Sociopath Community

Jada said: 

I think we agree for the most part.

I don't in spite of your continued insistence, but that's fine too. 

Would the test of time increase your confidence if you weren't just doing the same thing? Of course it would. It doesn't mean absolute certainty, but you'd in the vague sense be more confident than before that you were right.

All it'd do is prove a personal consistency, not a broader truth. The biggest yield would be me being trained through the repetition itself more than anything else, an ease with repeating what I'd said already as if I'd rehearsed it or something. 

Consistency is convenient but is bound to not yield the bigger picture, and other people show reason to lean towards different conveniences than those I might use. 

This confidence you speak of is basically just streamlining, playing on heuristics people often tell themselves is enough after enough times repeating the habit. 

And moreover the bit where you say traveling literally the whole world asking everyone if you're arrogant and every person on Earth says no, does not mean you can be MORE CONFIDENT (note: not certain just more certain)  than before that you're not arrogant, that I don't get.

Before questioning their room for accuracy even, you already aren't factoring for their resistance against giving straight answers to a complete stranger. 

Past a point, how polite people are becomes like The Emperor's New Clothes if you have not otherwise built a bridge towards more frank and honest discussion. 

What if it were the other way around, you travelled the world and every person said you were arrogant as fuck, are you more or less confident that you are arrogant after your world journey than before it?. Really not getting the logic here. 

If a ton of people accused me of that without me even bringing up the prompt, then something about me is eliciting that response out of the majority of people. I would presume that the accusation came from somewhere if it kept following me around, especially if that persisted throughout multiple cultures. 

It takes a lot more out of someone to say something potentially rude, rather than enable how they already want to think for short sighted conveniences of their own. 

Or is the problem here the sliding scale and where we can draw the line of certainty? If so, the examples were more to demonstrate that from individual facts you can tell if they support or not support your world view, so that's missing the point. You should combine allthe evidence to form your opinions, and no single fact is going to be sufficient to "be certain" in the absolute or even the relative sense.

There'd need to be some system of measurement, and even with that you'll find room for debate similar to that of measuring a pain scale people can use to compare and contrast an experience. 

I can however take this one step further and expand on that arrogance thing by saying you do 100 other different tests, colldct tests from other people, such that you're testing not just within your little reality bubble but the collective reality of everyone on the globe, and use those tests too, and let's for the sake of the argument say they all came back negative. Should you still believe you're arrogant? Or should you not believe it but still continue to test your beliefs?

How are the tests structured? 

There are some tests out there that try to operate on a blind system, asking seemingly unrelated questions to gauge relatively based on others who answered similarly. 

What do you mean how are the tests structured? I don't get it.

Interesting what you said about the arrogance thing. The reason I asked if everyone telling you that you are arrogant hints towards you actually being arrogant is because it necessarily means that you agree with me also on the negation of it. There's a mathematically rigorous proof for that.

If you think that everyone saying that you're arrogant could mean that you are arrogant, it necessarily means that them not saying that gives credence to the negation of it. You agreeing to the positive, which supports your argument, necessarily means that you also agree to the negative, which supports my argument.

Suppose for the sake of an argument a teleporting chicken in your bedroom.

Either the chicken exists or doesn't exist. If it exists, there's a 10% chance that when you open up your bedroom door the chicken will be there, and a 90% chance that it's teleported away to hawaii.

You agree that if you observe the chicken when you open the bedroom then it exists with 100% probability.

Then, you open the door, and the chicken doesn't show up, and I say, see, now we can be more confident that the teleporting chicken doesn't exist, while you insist that the teleporting chicken may just be enjoying their vacation at hawaii, so how do I know. And I say, well, there's no way to tell for sure that the teleporting chicken exists, but we can say with confidence that since we didn't see the teleporting chicken we can be more vonfident than before that the chicken doesnt exist because we both agree that observing the chicken would mean it exists.

