempt for you, but he wants to spur you to action through insults.
10. His writing style is on purpose because he's trying to jerk you out of inaction.
11. His writing style is on purpose because it is a planned method of teaching that inserts ideas into your brain on a deep subconscious level you couldn't otherwise actually learn
12. His writing style is free association and thus sort of on accident
And so on, and so on. I've had dozens of these conversations, all with very strident, very sure, absolutely conflicting reads on what the book is and is trying to do. They all come with very different expectations of how the book will help/hurt/change the reader. So I'm left to come to one of a couple and really only a couple of conclusions:
Either all these people are right, and he's a very deep genius who wrote a book that potentially has millions of infinite meanings, all of then legible, and that he did this on purpose and all those meanings are valid, even though the people *often can't even agree what the basic point of the book is on any level*
OR
He wrote a nonsense book that does a good job of convincing people that it's "difficult" instead of poorly written. Faced with a book that doesn't do a great job of explaining itself, they do the work he should have done and decide it means dozens of different thing.
I'm not trying to be insulting to any particular person here, but I've probably talked about this book longer and to more people than any other living human, unless it's Scott. And there's just no agreement at all on what the book even *is for*, let alone more granular elements. And I've read the thing, cover to cover, and found it to be just what I'd assume based on that - nonsense wordiness that looks like it might mean something profound, but never gets there.
It's possible someday someone will come to me with some explanation of what's going on here that completely up-ends what I think about the book. I hope so. But right now I'm a hard sell, and even if I could be convinced, everyone who is trying to do so is trying to convince me of entirely different things. Even if I *wanted* to think it was something different, I'd be picking an interpretation out of 10,000 explanation hat.
I agree that it can't be the case that all of those interpretations are correct; I think most of those interpretations could be supported / "are natural" in some way. [Like, I think I would word almost all of them in "I think" ways instead of "It is" ways; "I projected contempt onto him" and "I didn't project contempt onto him" both seem more accurate than "the writing is / isn't contemptuous".
[FWIW, I read TLP when it was live and haven't read the book, because I don't care about it / it's not for me; I'm just here because I at least start all of the ACX posts, and at least for this one made it to the end, and get emailed when people reply to my comments. I feel some desire to trollingly ask why you think and talk so much about this book if it's meaningless, but I don't have any felt sense that reflecting on that will or won't be useful for you.]
>Is the natural conclusion that the beach is just gibberish?
No, because gibberish is defined as being composed of words communicated through speech or writing, and the beach is not.
The appropriate comparison would be "is the natural conclusion that the arrangement of sand particles on the beach has no coherent meaning outside of the beach-goer's imagination?", to which the answer is obviously "yes".
Agreed, tho I think there's something interesting in the way that the distance between the features I'm building out of my sensations and the ones my husband is building out of his sensations is likely smaller than the distance between either of them and the features the seagull is building; something interesting about the way that the arrangement of sand on beaches is highly similar from beach to beach; and so on. I find that when I look, I see lots of things.
This is such a funny line, by far the best TLP idea I am aware of.
Is the corollary to "If you're reading it, it's for you" perhaps "If you're writing it, it's about 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.
I think there are some situations in which calling out a lack of meaning—or to be more precise, a lack of *intended* meaning— can be useful. For instance, if you are considering hiring someone as an analyst, it’s important to know if they are good at finding the truth or at finding the right words to say which feel truthful.
I mean, wouldn't it be useful if it were true? You might not think it's true in this case, but it seems pretty weird to say "hey, never say a book is bad" unless you ascribe to a view that no book could be bad in any case, that all of them are worth reading. In which case it starts to get dicey trying to explain why book reviews are useful at all, even when positive.
Worse, a common perception is that the book is manipulative, abusive, etc, so if true it's not just "lorem ipsum" time wasing bad, but harmful bad. I'd think throwing that observation out there is useful if true and detrimental if not true (like most observations).
I've talked to at least one person who got some value out of it, even while basically think it's garbage. So there's that. My main quibble is that no two blind men have the same impression of the elephant that is this book, but all of them swear they have the straight dope on what it "really means" and that it's genius.
My general impression on it is that it's hot nonsense, but that it's hitting a loophole/exploit in some people's brains where it seems like it *must* mean something (because how could someone they like write a super-long nonsense book), and they fill in the gaps the author couldn't.
