Is Knowledge Impossible?

Have you ever gone down the rabbit hole of trying to justify your own reasoning processes in the most rigorous way possible? If so, you may be able to relate to the concern that I’m replying to in the following excerpt from an email I sent to someone a few months ago:

I think the conclusion that there is no real basis for knowing anything is natural for all who approach the subject of epistemology with a strong desire for rigorous reasoning. “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” I think this common saying applies quite well here. With every new insight you have into how the human mind forms beliefs and weighs evidence, a multitude of new questions come to the surface as well. While the average individual rarely gives it even a single thought, and therefore beliefs in their own reasoning processes by default; on the other hand a person who delves into the great depths of epistemological inquiry tends to feel like every new piece of understanding brings them not closer to certainty, but even further away from a strong level of trust in human logic.

To escape this difficulty, I believe we need only make a distinction between two kinds of human cognition: automatic and manual.

A significant portion of the calculations ‘we’ engage in don’t happen within the confines of conscious awareness.

An unsurprising example of this is the human immune system. We don’t give orders to the armies of white blood cells, but there’s nevertheless no shortage of reasoning and intelligence which goes into their function and organization. The immune system is highly complex, and has cognitive attributes such as memory. When it defeats a disease, it will ‘remember’ the blueprint for victory, and next time the invading foe will be dealt with far more easily than the first time, when the immune system was inexperienced in that way.

Less obviously, however, is the huge amount of calculation that occurs behind the scenes which determines our taste sensations, emotions, and so forth. When the body experiences a food which provides certain required nutrients, that food may taste better the subsequent time you consume it, whether or not you notice the change or comprehend the reason behind suddenly enjoying the food more than before. And when someone’s facial expressions pattern-match to sociopathy or a penchant for scam artistry, you may feel the emotion of ‘creepiness’ or ‘uneasiness around this person’, which will likely cause you to abort the interaction, even if you can’t consciously explain why you felt those emotions and are unable to give rational justification for not trusting the person.

“Automatic cognition”, per my definition, is the process of deciding which course of action to take in a given circumstance by reacting to the conscious results of non-conscious calculation. A huge amount of work happens behind the scenes, but all we’re directly aware of is the ultimate effect: a feeling of fear, a sour taste, a depressed mood, a painful ankle, or a feeling of affinity for a person, along with a desire or an aversion for the situation or situations correlated with the feeling question.

“Manual cognition”, then, is where you temporarily disregard these psychological mechanisms, and instead make sure that every part of your reasoning process is completely and fully conscious. While automatic cognition says “if someone is creepy I will leave”, manual cognition says “when someone does facial expressions X, Y, and Z, along with intonation A and B, I will recognize that these behaviors correlate with a lack of empathy, an therefore I will exit the interaction as quickly as possible so as to avoid possible harm.

Epistemology is the science that seeks to explain the fundamentals of how to go manual. While actually going manual is often just called “rigorous science”, engaging in epistemological inquiry means taking a step back from the process and asking, “How exactly does manual cognition work? Are we doing it correctly and efficiently, or should we revise some of our procedures?”

Although the evolutionary process furnished us with the ability to go manual, the modern world seems to call for far more manual thinking than we’re equipped to efficiently deal with, and therefore epistemology is a very difficult subject. The practical reason to go manual is that automatic cognition is set up and calibrated for a much different world: the ancestral environment where humans hunted wild game, gathered myriad vegetables, and lived among the clean air and water of the virgin forests. Taste sensations, once a great indicator of whether a food would be healthy to consume, are now very misleading, with the production of refined sugar, industrial seed oils, and other unnatural ingredients. Presidential campaigns turn into popularity contests as tribal instincts go awry in an environment such intuitions were never built to handle: societies of millions upon millions of people. And so forth. When we think and decide with our emotions and intuitions in a natural setting, we often do well; in a deeply unnatural setting our best chance often comes from developing a rigorous epistemological framework and applying it to the problem in a painstaking and patient manner.

The phenomenon of engaging in epistemological analysis and then concluding that knowledge is simply impossible is a matter of overreaching with manual cognition. It’s not possible to think about everything manually; at times you must yield to the automatic systems. Manual thinking is highly precise and refined, but it’s extremely slow. Going manual is like digging with a spoon. When precision is needed it makes sense, but when you don’t have time you have no choice but to use a shovel or a backhoe.

The goal of human action is to achieve states of affairs which are satisfying. Manual reasoning does so by forming explicit predictions, determining one’s values, and then engaging in whichever actions will achieve those values; whereas automatic thinking is a matter of reacting to emotions, taste sensations, and other such things, in a trial-and-error process toward happiness and fulfillment. Neither is better than the other; both have their own specific uses. When we hit a wall in our research on epistemology, rather than say “knowledge is impossible” we may say, “Here it may be impractical to do manual reasoning. More research into how to do manual thinking on this topic could help, but perhaps it would be more useful to go automatic.”

What Has Civilization Given Us?