Then I say, well, how about we go and look for it in Hawaii, and we still dont see the teleporting chicken, I say again, see, now we can be more confident that the teleporting chicken doesn't exist, and then you say nono, there's a 5% chance only that the teleporting chicken is in hawaii so we're still not sure, because the chicken could also be in Florida.

So we go to Florida, and you say nono, greenland, Switzerlands, etc. So we set up a global internet forum, CNN, and Fox News calling for a search for the teleporting chicken.

And then you make the hypothesis unfalsifiable such that it does exist but we cannot ever know because of our limited space technology.. Then it can be dismissed outright because the a priori likelihood of any unfalsifiable claim is vanishingly small such that the hypothesis loses out to all other testable claims.

You may then replace the test with asking everyone if you're arrogant, 10% probability represents the chance that people are honest enough to tell you (honestly asking everyone for 10 years is probably closer to 99% but let's go with 10% anyway), and the news channels refer to the global consensus. You can change the 10, 100, 99, 5 percent numbers and nothing changes except the relative confidence levels. So even if observing the chicken meant a low level of confidence that it exists it wouldn't change much.

By making a truth claim about something we're necessarily saying also something about its negation.

Jada said: 

What do you mean how are the tests structured? I don't get it.

A test can be anything, it'd need to be a good test. 

If it could be any test then I could just ask you to look at ink blots as an indicator, or use how long you can hop on one foot to judge it, or any other unrelated and baseless setups that aren't really going to go anywhere. 

The testing itself matters. 

Interesting what you said about the arrogance thing. The reason I asked if everyone telling you that you are arrogant hints towards you actually being arrogant is because it necessarily means that you agree with me also on the negation of it. There's a mathematically rigorous proof for that.

If you think that everyone saying that you're arrogant could mean that you are arrogant, it necessarily means that them not saying that gives credence to the negation of it. You agreeing to the positive, which supports your argument, necessarily means that you also agree to the negative, which supports my argument.

My point was moreover how people through other context, such as modesty, will typically not give a straight answer over something like that which would skew the results. Judging people is presumed to be imposing on them in most normal situations, opting for people to find ways to squeeze out of it. As such, the social environment of the people within the bounds of this experiment are already tainted when it comes to gathering intel, which is why many in the field of psych try to find ways of asking deceptively. 

It's another story meanwhile if you ask a stranger how they feel about their parasocial relationships, like how people feel about celebrities or internet streamers. This lets them judge a stranger without feeling watched over it, but through that disconnect there'll be all sorts of projection issues and other problems to work through as well. 

As a more socially understood comparison, it's like when a girl with her gal pals begins complaining about how fat and ugly she feels. In most situations it is the modest thing to do to confirm that, regardless of their appearance, that they are wrong for the sake of giving that minor boost to their self-esteem. By comparison this group of gals could without shame or guilt find it easy to tear into celebrities they've seen on TV or Twitch or whatever. 

Suppose for the sake of an argument a teleporting chicken in your bedroom.

Either the chicken exists or doesn't exist. If it exists, there's a 10% chance that when you open up your bedroom door the chicken will be there, and a 90% chance that it's teleported away to hawaii.

You agree that if you observe the chicken when you open the bedroom then it exists with 100% probability.

Why would I agree to that? That's asking me to suspend more disbelief than over the existence of the teleporting chicken itself. 

Then, you open the door, and the chicken doesn't show up, and I say, see, now we can be more confident that the teleporting chicken doesn't exist, while you insist that the teleporting chicken may just be enjoying their vacation at hawaii, so how do I know. And I say, well, there's no way to tell for sure that the teleporting chicken exists, but we can say with confidence that since we didn't see the teleporting chicken we can be more vonfident than before that the chicken doesnt exist because we both agree that observing the chicken would mean it exists.