Is it actively harmful? I don't know. I know it beat all the joy out of my soul reading it. To the extent I think it's harmful, I think I'd say it's because I saw a lot of people read a book that *merely asserts* things are true and avoids giving any real evidence or making any real arguments, who nonetheless treated it like a reliable source for reasons of style alone (in this case, that it was impenatrable and thus must contain great mysteries). I'd like that not to get more popular, but I'm not sure it's actively breaking brains or anything.
Sorry if that was weird, by the way. I'm so salty about having read this book I'm not sure I can talk about it normally anymore.
The sections quoted in Scott’s essay were enough to steer me away. The problem with doing a book review is the process is entirely subjective. I wouldn’t fret about some pushback on a negative review. From the excerpts, my internal take was “This guys seems like an asshole so I’m not going to read the book.” If I were trying to play it much safer I would say out loud “It’s not my cup of tea. “
To avoid a potential ban for a bit of harshness without a compelling reason, I’ll add that the reason the excerpts were so off putting is the whole, “Here is an abrasive 800 page Zen koan that only those on the very verge of enlightenment will understand” vibe. Sure looks like a sucker bet to me.
Very interesting. Personally, I find almost all books tedious and unworth reading, stuffed full of cliches, tribal signaling, shibboleths o' the day, and platitudes so shopworn I could only have found them interesting before the age of 15. Maybe that's why I almost only read technical books, though, ha ha.
But I actually often find the kind of response you mention useful, in the sense if someone writes angrily about a book that it's complete garbage, stupid, and incredibly wrong -- and, best of all, throws in a few quotes to illustrate his point -- these are signals to me that the book might be worth reading, because it suggests the book (1) *isn't* cliched shopworn primate hooting, since it enraged one of my fellow bonobos, but (2) had enough depth to get past the barriers to publication that weed out complete gobbledegook if the gobbledegook doesn't soothe tribal sensitivities.
I saw an Amazon reviewer that complained his hard copy was messed up. It was a print on demand book. Might be self published.
It's a little weird that people still buy printed books. I would've given it fairly even odds 30 years ago that everyone would be reading e-books now, the way Jeff Bezos thought they would. But apparently not. I kind of get it, I have a vague aversion to e-books and prefer the real thing most of the time. But (1) I would've thought I'd be an atavistic fossil, not representative of the New Generation, and (2) I can't even explain why *I* prefer it. It's certainly not some artsy esthetic thing about loving the weight of the book, the smell of the ink and paper, or whatever. Couldn't care less about that. But I still like the printed physical page better.
I haven't read the book but I read Teach's blog religiously when I was younger. I was reminded of it slightly when you wrote a post last week about the fact that self-actualization is not the end-all/be-all of life, and sometimes we do owe a duty to others.
The writing style is self-impressed and focused on making you think he's erudite, but after reflection there are just three important things he said again and again that I actually found useful:
1) Self-fulfillment is a nonsense goal
2) You don't get to have a secret identity that is "who you really are" that's independent of what you do and say. What you do and say *is* your identity.
3) Occasionally you do things just because you are in a role where the person in that role does that thing. This is called "duty" and it's not always bad.
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.
Side note: Judging from the Amazon sales rankings, I suspect he has sold fewer than 500 copies of this total, and possibly much fewer. I get it, it's a tough book to recommend, but there's such a network of bloggers out there who I know for a fact are familiar with him that I'd have thought their various reviews etc would have moved more. But I also suspect TLP has no interest in selling lots of copies of this book and, in fact, if it started selling tons he'd probably pull it from the store. Again I think he just wanted it to exist so he could be done with it and move on.
That's interesting. I would think he would have sold more than that based on the buzz in the subreddit alone, much less Scott broadcasting it to his audience.
Any time Scott has shared numbers about his blog audience they have always been at least an order of magnitude less than I was expecting. For a certain kind of person (you and me) the Scott-o-sphere feels ubiquitous, but rationalism and everything rationalist-adjacent is actually a very niche community.
I've never been able to interest anyone in Scott's blogging IRL, which surprised me the first few times I failed but now I've given up on it. I have a friend who is much deeper into rationalism than me (I'm really only adjacent-adjacent). He read through and loved the Sequences (something I could only bring myself to read in part) and HPMOR (something I can't bring myself to read at all).
Ah, I thought, someone I can talk to about Scott's blogging! I asked him if he read Scott -- he hadn't heard of him. I showed him some posts I thought he'd like. He had zero interest. And that was that.