In Blindly Move Forward, or Give Up and Step Back, toward the end I pull together several explanations to show why civilization is the outgrowth not of a process that had our interests as individuals at heart, but rather as a trial-and-error system toward the creation of increasingly powerful imperialistic machines within the context of the natural selection of nation states, which in some cases produced social and government institutions aligned with the happiness of the average person, but in many cases produced an order on the surface of societal coordination that concealed the suffering of the individuals involved.

So what has civilization given us as a species that we should be grateful of? To what extent should we treat civilization as a welcomed development in the evolution of the human species, and to what degree is it an accidental process that deserves to be met with disgust, disappointment, or indifference?

When we encounter an eloquent speaker or writer extolling the wonders and beauty of civilization, we’re often met with romantic phrasing and a list of the Great Accomplishments of the Arts. They mention Bach, Beethoven, and classical music in general. They talk about the high-quality films which have told the story of humanity. They bring up the novels, literature, and philosophical tracts which have touched the hearts of millions. Without the leisure, technology, and longevity that civilization bestows upon the inhabitants of the first world, surely we would still be living day-by-day, fending off predators, hunting game, and praying that we won’t come down with an incurable illness. Civilization has given us, in a word, culture. Gone are the days of squalor, disease, and starvation. Humankind now lives the civilized life needed for introspection and development of artistic and scientific greatness.

While it’s outside the scope of this post to discuss the scientific side, namely whether humankind has benefited from civilization in terms of health, lifespan, hygiene, and so forth, due to recent technological “achievements”, I wish to quote an edited version of a couple paragraphs I wrote several months ago, in order to dispel the notion that civilization has given us something of fundamental worth when it comes to the Great Arts:

People talk about the wonderful creations of civilization that weren’t developed by the primitive tribes which populated the Earth before the last several thousand years, such as music, film, and literature. But these are merely ways for modern humanity, living in massive populations and cut off from one another, to re-gain what was lost with the advent of “civilized life”: the ability to readily and easily connect on a deep level and communicate thoughts and feelings. Without civilization, we would have far more context in common with each other, and a normal command of one’s native language would suffice for every purpose the Great Arts attempt to approximate. Without the extensive division of labor and the extreme variety in the experience of living as a human in the modern world, we would have much more natural context with one another, and the simple method of speaking words to the members of our tribe would give us every deep and beautiful feeling that we must now seek from complex cultural creations.

Just like a self-compensator, civilization causes feelings of social isolation and personal disconnection, and then convinces you of its worth by providing tools to re-gain precisely what was lost, pointing at them as if they stand on their own as what every rational human being should see value in.

When a primitive tribesman sees no value in a great novel, we scoff at his ignorance. But perhaps we should realize that we’re trying to feed him an antidote for a psychological illness that he’s never heard of and is alien to his life experience.

Blindly Move Forward, or Give Up and Step Back

The progressive wave of feminism, liberal values, and social justice embodies a correct identification of many of the oppressive qualities of present and historical norms, rules, and controls. A steady march toward greater standards of toleration really does improve the lives of many people, such as homosexuals. A loosening of the shackles of rigid social norms and crushing oppression allows a greater range of people to pursue their own view of a happy, fulfilling human existence.

Well, at least in the short term…

The fundamental problem with these movements is that almost nobody involved in constructing or propagating the theories has even a minimal level of appreciation for the fact that one cannot simply organize society by whim, and that the laws of economics, group psychology, and cultural evolution must be respected.

When we’re simply trying to push freedom of choice to its utmost, and usher in an age of tolerance, love, and honesty, the ideals of polyamory sound wonderful.

But then reality strikes.

In 1949, Ludwig von Mises published Human Action, a brilliant and comprehensive treatise on economics that stands until the present day as required reading for anyone aiming to understand how civilization works, and how it breaks down.

In the introduction, he described the genesis of economics as the realization that there are laws of human behavior and societal coordination, and that it’s not possible to simply draw up a beautiful story of humans working together toward a common goal, convince the majority of people that this system would be marvelous and fair, and then expect the society-wide agreement alone to produce the system as intended. If you ignore the hard work of figuring out how to put into place an incentive structure that would actually lead to the intended results, even unanimous approval for your laudable vision could devolve into depravity.

See here for the first four paragraphs of that introduction:

Economics is the youngest of all sciences. In the last two hundred years, it is true, many new sciences have emerged from the disciplines familiar to the ancient Greeks. However, what happened here was merely that parts of knowledge which had already found their place in the complex of the old system of learning now became autonomous. The field of study was more nicely subdivided and treated with new methods; hitherto unnoticed provinces were discovered in it, and people began to see things from aspects different from those of their precursors. The field itself was not expanded. But economics opened to human science a domain previously inaccessible and never thought of. The discovery of a regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena went beyond the limits of the traditional system of learning. It conveyed knowledge which could be regarded neither as logic, mathematics, psychology, physics, nor biology.

