Sociopath Community

What do I have against airheads? They bring the conversation down, make people around them stupid, and do senseless things that are sometimes harmful. It's not the group I hate the most, though. A combination of an airhead, an angry person, and an entitled person, is the perfect mixture that throws me into rage. Airheads are fine. It's like asking what's wrong with sucking dick. Nothing, just that I'm not gonna be participating in it.

Why do I feel like I dont have a community and purpose?

Have you ever heard of he phrase "lonely in a crowd"? I feel like I'm in a situation whete I can offer many things to other people, but I don't get what I most want in return. I am grateful for the things I do get. But I can't get what I.most want, which is someone smarter than me, or someone who can meaningfully help me in answering all these questions and curiosities I have. I feel the same way about discussing about what I've learned and want to learn with the immediate community as I would if I discussed with a 10 year old, enthusiastic about sharing my thoughts with a person who cares, but eventually unfulfilled with the one-way nature of the conversation.

As for purpose? What's my purpose now that God's gone. There is no objective purpose. I think here I am a bit guilty of a defeatist attitude. But alas, can you blame me for feeling entitled to sulk, after having been fooled for decades, only to learn that everything I've built my moral and philosophical framework upon was a lie, probably made up buy some semi-retarded guy who couldn't even make his story self consistent without contradicting himself?

I can totally relate to the lonely in a crowd feeling, I think everyone can. Guess it just comes off like you have a learned helplessness type attitude to it, where you’ve already decided that nobody can match your intellectual level and you’re looking to be proved right on that. 

And God’s gone?

Honestly, you need a good therapist 

Jada said:

What do I have against airheads? They bring the conversation down, make people around them stupid, and do senseless things that are sometimes harmful.

See, this kind of talk to me strikes me more as you saying you don't know what to talk about with people who don't share your interests. 

My point was moreso a reference to the buddhist teaching against ignorance. We could say no buddhist monk kmows how to speak with people who don't share their interests because they dislike harm caused by ignorance.

I'm not really looking.to be proved right. I've tried to explain this already, but clearly I'm not doing a very good job, because you both find it so unbelieveably unlikely that I am smart that you've decided to opt for an alternative narrative, ignoring what is put in front of you. So we're talking at cross purposes, because your picture of me, which is a false projection built based on limited consideration and knowledge of me, doesn't match my picture of myself, which is the objective reality. This buddhism thing is a good example.

Let me try to explain this in a slightly different way. I don't go into a conversations looking to be proven right, with, as you say, a defeatist attitude. I enjoy my discussions, and people love to talk with me. However, at the end of each discussion, it is objectively true that most of what I heard were thoughts I'd already explored, and if I tried to go deeper, it ended up with mostly me teaching others about the subject, donating my thoughts. I'm not going into the conversation with the sole purpose of finding novelty or being intellectually stimulated. It is simply an objective truth that I've come to realize throughout the years that I am smarter than most of everyone, and it is limiting my ability to be intellectually stimulated through other people's input. If I was not smarter, then I would be stimulated.

Regarding therapy, I've gone to therapy for 4 years. Maybe my three therapists were incompetent, but I didn't find therapy particularly helpful in this matter, because the therapists couldn't wave their magic wands and make the people around me smarter. I'm anyway veryvopen with.my thoughts IRL and I'm not needy, so I didnt feel there were many things I could only chat with my therapist about, beyond perhaps the occasional depression, which I didn't want to share with everyone. I think you're right that therapy can help with existential angst.

Like I said before, if you were capable of thinking beyond the linear explanations, which every person has already explored, and instead accepted what I've said and worked within a framework that was unfamiliar to you, expanding your horizons beyond the immediate neighborhood, then this conversation would likely turn much more fluid. Alas, most people do not appear to be capable of overcoming the wysiati bias. It takes conscious effort.

Have you two ever heard of that monkey experiment where they hold a banana at the top of a ladder inside a monkey cage with a dozen monkeys, showering all the monkeys with cold water whenever one of the dumbass monkeys climbs the ladder to get the banana? What's interesting about this experiment is that when they change the monkeys one by one over a long period of time, replacing all the original monkeys with new ones who'd never experienced the cold showers, the monkeys still beat the fuck out of every dumbass monkey trying to climb the ladder.