But OTOH we know that a number of prominent figures do read Scott. Though the reason they're prominent is usually that they themselves do a lot of incisive writing, which makes them a highly unrepresentative sample, even of high-IQ people.
I think I've brought a couple of people here, mostly people who I knew from the rasfw days, who I thought would find ssc/act interesting.
The print book ranking is much higher than the E-book ranking -- which could supress the number of ratings relative to an indie novel in KU -- and if something has sales driven in lumps by external reviews, rather than organically through Amazon also boughts it could be hard to tell how many sales something has had from its sales rank at a given moment in time.
Having said that, it is pretty clear it isn't selling a lot of books.
>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
The obvious interpretation here is that the reader he's targeting this at is himself. It's a description of one man's idiosyncratic psychological issues, written in the second person, and appreciated by people whose own idiosyncratic psychological issues just happen to overlap in parts.
Oh hey you were the first good writer about Trump that I found. (Scott was the second.) Thanks for that.
I read maybe a hundred pages, realized the book wasn't for me, and put it down. But I was left with the nagging doubt that all men use porn, and I must be some kind of freak because I don't.
The men who don't are certainly a small minority, but my partner is one of them (not on some principle, he's just meh about it), you're not alone. I oscillate between daily consumption and months-long abstinences and utter disinterest.
I have a friend who cannot get through a work day without wanking. He thinks I jest when I say I'd consider that disabling.
It feels a bit about how people dance around talking money. We'd all be helped a lot by giving numbers and being precise so we learn how our experiences differ, because I've been to porn film festivals with that friend, talking about sexual experiences and fantasies a bunch for years, before we learned how large the gulf is between our respective libidos. You can easily have two people say the same things yet having vastly different internal experiences.
"Everyone's addicted to porn" can mean "I keep coming back to it every few months though I don't feel good about it" or it can mean "I have a tab running all day on my second display".
Cracked was my favorite truehardtalk site, back in the day. Which always astounded me, given that it was the webfront spinoff of a weak knockoff of Mad. But then it went Woke and then collapsed, which made me sad.
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
If feel like burn after reading should be required viewing.
It's hyperreal, obviously, but it matches my experience with those types of people and orgs.
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.
Yes, but you writing a review got the world this:
> '...we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. If we have fantasies, he says, they are about this; we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance. Think “you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”.'
...which seems to insanely-well characterize the present-day Zeitgeist/struggles/people.
And this:
> 'Fourthly, he makes a nebulous claim about ledger-keeping in relationships; it’s unclear enough what exactly he’s trying to say that you should take my interpretation of it with a grain of salt. His claim seems to be that in a relationship, if someone gives you a lot of satisfaction you feel it creates an imbalance; ditto for you giving them a lot of satisfaction.
You respond to this by depriving, mainly; there’s an imbalance, so you fix it by stopping loving your wife, not taking care of your friends or other similar efforts to hurt people in pursuit of homeostasis. This leads to bad things, but seems in TLP’s view to be inevitable.'
...aka "the ledger problem." Which I got to mash my brain against for months, and will continue to!
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".
Are psychiatric zombies people who went to therapy? Or just people who got sick of overanalyzing things with no apparent solution or utility?
At some point in my anxious youth I had the specific thought, “Why am I torturing myself over getting a compliment? I think from now on I’ll just say ‘Thanks!’” This simplified my life considerably and represented a major savings in mental load.
I also had various people in college tell me that I didn’t really like hamburgers or sex, but thinking I did was all a ploy of capitalism or patriarchy or some other fiendish form of socialization. I meditated deeply on this, and decided, no, hamburgers really are delicious and sex really is fun.
P-zombies might just be people who perceived the whirling torment of their own minds, couldn’t find a good reason to leave that fan running, and for whom that machinery conveniently equipped with an “off” switch. This is not the same as living an unexamined life or burying one’s authentic self in false desires.
Fear of death would be a totally legitimate reason to get into my religion, we wouldn't consider that an ulterior motive at all.
It seems like I'm a p-zombie, but I've never gone to any therapy, it has always sounded to me like a perfect example of a spurious first world activity designed to extract money from bored hypochondriacs. I've never felt tormented by desires, can't even imagine what it must be like. The "revealed preferences" framing always felt tautologically true to me, I always end up doing whatever I want the most on balance, and whichever stuff doesn't win out never particularly bothers me by virtue of being "suppressed". But then again, I suspect I'm atypically low on conscientiousness and status anxiety, and I can sort of abstractly guess that when people's revealed preferences happen to substantially differ from their chosen image of themselves, it can be a source of discomfort.