Philosophers had long since been eager to ascertain the ends which God or Nature was trying to realize in the course of human history. They searched for the law of mankind’s destiny and evolution. But even those thinkers whose inquiry was free from any theological tendency failed utterly in these endeavors because they were committed to a faulty method. They dealt with humanity as a whole or with other holistic concepts like nation, race, or church. They set up quite arbitrarily the ends to which the behavior of such wholes is bound to lead. But they could not satisfactorily answer the question regarding what factors compelled the various acting individuals to behave in such a way that the goal aimed at by the whole’s inexorable evolution was attained. They had recourse to desperate shifts: miraculous interference of the Deity either by revelation or by the delegation of God-sent prophets and consecrated leaders, preestablished harmony, predestination, or the operation of a mystic and fabulous “world soul” or “national soul.” Others spoke of a “cunning of nature” which implanted in man impulses driving him unwittingly along precisely the path Nature wanted him to take.

Other philosophers were more realistic. They did not try to guess the designs of Nature or God. They looked at human things from the viewpoint of government. They were intent upon establishing rules of political action, a technique, as it were, of government and statesmanship. Speculative minds drew ambitious plans for a thorough reform and reconstruction of society. The more modest were satisfied with a collection and systematization of the data of historical experience. But all were fully convinced that there was in the course of social events no such regularity and invariance of phenomena as had already been found in the operation of human reasoning and in the sequence of natural phenomena. They did not search for the laws of social cooperation because they thought that man could organize society as he pleased. If social conditions did not fulfill the wishes of the reformers, if their utopias proved unrealizable, the fault was seen in the moral failure of man. Social problems were considered ethical problems. What was needed in order to construct the ideal society, they thought, were good princes and virtuous citizens. With righteous men any utopia might be realized.

The discovery of the inescapable interdependence of market phenomena overthrew this opinion. Bewildered, people had to face a new view of society. They learned with stupefaction that there is another aspect from which human action might be viewed than that of good and bad, of fair and unfair, of just and unjust. In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his actions if he wishes to succeed. It is futile to approach social facts with the attitude of a censor who approves or disapproves from the point of view of quite arbitrary standards and subjective judgments of value. One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature. Human action and social cooperation seen as the object of a science of given relations, no longer as a normative discipline of things that ought to be–this was a revolution of tremendous consequences for knowledge and philosophy as well as for social action.

While economics was the youngest science at that time, we may only hope that soon the youngest science will be an epistemologically equivalent analysis of other social institutions, such as the sexual marketplace or natural language.

Faced with the problems in human society, the progressives are those who choose to Blindly Move Forward. They see suffering, and in response they weave a utopia of tolerance and beauty, completely ignorant to the fact that there are inexorable laws of human coordination, and simply ripping out the parts of civilization that they don’t like could lead to a disaster of unintended consequences. Even the most ugly social norm could, upon close inspection, be discovered as a crucial mechanism for societal cohesion and order.

Denying women the same standard of education as men, for example, sounds like an intentional attack against female welfare. “If we give them education, they will see the light, and realize how oppressed they truly are, while at the same time gaining the knowledge that will allow them to revolt against the patriarchy. Keep their minds lost in the darkness, so we may continue to subjugate their bodies with no limitations.”

But when you look more closely, you’ll discover that even this norm, as horrible as it may sound to the modern Western ear, likely had a crucial function in the genesis and maintenance of Western Civilization, and its departure is likely leading to systemic problems.

In natural conditions, humans do not arrange themselves into the one-man-to-one-woman system of monogamy, the family structure, and the marriage institution. Instead, the top men share many of the women, while the low-status men get little if anything. As women are designed to feel attraction only for men who feel high status to them, denying education to women and supplying it to men can effectively lower the status of all women and raise that of all men, making the one-man-to-one-woman system much more workable from the standpoint of female sexual psychology. Give the female population an equivalent standard of self-improvement and education, and we find ourselves back in a circumstance where a greater number of men seem low status (and therefore unappealing) to women, than the number of women who seem unattractive to men. The natural lopsidedness of the sexual system returns to some degree. We find monogamy run into an obstacle, and the sexual landscape moves closer to the primitive order of 40% of the male population taking 80% of the females. Civilization takes a hit to the gut.

But who are those who Give Up and Step Back?

Many people who recognize that the ideals of feminism and liberalism lead to societal disharmony and social breakdown use this information to conclude that we must go back to the systems which worked in the past. Against the progressives, they are the conservatives. They understand that the marriage institution, limitations on female promiscuity, and so on are what created the order that we call Western Civilization, and they realize that with the unraveling of this order their home countries and native cultures are in danger.

But recognizing that many of the social norms that progressives think are intolerant and prejudiced actually lie at the heart of social coordination doesn’t detract from their claim that they do in fact make many people suffer. Returning to those painful social systems, as effective as they may be for certain purposes, is a case of giving up the fight for fundamental improvement and progress. While marching blindly toward a utopian vision, and having no understanding of the realities of societal organization, is a disastrous mistake; at the same time it’s a replacement of starry-eyed visionary thinking with battle-hardened cynicism to simply desire a return to the old order of rigid oppression.

A few months ago, I started writing a post I titled “The Volatility of Sexual Freedom”.