It do be like that except when it dont

Jada said:

My point was moreso a reference to the buddhist teaching against ignorance. We could say no buddhist monk kmows how to speak with people who don't share their interests because they dislike harm caused by ignorance.

Buddhism tries to teach that the more people "know", the less they hear, and often goes on about how the self must be abandoned to really see and hear the world around them. It's why their advanced teachings often become about the wisdom behind using less words to express more. They often see words as a distraction from the larger truth, yet see value in talking to people over the foundations of conversation itself. Even if the conversation goes nowhere on it's own merits many Buddhists would still see it as, for example, a chance to practice their skill in conversation and learn of the larger world outside of themselves (typically after trivializing it overall to make it easier to listen to). 

Essentially, a successful Buddhist monk (barring personal issues) knows how to talk with those they don't share interests with largely over being a good listener and one willing to act outside of their comfort zones. A Buddhist would likely see value in their conversations with airheads in ways you do not, as if anything, depending on the airhead, they may likely be closer to their faith's endgame over seeing less complications. Even if not they are still another person on the same journey they are, and they would be more likely to try to point out the common lines between them rather than point out what splits them apart. 

It's why some monks act like babies are geniuses: They are not held back by their own minds as they observe the larger world, learning at an astounding rate while that state of being lasts. It is a path that argues that people must empty themselves of themselves in order to take others in, not that they have to trust every person at their word. 



By comparison, you seem to want others to conform to your standards as if you figure yours are already the superior approach, then much like Spatial Mind expect them to explain it to you as if it's their responsibility to help you, rather than your responsibility to help yourself, followed by presuming they must be wrong purely over how you have yet to become convinced. Where a Buddhist would invite the variety and doubt themselves just as much as their immediate audience, you seem to want people to go through your limited filters over how self-assured you believe yourself to be on this path. 

If you were to be wrong, how would you even see it? If your ideas are by default superior, why would you even listen to other people? If you ask a Buddhist POV, you'd appear to be overcomplicating things by making it continue to turn inwards about being over yourself, rather than simply being an observer of the larger world.

In your plight over feeling like the smartest person in the room for instance you have not drawn similar comparisons out of others other than a tongue-in-cheek reference towards Einstein and God, while by comparison even within my misguided beliefs in my own intelligence I have found it easy enough to talk to others about how they share that belief far enough to begin to doubt that belief in myself.

If you feel alone over your perception of your own intelligence, I assure you you are not the only one who feels that way. Why not try to seek out those people, the others who feel alone in a room of "normies" or whatever? More often than not I see both turn away from eachother exclaiming that the other must be an idiot before returning to their life of loneliness, but how could both be correct? 

Jada said: 

I'm not really looking.to be proved right.

You are in the sense of feeling trapped in this situation. A lot of this reads as largely rhetorical to me when you're only really looking for your own answers as a self-appointed judge. It's fairly human to prefer the structure of feeling right over the rapture of feeling happy, as the former is consistent while the latter takes doubt and risk. 

It's worth remembering that convincing you does not change the world, simply your perception of it. People saying their own two cents in a way that does not match your own doesn't suddenly invalidate their experiences so much as the validity of their knowledge, as what they believe has otherwise still carried them this far. Even if it's factually wrong it could have nuggets of experience nestled within it that have something valuable to gain from the subtext alone. 

It's like how drug dealers can go on and on about being self-made and the power of motivation. They don't have to be largely right about how they lead their lives, yet within these incorrect stories there's still something worldly to gain. 

I've tried to explain this already, but clearly I'm not doing a very good job, because you both find it so unbelieveably unlikely that I am smart that you've decided to opt for an alternative narrative, ignoring what is put in front of you. So we're talking at cross purposes, because your picture of me, which is a false projection built based on limited consideration and knowledge of me, doesn't match my picture of myself, which is the objective reality. This buddhism thing is a good example.

Let me try to explain this in a slightly different way. I don't go into a conversations looking to be proven right, with, as you say, a defeatist attitude. I enjoy my discussions, and people love to talk with me. However, at the end of each discussion, it is objectively true that most of what I heard were thoughts I'd already explored, and if I tried to go deeper, it ended up with mostly me teaching others about the subject, donating my thoughts.

You don't see the nuance that comes from their personal experiences? If I tell you how to eat healthy, is it the same as if a fitness guru did it, or a sumo wrestler did it, even if it ends up being the same advice on paper? No wonder you have no appreciation for acting though, jeez. If you can't even appreciate why someone says something then you're missing like 9/10 of the human experience out of others. People aren't textbooks. 