Same. Everything seems very straightforward to me. I know exactly what I want; good things are good; bad things are bad.
Relatedly, I never understood therapy at all. What is there to even figure out? Especially such that you need someone else to tell you?!
I'll add another data-point here that I'm in both categories: I got therapy (which helped a bit) and then, about six months after therapy ended, decided to stop fucking torturing myself for no reason and used some basic meditation techniques to break the cycle (which helped immensely).
Counter-hypothesis: pretending to be a psychiatric zombie is a status game
Right, and that's what makes them so insidious! Because a normal person full of psychological torment is also going to want to pretend to be a psy-zombie, which makes psy-zombies externally indistinguishable from normal people.
The only way you could know for sure if psy-zombies exist is if you are one yourself, and you find yourself thinking "I can't relate to any of this, my interior life is actually pretty straightforward".
But then again, you could also just be lying to yourself, which is exactly what a normal person would do.
I’m a little frustrated by the use of “normal” here. We all know that “normal” and “typical” are two different things, but who decided that torment was any kind of default?
>We all know that “normal” and “typical” are two different things
Do we? What is the "norm" then? Pronouncements like "psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know" just seem outright absurd to me.
I think I pulled that line from Kinsey back in the day. I think there are some senses where it applies, eg fetishes that are not a “norm” but which are not uncommon, and which are good examples of the thing itself (foot fetishes, BDSM, etc.)
I think I’m applying it in the sense of “being a functioning adult and not in a constant state of internal self-immolation.” But TLP and a lot of other people seem to find that state of being deeply suspect or outright pathological. If you’re not self-immolating, you’re not paying attention or suffering from false consciousness.
Reality is indeed filled with paralyzing, formless terror, but I think nature and society both do a lot of work to help us avoid wallowing in that as a failure mode. So of course anyone who sees themselves as exceptional or smarter-than-the-system will want to take a sledgehammer to all that, because how else would they know they’re exceptional? How could anyone who really understand what surrounds them not be a tortured mess? But then you’re left with “normal” meaning “a chronic mess”. I don’t believe following that to its conclusion is a more desirable outcome than using whatever mental hacks permit satisfaction and happiness. I think I experience those things, and that they’re real no matter what TLP tells me. But my main beef with TLP is that I can’t imagine a world of people he would deem “psychologically healthy” not being objectively *worse* than this one in quite a few ways.
Based on what meaning I could wrest from the soup of crap that was his writing, he thinks "psychologically healthy" people are some kind of Nietzschean ubermensch who have made it to the far shore of the paralyzing formless terror and are now self-actualizing heroic demigods- but he also thinks that there's basically 1,000 psychologically-healthy people in all of human history. The Alexanders, Caesars, and Napoleons of the world are what "psychologically healthy" looks like to him, and everyone else is a degenerate untermensch that is both fit only for and desires subjugation to the will of the strong (can you tell that I think this book has strong fascist undertones?)
That being said, I overall agree that a world where Teach got his wish and annihilated everything he saw as a "crutch" preventing people from confronting their narcissism/degeneracy would be pretty awful.
I'm pretty sure most people younger than 70 or whatever would agree, if the topic comes up, that having some fetish is normal, and at the same time not discussing them in polite company is also normal.
>“being a functioning adult and not in a constant state of internal self-immolation.”
Well, since nobody has direct access to other people's internal state it's hard to judge what's typical here, but I'll grant that for status reasons its plausible that those who experience this state would downplay it. Yep, I guess a qualifier that makes sense is that "normal" is the commonly acknowledged subset of "typical".
"Because a normal person full of psychological torment is also going to want to pretend to be a psy-zombie, which makes psy-zombies externally indistinguishable from normal people."
Has it occurred to you that if you can't distinguish "psy-zombies" and "normal people" by any observable physical or behavioural attributes, then maybe being a "psy-zombie" is in fact normal?
I think there are fairly effective counter-memes to a lot of things like this, and once you have them the problem kind of looks silly? For example I read a fair amount of sex positive feminism in my youth and so got ideas like "If you always jerk off in the same way you'll become desensitised to other kinds of stimulation, but this is a fairly temporary effect and stopping that for a couple of weeks will let you learn to enjoy other kinds of stimulation" instead of developing a guilt complex around porn dick.