See the following excerpt for the beginning of the draft:

From the point of view of the evolutionary forces, it doesn’t matter whether our action is impelled by the pursuit of greater heights of happiness and pleasure, or driven by the retreat into lower planes of misery and pain. For the units of natural and cultural selection, there exists no test less callous than, “Do the psychological conditions of these humans induce them to behave in a way advantageous for the perpetuation of the genes behind their physical constitution and the memes underlying the institutional framework of society?” Whether we show up at a social gathering and take on a certain personality role because it gives us a sense of satisfaction and belonging, or whether we do so in order to escape the lowest rungs of loneliness and isolation; such things bear no necessary relevance to the gears of biological and societal evolution. Insensitive to the plight of the conscious mind occupying the human body, the evolutionary process need only herd us in the right direction.

Maxim #1: Conservative values are the bedrock of industrial imperialism, with modern first-world society being a result of the natural selection of nation states.

Opposed to the natural order of the sexual climate, the traditional marriage system and family structure acted as a dam which diverted the unruly and volatile sexual urges of men into economic productivity and industrial development. Girls were put on a tight leash by their parents, and then as women they were passed off to the authority of a husband; the female population’s own impulsive and hedonistic sexual appetite was repressed by the social machine. With men searching for a sexual partner or a romantic companion lacking direct access to women free to make their own life decisions, the social game for men consisted not in gaining a bit of privacy with a woman and pressing her attraction buttons, but rather winning the respect of her friends and family. Passionate and spontaneous lust and emotional connection was replaced by socio-economic status and a considerate demeanor.

As per the insights in the first paragraph, I must emphasize that these norms developed because they worked for the perpetuation for certain cultural arrangements, not necessarily because they were enjoyable for the individuals involved.

I wrote a note to myself on the same topic a little less than a year ago:

In terms of the evolutionary forces, there’s no reason why we must be driven by pleasure rather than simply less pain. If a more useful outcome from the point of view of evolution simply meant switching from terrible pain to more tolerable pain, then humankind would still march consistently in the direction of the gene’s desires.

However, we now live in one of the first times in history, perhaps, where the goal can be happiness for all individuals.

The old order may have worked in many powerful ways in terms of optimization processes, but there were plenty of casualties of society: people who suffered their entire lives with minimal reprieve. The Liberation of the Individual is beginning in earnest, but there are many unintended consequences brewing on the macro scale. The participants in the Order of Conservative Values surely didn’t know any better than the participants in the Progressive Order of Individual Liberation about the macro effects of various individual behaviors, but while for the former the forces of group selection mediated by imperialism gave them intuitive wisdom the latter has nothing to grasp onto. The rush to usher in a world of happiness, acceptance, and toleration has brought with it an undermining not only of the Dark Side of Societal Coordination, but also the Light Side. We shall experience a deluge of unintended consequences for years to come as people begin to wake up to the mess their utopian vision has caused.

The Order of Conservative Values worked like this: Opposed to the natural order of the sexual climate, the marriage institution and the family structure acted as a dam which diverted the unruly sexual urges of men into the sort of economic activity required to build up a military capable of imperialism. Alpha-style courtship was systematically stamped out by norms concerning age of consent, difference in age between sexual partners, and so on, along with the women being put on lock down first by their parents and then by their husbands. A certain kind of beta-style courtship instead was incentivized, where the man had to slave away as a cog in the machine to develop the status and monetary situation to get a wife. While alpha-style courtship presses the buttons of the woman’s attraction mechanism, this peculiar form of beta-style courtship forced the man to go through the parents to have access to their daughter, leading to the development of courtship norms such as respect, chivalry, and so forth, which worked on the parents but are irrelevant when trying to seduce a liberated woman.

These norms, however, are being systematically dismantled. As conditions move more and more into a futuristic society, the religious ideologies of times past begin to fail their hosts in myriad ways. People turn to science for the answers to their worries and life problems, but science has developed in a lopsided manner: while physicalist reasoning is done well (e.g., physics, biology), praxeological reasoning is left behind. Partial rationality is the result, as the gears of hedonism grow stronger under the guise of liberation from oppression. With religion falling to the wayside, and science yet unable to fill in certain vital gaps, we see part of the foundation of conservative values collapsing with nothing to fill its place.

Other conditions have changed as well. With abortion, the pill, contraception, women’s economic independence, no-fault divorce, densely packed cities, anonymous Internet-based communication channels, and so forth, the model of one-man-to-one-woman is beginning to break down, and MGTOWs (beta quitters) and PUAs (alpha monopolizers) are developing in their wake. Neither side has the incentive to work as a cog in the machine any longer, and with that change we shall see a slow breakdown of the old order of civilization. With sex androids and virtual reality sexual experiences on the horizon, along with increasing acceptance for the myriad ways to have sex without having children, the number of childless MGTOWs and PUAs will rise further and further and we’ll have to wonder what the future holds for the propagation of humankind.

There’s strong reason to believe that materialism, heavy industry, long hours working in unnatural settings, stimulants that help people do what would otherwise be soul-crushingly boring cubicle work, and emotionally charged political rallies aren’t very helpful for the general happiness and well-being of a population.