I've heard a lot of the same stories time and time again from people, but who said it, why they said it, and the context that had the conversation come about had more to teach than just the story by itself. I can hear hundreds of people tell me about how alone they feel over how they feel as if the smartest person in the room, even from idiots sometimes, and by contrast I've seen tons of people with good listening and communication skills of varied intelligence to the point of never feeling alone in the same way as the former case. 

When stuck looking at intelligence and charisma as independent variables for example, it becomes easier to see what the "Genius" is really stumped with. If someone goes into a room presupposing the conversation will go nowhere, then the one presupposing it is often the one steering it there as per the case of being the common denominator. You even said by the end of your conversations that you're usually the one "educating them", but what I end up seeing from the explanation by contrast is someone who isn't patient enough to listen to more than the surface level details of answers to questions you believe yourself to have the answers to already. 

How often do you let others control the conversation, talking about things you've never tried? Do most of your talks tend to only be over things you already understand in advance, or do you try to talk to farmers about PH balances and junk? 

I'm not going into the conversation with the sole purpose of finding novelty or being intellectually stimulated. It is simply an objective truth that I've come to realize throughout the years that I am smarter than most of everyone, and it is limiting my ability to be intellectually stimulated through other people's input. If I was not smarter, then I would be stimulated.

Regarding therapy, I've gone to therapy for 4 years. Maybe my three therapists were incompetent, but I didn't find therapy particularly helpful in this matter, because the therapists couldn't wave their magic wands and make the people around me smarter. I'm anyway veryvopen with.my thoughts IRL and I'm not needy, so I didnt feel there were many things I could only chat with my therapist about, beyond perhaps the occasional depression, which I didn't want to share with everyone. I think you're right that therapy can help with existential angst.

You have an internet connection, there is nothing stopping you from finding other geniuses, yet you hang out among people who you can clearly define as not being your superiors. 

This to me makes it look like you prefer the company of those 'beneath you' to confirm your beliefs over your own intelligence. Why not join Mensa or something, even Chapo considered that route. 

Like I said before, if you were capable of thinking beyond the linear explanations, which every person has already explored, and instead accepted what I've said and worked within a framework that was unfamiliar to you, expanding your horizons beyond the immediate neighborhood, then this conversation would likely turn much more fluid. Alas, most people do not appear to be capable of overcoming the wysiati bias. It takes conscious effort.

What if you're the one stuck within linearity, simply seeing others who don't conform to your approach as the stubborn ones? 

What if you are what you see in others? 

Forgetting buddhism for a second and the fact that the picture of me right there is very skewed, your question is a good one: How would I know if I were wrong (about my problem not originating from within me)?

You're convolving what you've learned in psychology, which is that our view of ourselves is biased, with a lack of objective epistemological standard. This now becomes a bit meta, but I know I'm not imagining things because there's a prevalent lack of novelty in all my discussions and I have explored the alternative explanations the better part of a decade. When I host discussions among people of similar level, people tend to learn new things and exchange ideas that they've never thought of.

The obvious linear alternatives include that I cannot host meaningful discussions, I haven't made enough effort to look for engaging people, that I am too aggressive in conversation, that I am not aggressive enough, that I'm too rigid in my thinking, that I'm not rigid enough, that people aren't engaged, that I'm impatient, that I don't listen, that I take myself too seriously, that I haven't tried using tools that allow for more low-level discussions, that I shoot down ideas prematurely, that I suffer from duning kruger/hindsight bias/curse of knowledge/shared information bias, that I am too antagonistic, that I don't give people time to think, that my language is prohibiting me from accurately expressing my thoughts, that I don't convey my ideas properly, that I don't contribute enough to the conversation to set up a common domain knowledge upon which to build information, that I'm not entertaining or fluid enough, that I don't conform to other people's way of working, that I'm not connecting with concepts that I am unfamiliar with and thus consider them unimportant, and so on and so forth. Each of these presuppose that I couldn't figure it out over years of trying, and each one of your suggestions fall into this category, which is why indeed there is a prevalent lack of novelty also in this discussion, because you go for the straightforward linear explanations that everyone who would be in my position would've already explored, and then bootstrap every nuance that you pick up on and propose it as an alternative explanation; for example here you could pick up on the fact that I'm shooting down your ideas and offer as an alternative explanation to my decades-old problem that perhaps I have never tried not shooting down everyone's ideas, as though I was not self aware.