Basically I tend to blame a lot of this on society unnecessarily assigning moral values to things, and I think that people probably have varying susceptibilities to this and aptitudes at realising it's going on, as well as just luck at being exposed to this idea.
How do they know it only takes a couple of weeks? Research citation needed.
Personal experience.
I think I got this idea from this guys sex blog. I can’t be bothered finding the exact post. http://pervocracy.blogspot.com
This also matches my experience with things like learning to jerk off left handed, or reach orgasm during PIV sex with a new partner. The later may be down to trying to have sex before I was sufficiently emotionally comfortable with the person instead of sensitivity issues, it’s hard to tell.
Kierkegaard seems to divide people into 4 stages:
- Immediacy: Your p-zombies. They like what they like, uncomplicatedly. They don't reflect on it. Young children are like this.
- Aesthetically Qualified: Your normal people. They reflect on their desires, which produces a hall-of-mirrors whirlwind of tormenting hidden desires and suppressed thoughts. They are in despair.
- Ethically Qualified: Mostly religious people. They reflect on The Good / The Universal; they recognize that the torments of the aesthetically qualified life are not good. They fall back on a rigid orthodoxy and authoritarian mindset. Pillars of society, they are often ridiculous and/or secretly in despair.
- Faith: A higher immediacy. Faith has genuine desires (immediacy), recognizes them (satisfying aesthetics), recognizes that they're impossible to fulfill (satisfying ethics), and knows that it will get them anyway. How? Miraculously. These people behave like the ethically qualified, dream like the aesthetically qualified and enjoy their lives like they live in immediacy. From the outside, it is impossible to tell whether a person has faith.
Just thought since you identified 2/4 categories pretty on-the-nose, the other 2 might be interesting.
This reminds me of this silly bell curve meme: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/q52ca85320lzxly8xli0.png
Plotting the aforementioned stages, p-zombies and the Faithful both end up in the tail ends as they are the rare people with uncomplicated world views. Meanwhile, most of us end up suffering near the middle.
A similar classification is proposed by the Buddha after living through these stages. Those who live for the body and material things (most people, Aesthetically Qualified) and those who live for the soul (ascetics, Ethically Qualified) exemplify two extremes that perpetuate suffering. Rather it is those on "the Middle Path", the ones with self awareness and acceptance of the absurdity of the human predicament, that live a life with less suffering.
That's really interesting. I've always been turned off by the Buddhist idea that suffering comes from desire. But Zen has always seemed to be getting somewhere productive, with its focus on absurdity. I'll bet there are a ton of parallels between Kierkegaard and Buddhism.
"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."
Well, n=1 here, but I can definitely tell you that I spent my high school years feigning ignorance of any interest a girl showed in me because I was worried that if anyone got too close to me they'd realize I wasn't actually ingroup material.
Did you actually lack desire? Or did you simply feign a lack of desire? Because those are very different.
I certainly *thought of myself as* lacking desire at the time, but it probably wouldn't be completely accurate to say I actually did. In any event, I think the TLP reading - that keeping to a role and maintaining status are even more compelling forces than teen hormones - resonated with me.
Maybe the reason older men are confused about the "desire for desire" bit is because for them, those two forces were in concert - getting laid all the time both satisfied your urges *and* raised your status - whereas today it's a fair bit murkier. There's that infamous Scott Aaronson post where he talks about his own high school experiences as a nerd socialized into thinking that being attracted to girls made him a selfish pervert rather than, like, a normal person. Some key quotes:
"My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did."
"At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself."
In other words, he didn't fantasize about having his desires *fulfilled* but rather *removed*. I think this maps kind of well onto the TLP thesis that people often self-sabotage and rationalize failure rather than work toward success.
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.
Good insight -- the Fristonian way of putting it is that predictions exist in a neural hierarchy, where the highest level priors take precedence over lower ones as determinants of behavior. So we are invested in high-confidence "predicting ourselves" first (which may include some entanglement with ideology, authority, etc), and then behaviors follow.
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.
That is realllly incredibly wonderful; thank you for sharing that.
"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 love this description. That's awesome. Who knew that willingness to acknowledge that we of need things from others... was what we needed more of? But I think it is... or, some version of that, anyway!
"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." <-- This sounds really plausible to me!
For what it's worth, the single best piece of advice I've gotten as a new parent was "Accept help from others when offered." It was life changing, and actually improved my relationships with the helpers
> 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.