But what would have generally happened to such a population? Of course they would have been invaded, conquered, and assimilated into the Western way of life, for better or for worse. The structure of human civilization that we see in the present age wasn’t the outcome of a wise and steady trial-and-error march toward social institutions increasingly in line with our fundamental values and needs. Rather, we can explain an astonishing proportion of the structure of modern society by pointing to an evolutionary process which didn’t have too overwhelming of a care for individual happiness and welfare: the natural selection of nation states, especially through imperialism but also via other factors.

Is this the way of life we should want to preserve?

To conclude: Rather than Blindly Moving Forward like the feminists, liberals, and social-justice warriors, or Giving Up and Stepping Back like the people involved in the Red Pill community, the manosphere, and particular areas of the general conservative movement; instead we may recognize (as the former group does) that the social norms which characterize the history of much of civilization have led to a lot of suffering, realize (as the latter people do) that throwing them away without a moment’s thought could put Western Civilization at risk, but then (as neither group does) put these two ideas together, and work toward figuring out a new order for civilization, which takes into account the Red Pill facts of human nature, but pursues the Blue Pill ideal of an enjoyable and happy life for all people willing to work as a team.

A Return to Epistemological Normalcy

Within society we have a class of individuals who we call “scientists”, “academics”, “intellectuals”, “rationalists”, or “thinkers”. In the popular imagination, the high-status members of this class belong to a subset of mankind we may call “highly intelligent”.

While the individuals who fall into this category build an identity around their supposed intelligence, and the people who have nothing to do with intellectual life have hardly even an inkling of what a mathematician or economist spends their day doing, those who have one foot in each life, like me, are able to perceive that it’s usually not “intelligence” which lies at the foundation of why the average intellectual chose their life path.

What happens when you spend all day inside?

First of all, let me describe a particular epistemological framework:

  • Step #1: The Generalization-to-Refinement Method.

    For example, let’s say you meet 20 girls and they all like X. You conclude, “Girls like X.” But then you meet a girl who doesn’t like X. The first 20 girls were American, and this girl is Russian. So you conclude, “American girls like X, and Russian girls don’t.”

    Next, you talk to one of your friends. You tell him your theory that American girls like X, and he replies by providing a counterexample. He explains that he met an American girl who didn’t like X. You ask, “Has she been to Russia?” He says yes, and your new conclusion is, “American culture produces value X, and Russian culture does the opposite.”

  • Step #2: Equation Development.

    Rather than simply creating a large catalog of generalization, one may construct an overarching theoretical framework to ease the memory burden and allow one to derive the largest set of generalizations possible from the most concise “equation” or “hypothesis generator”.

    I could simply note that landing on your heels while running causes shin splints, that swallowing one’s food before it’s mostly liquified is harmful, and that using artificial lights to stay up late is damaging.

    Or more usefully: I could say that humans are better adapted to hunter-gatherer life than modern life, which allows me to generate all of those hypotheses on the fly.

    “Is this method of running good? Maybe not. I’m landing on my heels only because there’s a shock-absorption mechanism in my shoes, and shoes are unnatural. What’s a common injury for runners? Shin splints. Hm, perhaps heel-striking in running shoes contributes to shin splints.”

Now, note that running this system of Generalization-to-Refinement, and then Set-of-Generalizations-to-Equation-to-Summarize-Them requires you to have a large numbers of anecdotes in your mind, and running the system at a high level necessitates that you have at your disposal a huge number of data points from your experience and the experience of others. You must have a lot of life experience, and you must interact with and debate against many others in a similar position who are running a similar epistemological system.

Here we may return to the question from earlier: “What happens when you spend all day inside?” There’s a reason for the classic stereotype of Ivory Tower Intellectuals. When you spend your days reading textbooks and interacting with others who do the same, you live a life of anecdote deficiency. No wonder the more hardcore the scientist, the more they scoff at anecdotes and require statistical evidence for even the most mundane concern!

In short: A large proportion of what we know as intellectual and rationalist culture is a direct outgrowth of lack of life experience. Sitting behind a computer all day, and limiting one’s day-to-day social contact to only the subset of people who do the same, leads to a lack of non-statistical data to draw from, so any attempt to generalize based on experience will be an immature or ineffective method in comparison to following Team Science, and falling back on the Holy Catalog of Studies and Statistics.

I’m calling this post “A Return to Epistemological Normalcy” because the epistemological framework I described above is essentially what the average competent person does on a day-to-day basis in order to optimize his or her health, finances, social life, and so on. That most people aren’t obsessed with amassing studies and statistics is less an indication of a low standard of intelligence in society, and more a sign that most people do in fact go outside quite often, and interact with a large range of people with a life outside the Ivory Tower.

An Example of a Word-Based Error

When I first started studying Japanese, I hadn’t yet been to Japan and I didn’t know any Japanese people. I was talking to one of my friends who lived in Japan at the time, and he mentioned that I could gain two things at once if I met a Japanese person over the Internet: I would have someone to do language exchange with, so as to improve my Japanese, and I would potentially meet someone I could stay with for a few weeks in Japan, in order to decrease the cost of visiting.