I'm not ungrateful. However, I try to first and foremost be clear. If we really wanted to get into it, there are also other standards that at least suggest that I'm intelligent, but I, like you, do not appreciate anyone gloating over their academic and intellectual achievements so let's just leave it at us both knowing what I'm talking about

So yes, like I said before, I am a part of other internet communities which are for "intellectuals" like for example slatestarcodex and I've taken the last 10 years to seek intellectual company IRL. The same problem applies also to your suggestion to consider the nuance of what a sportstar vs a nutritional expert might have to say about fasting and to consider the fact that perhaps other intellectuals aren't having the same problem (there are some examples); you're missing the point.

The whole sportstar vs nutritional expert thing you mentioned is of course true and interesting in its own right. My personal philosophy on all of this is something akin to connectivism (and part mysticism), but the point is that 95% of everything exists in our shared reality and only a small percentage of people can go beyond the immediate horizon to explore any question, and even smaller percentage exists in a reality that is less shared, because only few people truly introspect.

So while I appreciate that a sportstar have different nutritional advice from a nutritional expert, the personal nuances at best color the topic, but truly novel ideas require deep thought and introspection, and a sportstar jacked up into the wide web for the most part will not have gone significantly further beyond the horizon of the collective knowledge.

I already know the left-wing and right-wing talking points, I know what the apologists say about God, I know what the atheists have to say in return, and so on and so forth, and while I appreciate hearing the same things over and over again (with slightly different "colors" painted over a global adiabatic evolution of knowledge), I appreciate even more when I hear something fundamentally new. Yesterday, I was chatting with one of my students over lunch, and he told me something very interesting. He said that people in the past used to have more imagination, and he recommended I read the Time Machine by H. G. Wells. What I think is possible is that the collective knowledge around 100 years ago was so fundamentally different that reading some of the old sicifi book exposes us to a shared reality of knowledge that no longer exists within our society, so it "feels" novel. At least that'd be the connectivist view. But maybe we've since then also become too attuned to having all the information accessible to us, and we've put all our efforts into keeping up with the constant stream of information, being spoon-fed all sorts of garbage about how to live instead of sitting down and thinking about life ourselves, in the process forgetting the prime directive. Who knows.

To answer your question about me being unable to point towards anyone else having this problem, I believe it was J. Peterson who said something similar about leftist talking points. I don't particularly like J. Peterson or appreciate him as a person, but he did give at least some originatlity to the age-old political debate. I couldn't find the youtube video anymore; I think it was that channel 4 interview or the CG shitshow where he said it.

Jada said: 

You're convolving what you've learned in psychology, which is that our view of ourselves is biased, with a lack of objective epistemological standard.

Pretty sure that's present in more than Psychology, it's not like people only started noticing that in the 1800s. 

This now becomes a bit meta, but I know I'm not imagining things because there's a prevalent lack of novelty in all my discussions and I have explored the alternative explanations the better part of a decade.

You are the common denominator, as such I question what it is you are bringing to all of your discussions. I see plenty of novelty from every person I meet, regardless of their level of intelligence. 

When comparing you to myself, this has me question if you either: 
a) Surround yourself with very few people, or at the very least the same people you're already used to seeing rather than a steady flow of new ones. 
b) Don't really pay attention to what other people are saying, or are about, as you continue to focus on only your own ideas. 

Why do you figure that, with both of us spending years of our lives meeting people, that we'd have a contrast between us when it comes to finding novelty in other people? 

I spend more of my time thinking and introspecting, I'm more curious than you are, I'm very knowledgeable, and I have developed a more efficient mental framework for learning. Most of what I hear I've thought of already at a deeper level, so the information is not novel or impressive. If it is novel, it's more of an a-ha minute moment and then after that I'm already ahead.

Can I ask a question? What have you learned from one of the forum.members here that was entirely novel in a deeply meaningful way to you, that you could not figure out yourself, in the past 6-12 months?

I have considered at length the possibility that you are right, exploring that for nearly a decade before making up my mind. Neither a nor b fits me.

I'm still.not sure if you're getting what I'm saying, despite my effort.