This is an idea I've come to recently myself and it is great. My route to this was more via noticing I was hugely anxious about asking for things, and also thinking about how I reacted to opportunities to do things to help people.
An idea that seems closely related to me is that it's ok to have different goals and preferences to other people, and people who have similar preferences to you in who they want to spend time with probably exist, though finding them can be hard. Which I'd kind of been exposed to before but it took a kind of similarly indirect path for me to actually grok and believe fully.
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.
The science fiction writer, renaissance history professor, and musician Ada Palmer has written some some essays about protagonism and the inverse problem of feeling like you're not a protagonist so nothing you do matters, so you don't do anything. She is also known for running a LARP of the papal election that produced one of the really bad popes for her students.
I greatly enjoyed her Terra Ignota series, and reading it has probably contributed to me thinking a lot about agency for the last few months. It is also challenging in some ways, and fairly dense and long, but I suspect it is a much more pleasant exploration than Sadly Porn based on the reviews.
Fans of Unsong might enjoy her clever ideas about the problem of evil and why a god might make a universe where suffering happens. I have also heard it described as "the most serious book containing a battle between a twink and a giant mecha you'll ever read".
Oh, I was struggling to remember the word theodicy while I was writing my other comment, and then I saw it in your name.
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.
Rorschach tests are explicitly underspecified in terms of content, whereas Teach is trying to get you to project yourself into the text by *triggering* you, and to that end he tries many possible ideological "hooks" (like if a Rorschach test showed you little movie clips and asked you "how does this one make you feel?" rather than just "what is this?"). That's why he emphasizes the importance of the line that enrages you, as it says a lot about where you're at ideologically.
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.
> 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.
This is what made me not kill myself once, when I was closest to doing so, and marked the beginning of my recovery from depression. It's literally a spiritual experience if you have enough of an inner turmoil to contrast it with.
The "I can move them" part is the secret sauce, I think - noticing that there exists a reality (in the Dickian sense - "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away") and _you have agency in it_, on the most basic level.
Strongly underrated method.
"that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - I don't think I've heard this quote before, but I love it and will cherish it.
That's kinda what I'm getting at - if I don't believe in these frames, don't notice these allegories, don't understand this analysis, then it's not true for me, right? I can just make it not true by not bothering in the first place. Like how modern poetry is only accessible to those studying modern poetry so it's basically a conlang for literature nerds. It's fine for people to look for layers upon layers and weird interpretations of stuff but I don't believe all this supposedly subconscious stuff is actually going on unless you look for it.
That might be unjustly dismissive, but unless there's some strong empirical proof coming its way I don't bother with inaccessible media analysis, unless it's for fun.
This is an unbelievably wonderful comment and I want to thank you very much for taking the time to write it.
Thanks for this comment. Had I not read it, I would have continued day-dreaming my way through the comments here. As it is, I'm going to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen.
I agree with Patrick and Anteros. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for writing this.
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.
> I see no issue in pointing out that if the thing I was getting from them goes away, I will cease giving them my attention and money
Well it's fundamentally impolite. It's both unprovoked and immediately follows consumption of labored content. Even in a long-form review, it would be quite a conceit, even after a negative impression, to directly threaten to withhold support because a piece of entertainment wasn't entertaining enough.
Conceited too because you don't make up the entire audience. This is not a commission work; it's not up to you to steer creative direction. Transaction with creators and the cloak of rationalism isn't carte blanche to be rude, and my understanding of social grace is that certain users being demanding in such a fashion is rude.
"“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.
This comment actually blew my mind. I think a lot about the avant-garde in art: artistic innovation seems like it's caused by beating your predecessors (maximizing), but most art is necessarily made by people who are not trying to redefine art, primarily because it is a lot easier to make art when you're not trying to be the best (satisfiers). This gave me better language to think about that with than I had before. What do you think determines whether someone is a maximizer or a satisfier? And why might one person be a maximizer in some domains, but a satisfier in others?
no clue! I guess everything is some mix of genetics and environment. Maybe you could tease out some of this with twin studies but it would require a really clever experimental design since maximizers so often pretend to be satisfiers
Y’all over write on here.
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.
...Christ, and I thought *I* was being hard on him.
So, since you clearly think you've cracked the cipher here better than I have: who the hell are the people who get something out of this WHILE ALSO thinking Teach is some profound deep thinker who isn't projecting more than a cineplex whenever he talks about other people?
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?