Being a cautious person, I responded to this suggestion by saying something like, “Well, I wouldn’t want to stay with a stranger.” My friend responded by pointing out that the person would be a stranger to me now, but upon getting to know the person through Skype and other means they would no longer be a stranger.

If I actually visualized the process of meeting someone on the Internet, Skyping with them multiple times per week for a few months, and learning about their life and values, it would be inescapable to view them as a friend rather than a stranger. But I didn’t do that. My thought process was simply: [someone I don’t know now] -> [“stranger”]; [“stranger”] -> [someone I don’t know]; [someone I don’t know] -> [don’t want to stay at their house]. Rather than thinking through the actual scenario, I merely labeled it in words, and in turn arrived at a conclusion based solely on the words.

If I visualized someone I don’t know, and then imagined staying at their house, it would jump out at me in a second that I made an error. Obviously I’m not visiting a person I’ve never interacted with before; I would have already created some history with them. Coming up with a hypothetical relationship history, complete with a vivid visualization of meaningful conversations, their face and personality, and so forth, would make it clear that I would be staying with a person that I know. But simply slapping the word “stranger” onto them is a recipe for error. The original thought was that I don’t know them now; the thought in turn created by the words was that they would be dangerous to stay with in the future, because, after all, strangers are dangerous!

On the most fundamental level, this is an error of time structure. In English, you may say, “I wouldn’t want to stay with a stranger.” But where’s the specification of the tense for the word “stranger”? A more precise language would have a grammatical system that requires you to say, “I wouldn’t want to stay with someone who is a stranger at [time X, where X is the moment of the utterance, the time of staying with the person, or any other specified time].” Where English doesn’t make explicit the fact that the word “stranger” has an internal time structure, a less error-prone verbal communication system would have in place a grammatical mechanism designed to remind the user that there is in fact a time structure to take into account.

Pickup in a Foreign Land: A Rationality Technique

I was talking to a male friend, and I was trying to give a few major suggestions for how to improve a man’s rationality. He singled out one of my claims as requiring more explanation: that a man can make great leaps in his ability to think clearly by leaving his home country, and learning how to do pickup in a foreign land.

See the following excerpt for the explanation I gave:

  • Seeking to produce useful social emotions in someone is a very different endeavor than seeking to communicate true statements. Fascination, sexual attraction, feelings of friendship, in-group signaling, curiosity, and so forth; optimizing for creating these emotions within a conversation will often have very little if nothing to do with optimizing for truth and scientific rigor.
  • Women have two sets of buttons: resources mode and genetics mode. In the former, they value common interests, a shared vision for the future, substantial conversation, agreement in moral views, and so on. In the latter, however, they don’t value any of these things. Genetics mode is essentially content free. They won’t expect you to hold any particular belief; your value to them is unrelated to whether you connect on an intellectual level.
  • Society seeks to stamp out genetics-mode behavior, and most men are aware of its existence only in the perverse version where men and women artificially raise their time preference through staying up late, drinking a lot of alcohol, doing drugs, eating a ton of carb-laden junk food, and so on, while they both put on an act which would make it hard for them to recognize each other the next morning.

    Genetics mode when done right actually trains low time-preference in the man, contains no shortage of affectionate behavior, and doesn’t require either participant to hide their true self behind a mask of drunken clown-like joking around or anything else.

  • If you focus on resources-mode relationships, you’re constantly within the social system. Your happiness hinges on whether you’re able to connect with the girl in terms of beliefs, values, and worldview, whether or not she’s a logical person. Wherever the herd is misguided, a preoccupation with resources mode will exert a pressure to accept the mainstream view of reality.
  • If you engage in intellectual discussion in English, you train your mind to produce sentences which communicate cause-and-effect data to your conversation partner. When you hang out with guys and seduce girls in English, you train your mind to produce sentences which press certain primal buttons relating to in-group signaling, team affiliation, etc. However, since you’re using the same language for both endeavors, you’ll inevitably run into situations where you do signaling at the expense of truth in an intellectual discussion, or you come off as autistic or humorless in a social interaction.
  • Therefore, if you do genetics mode in a foreign language, you will break free of a large portion of the indoctrination system which pervades civilization.

    Genetics mode done right provides most of the social satisfaction that a physically healthy male desires without exerting almost any of the normal pressure to conform one’s thinking to the mainstream, and gaining this social fulfillment within the context of a foreign language means one won’t have to deal with the epistemically hazardous mechanism I explained in the previous bullet.

Are Children Better at Learning Languages?

Most people believe that there’s a critical period in human development, where during that period it’s easy for a human to learn a natural language, and after that period it becomes very difficult. When a young child goes to a boarding school in a foreign country and picks up perfect native-level pronunciation, grammar, and word usage after a few years, their admirers say, “What a wonderful thing childhood is! His brain is like a sponge.” And when an adult ends up with a heavy foreign accent, broken grammar, and foreign-sound word usage, their defenders reply, “Well, he learned the language as an adult. Everyone knows how hard that is.”