Then I say, well, how about we go and look for it in Hawaii, and we still dont see the teleporting chicken, I say again, see, now we can be more confident that the teleporting chicken doesn't exist, and then you say nono, there's a 5% chance only that the teleporting chicken is in hawaii so we're still not sure, because the chicken could also be in Florida.

How would I even be assigning this metric to the probability of a teleporting chicken? What even gave me the impression that the teleporting chicken was there in the first place? What if the mystical chicken is merely invisible, or well hidden? 

You're treating this teleporting chicken like a binary problem while skipping over a lot of important details. If this chicken is a Wizard for example, then why am I only expecting teleportation? Have I had a conversation with the chicken before over it's superpowers? Could this be some sort of David Blaine shit someone's doing to try to mess with me that involves puppets and mirrors? 

You may then replace the test with asking everyone if you're arrogant, 10% probability represents the chance that people are honest enough to tell you (honestly asking everyone for 10 years is probably closer to 99% but let's go with 10% anyway), and the news channels refer to the global consensus.

The arrogance question pulls at entirely different context though, and has past precedent and even explanations in other fields as to how this outcome trajectory could skew the results. It's less that it would tell me if I am arrogant or not, but rather that anyone doing this test will find complications with accuracy. It's too open ended and not rigorous enough to prove the point. 

It'd be like trying to measure a person's pain tolerance by word of mouth rather than through observing something measurable, like adrenaline/blood pressure spikes or something. 

By comparison the teleporting chicken has no prior basis to work from. 

Maybe I didnt express myself clearly enough but my last post already answers your questions, namely (a) what if it's not 100% and you dont agree to the probability, or (b) what if the chicken is invisible and thus its existence is unfalsifiable. I predicted the linear response so I added that last paragraph, but wanted to keep the example simple. The same argument applies to your alterations of it.

Honestly I feel like you're not really trying to think. You're instead selecting something you at face value disagree with and fire a blank there without regard to framing that thing in the context of this.conversation, yourself, everything you know and understand, incorporating it in your.mental framework and subjevtive reality and evaluating its validity there, and indeed without thinking about it, to see if something interesting happens in response, which is evident in how little connection with your reality or thoughts or personality your post has, cause thinking costs you energy. Your posts lack depth and mental clarity. Just assume I know 1,000 times.more than you currently assume, you dont need to be so accommodating, I can handle much more than this and I honestly think you could too if you tried to think harder.

So let me reiterate my teleporting chicken argument against your pure constructivist view devoid of objective reality and regard for logical positivism.

If you didnt agree that observing the chicken renders its existence 100% probable, it would still necessarily mean that you are more confident the chicken doesnt exist because if it didnt exist you're more confident it (or.something like it) doesnt show up than vice versa. If the chicken was invisible then its existence would be unfalsifiable and the probability of any unfalsifiable claim being true is vanishingly small compared to any falsifiable claim. So neither of these objections change anything except relative likelihoods and thus .or are they a defeater to the argument.

The argument is also not changed by priors, only the relative likelihoods are. The argument is universal as long as you agree that observing the chocken incresses your confidence.

In summary, if you agree that everyone telling you that you're arrogant increases your confidence that you actually are arrogant, you necessarily also agree that nobody telling you that you are arrogant invreases your confidence that you are not arrogant. When you say that people could be nice and thus they are being biased you're not questioning the validity of that statement you're merely asking: "by how much?"

By how much our confidence is increased. Perhaps not by much, like not observing thr chicken in your bedroom didnt raise your confidence much, you need to do different nature of tests to be sure. However, once you've exhausted the checklist, the chances that you're wrong is honestly nil at that point, even if therr are a few tests that suck balls as you say.

This is where pure constructivism fails, because no matter what, we do have a way to bootstrap ourselves into an objective reality even when our own reality is subjective.