Our experience shows that children learn languages well, and adults have trouble with pronunciation, grammar, and so forth. Children seem to pick up languages within a few years, and adults generally fail to ever learn the language to a high degree of proficiency. Hm, I suppose this means that children have brains poised to soak up natural languages, and the adult brain has simply grown out of that ability. Yep, it must be a cause that’s totally out of our control, a cause that gives everyone who fails a ready excuse and an emotional escape pod. You have allergies because genetics, and you suck at Korean because adult!

But wait…

The average child who learned a foreign language to fluency was simply thrown into a new setting where suddenly a large amount of their social existence was conducted in the language. Perhaps the child’s family moved to a new country, or the child went alone as a foreign-exchange student. Suddenly they find that to get what they want, and to enjoy their life, they must communicate effectively in this new language. The average adult who makes the attempt to learn a language, on the other hand, sits down with a textbook and does vocabulary and grammar exercises. When there’s a massive difference between how group X acquires a particular skill and how group Y does so, and one group does far better than the other in almost all cases, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that perhaps it’s the difference in learning method which determines the difference in ability?

Hm, the children learn by immersion and social sink-or-swim, and the adults with a textbook…

Must be brain plasticity!

Now, it’s of course possible that the learning-method difference is not the cause of the discrepancy in success, and that the cause really is developmental shifts in brain-hardware function. But that possibility really starts to crumble when you realize that the pattern by which adults come up short can be modeled in a comprehensive manner by pointing to the structure of the Conventional Study Method.

  • Heavy foreign accent? That’s what you get for memorizing a ton of words in writing before you can hear them properly in rapid speech!
  • Broken grammar? Welcome to the land of conjugation tables. Native speakers learn by hearing, imitating, and simply getting used to the flow of the language. Memorize how to string words into sentences by doing grammar exercises, and you will sound like the group of people who do that: foreigners.
  • Foreign-sounding word usage? There are few proper one-word-for-one-word translations between languages. Learn 古い as “old”, and you may accidentally say that your Dad is 古い. No Japanese person would ever say that. It sounds like you’re describing your Dad’s advanced age as if he’s a dusty bookshelf long forgotten in the back of your attic.

The Fine Line Between Jaded and Wise

I was talking to my sister several months ago, and she was concerned that entertaining information on certain topics would upset her and make her less effective as a parent to her young children. Subjects relating to historical wartime atrocities such as the Holocaust are some of the most obvious examples of this. Research into present-day politics can also lead an individual down a dark path of rumination about certain unfortunate realities.

I have plenty of friends who are the opposite. They think that avoiding such information is tantamount to taking the Blue Pill. They consider it a deep emotional weakness to turn one’s attention from the state of the world, and retreat into a haze of blissful ignorance. So they keep their eyes open to the truth, and they suffer as a result. They find meaning in the suffering, assuring themselves that every extra ounce of pain is merely another reminder of their superiority and strength in seeing the true state of the world.

But such a dichotomy is not necessary. It’s possible to keep one’s eyes open to the truth, without opening the flood gates to negativity, depression, and rumination.

See the following few passages I wrote to my sister those several months ago:

Yes, I understand. Certainly one of the most important gifts you could bestow upon your children is the ability to think positively, see the beauty in the world, avoid needless negativity or worrying, and so on. Teaching them love through example is I’m sure crucial to their development as mentally healthy, socially well-adjusted members of society who are able to live in harmony with other people and create lasting relationships.

With that in mind, it makes sense to avoid upsetting information. If you end up jaded, sad, depressed, angry, etc., your likelihood of being a good parent decreases. But it’s important to recognize that ‘upsetting’ is actually not a property of the article, the writer’s state of mind, the words used, etc. Instead, ‘upsetting’ is a property of the reader’s thoughts. And when we consider that the dangers of the world won’t go away if you simply stop thinking about them, I wonder: Wouldn’t it be best to learn the skill of not being disturbed by reality, to internalize the understanding that ‘all comes back to normalcy’, and then give to your children not only love and affection, but a sober window into reality?

The line between jaded and experienced is a fine one. Many people equate a clear-eyed view with frustration. This is the origin of the idea of the Red Pill, of the phrase “ignorance is bliss”, etc. But we need not make this mistake. Nothing could better define being mentally healthy than joining straightforward appraisal of reality with affection and openness. While Red Pill philosophy is a shortcut into sobriety, self-delusion and turning one’s back on ugly truths is a shortcut which brings about a loving disposition. Truly getting the best of both worlds takes true discipline and character, and I’ve only seen it a handful of times.

Absent-Minded Professor Syndrome

A couple months ago, I used the term “absent-minded professor syndrome” in a conversation, and the person I was talking to asked for a definition.

See here for an edited version of my reply:

There’s a classic story of an Ancient Greek philosopher who fell into a well because he wasn’t paying attention to his body’s movement on the Earth, and was instead looking intently toward the sky and at the stars.

Many people say that those with “high-functioning autism” who can, for example, do impressive mathematical calculations in their heads with minimal effort, are “geniuses”. I think many of these savants have similar overall brain capacity to normal people, but many more of the neurons in their brains are focused on specific tasks.

You can also put this into effect intentionally.

For a long time, I was so intensely focused on economics, linguistics, and other academic subjects, that I would only rarely think about anything else.

My peak was when there was a big snowstorm going on outside, and I walked into the sauna at my gym. A guy made some smalltalk: “Some crazy weather we’re having out there!” I responded, “Huh?” He then acted really confused. I had no idea what he meant. He then muttered something about snow and it hit me… Oh yeah, it was snowing outside…

Snow…

Physical object…

White color…

Correlates with cold sensations…

“I see,” I said to the muggle in my presence, “That did seem to be the case as I was entering this fine establishment.”

Essentially I use the term “absent-minded professor syndrome” to refer to certain non-permanent, cognitive rather than physiological attributes of individuals with “high-functioning autism”: extremely fine-grained and focused concentration (good), and obliviousness to massive swathes of human experience (bad).

I induce it into myself on purpose when working on intellectual projects.

The Journey to Sobriety

Everyone knows that downing a 6-pack of beer every night just to fall asleep, or splurging on donuts whenever you can’t get thoughts of your ex out of your head, is a matter of self-medicating. It’s clear that these aren’t healthy coping mechanisms; continue such behavior and your problems are bound to get worse.

But have you considered that even a cup of tea in the morning or a bowl of rice with dinner might be operating in the same way? Virtually everyone in the industrialized world is so caught up in the whole mess of “civilized life” that their worries have no right to extend to such moderate ills. They have more severe issues. If they’re worried about their health they’re probably trying to give up cake and cookies, alcohol and drugs. Grabbing lunch at an Indian restaurant likely makes them feel healthier than before, notwithstanding the torrent of refined carbohydrates from rice, naan, and sugar-laden sauces.

About a year ago I took a 3-month trip to Japan. I’ve long been a stranger to the worst ills of civilization: fast food, soda, sugar-laced espresso drinks, and so on. But I still had a few lingering symptoms, and I knew that I still made use of an array of mild “comfort foods”. I made a decision to quit these substances; I would eat just meat, non-starchy vegetables, nuts, etc. Grains, sugar, fruit, and so forth would become a thing of the past.

If achieving good nutrition and improving one’s health were merely a matter of determining which foods to eat and which to avoid, the problem would be much easier. Food functions as a coping mechanism for most people, and honesty with themselves would dismantle the charade. The path to sound nutrition isn’t merely a journey through a tall stack of books and articles on the physical effects of various foods on the human body; rather it’s also an emotional journey, where one must learn to end the cycle of distraction and see one’s life through an honest lens.

With that said, see the following text for an edited version of a message I sent to someone in the middle of that trip, while I was struggling to maintain my diet:

The main problem, which I’m becoming every day more aware of, is that getting away from these damaging substances is no more a matter of knowledge than a journey requiring massive cleaning out of one’s psychology. If there are any issues bubbling under the surface, or emotional turmoil leaking into one’s everyday life, then the path toward independence from coffee, tea, chocolate, grains, and so on is a matter of removing the desire to paper over these problems.

To ditch the wireheading, there are likely many actions you will have to take which have nothing to do with food.

Carbs are a matter of wireheading, or rather unnaturally large influxes are.

Meditation, mental housekeeping, creating a worldview lacking in delusion, learning to apprehend the bleak parts of reality without feeling personally responsible for them or feeling disgusted, and so on; these are no less required for the journey at hand than knowledge concerning nutrition, physiology, etc.

It’s no exaggeration to say that there are very few people in the modern world who have ever, even once in their entire life, apprehended the reality of their existence in the light of sobriety. Almost everyone’s only clash with sobriety is really just a here-and-three arrival at the first withdrawal symptoms of going off of the psychoactive substances they rely on… which doesn’t really count for being sober.

This trip has been ridiculously intense, because not only have I been spending 8+ hours everyday learning two skills at once (social ability and Japanese proficiency), but I’ve been seeking complete freedom from these substances, and have therefore found myself at many times in a sober state, which can be a harrowing experience if I haven’t yet adjusted my habits and thinking in accordance with an honest view of life.

Lifting the veneer of caffeine, blood-sugar spikes, and other wireheading in many cases reveals underneath a reality which is far different than ever considered before. It becomes clear that few things are more common than dealing with a problem by medicating, than by actually fixing it. Emotional maturity must replace the drug-induced haze of the past.

Despite my original goal being to clear up some of my lingering physical symptoms, the actual task of sticking to this diet has required a full-scale reworking of my psychology. I’ve been forced to question every emotional habit I’ve developed, every belief I’ve used to feel one way or another; I’ve had to put into effect a way of thinking and feeling which doesn’t come crashing down under the context of no artifice to catch me, no substance use to turn my attention away from my true situation and the true state of the world.

If you have trouble getting away from carb and stimulant abuse, know that what you’re having trouble with is likely not only the physical withdrawal symptoms such as having less energy than normal, but a much deeper issuer of your cognitive framework falling apart under a situation it was never built to handle: pure, unadulterated sobriety.