However, you dont have enough background to engage with the argument, which is sort of where I feel this disconnect with people who can't converse at the level I want to converse. I can now spend a lot of time on something that to me feels like elementary calculus, and donate my thoughts further starting from the fundamentals in a one sided fashion (which is what I usually do), or I could skip to another topic so we don't need to be stuck here in what feels like a pervasive lack of thought. (Or maybe I need to start posting voice clips)

I'd opt for the latter, because your question regarding how to device tests is a good one and honestly more interesting. I already got something interesting to think about with your media thing prompt, which was the first thing I hadnt thought of  so thank you for that.

So here's the response to your second question.

I appreciate and of course know psychological bias and how when devicing psychological experiments we need to "fool" people into thinking that they're doing a different test, in order not to have the test be affected by our own input. As I said, I've spent time thinking about this, which is why I'd like us to go a bit more into depth instead of dealing with these linear suggestions that most people will have thought of. I even apply the principle in my everyday interactions. The unfortunate thing is that I can already predict what you will say about the following explanations through linear extrapolation, which is why perhaps I should stop being so rigorous in my thought and instead just wing it and smoke weed and accept, like I originally suggested, that you don￠t care about logic or being wrong or about your discussions being limited to surface level stuff.. But alas I keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, but it's alll an argument from utility rather than being an epistemologically motivated stance. That's why we all believe in God, too, don't we? I honestly think you can do better.

Let me expand; there are in general at least three ways to account for bias: minimization, informed debiasing, and averaging the bias.

The first one is to, as you say, minimize bias. Then when you look at the results you can go, see, here's the result, tada, boom.

The second way to do it is to (1) account for the bias or to (2) be conservative about it. So in your example, even if the large majority of people  were being polite, then if you understand roughly how the bias works you can weight the results of those who said you're an arrogant piece of @!*# by a larger factor so you debias the results. Or you could go with a conservative estimate; if literally the ENTIRE WORLD says you're not arrogant, then let's face it that's extraordinary even for some of the least arrogant people on Earth. So I'd personally put my money on a person, who's told that by literally the entire Earth that they are not arrogant, on not being arrogant, irrespective of any biases.

However, sometimes you don't even know if your test is biased, so neither minimizing nor debiasing works, although oftentimes being conservative works.

Thus, the third way is to average over many different uncorrelated measurements to roughly average out the bias. That's devicing different types of tests and trying out all of them, which was among one of my suggestions. That way, you reduce the effect of the bias by the root of the number of experiments, assuming equal weight to every experiment, and a bit less in reality because the biases are never entirely uncorrelated, but the correlation itself in the broader sense is not strongly metacorrelated, astonishingly; you need to be incredibly unlucky for those tests to be all metacorrelated. The funny thing is that this works the same way for social sciences as it does science experiments, and it works EVEN if you don't know if your tests are biased. Personally, I find that amazing.

In reality, you should employ everything.

So yes, all in all, my.original suggestion is valid even in the context of constructivism. I had considered all of this in the two days of the decade when I've had this problem, so we're still just scratching the surface. How the above applies to God is the start of another set of existential issues..

And yes, I can mostly predict what you will say next, so let me instead ask a question that I don't know the answer to:

I appreciate the discussion and that you're enthusiastic and willing to engage, so dont take this the wrong way. However, I also feel a pervasive lack of thought, quality, and novelty in this discussion, and not on my part, particularly when it comes to jumping into something in depth, not necessarily the broader discussion.

So my question is: as one of the two interlocuters, would you say this is because of something wrong with me or just because I'm smart? If it's something wrong with me, then what is it? Why do you think I could predict so well what you were going to say? You do have unique insight into my problem here now, and I'm being genuine in my question, instead of asking it in tongue-in-cheek style.  I want to know.

Jada said: 

I appreciate the discussion and that you're enthusiastic and willing to engage, so dont take this the wrong way. However, I also feel a pervasive lack of thought, quality, and novelty in this discussion, and not on my part, particularly when it comes to jumping into something in depth, not necessarily the broader discussion.

It's your responsibility to help yourself rather than mine to help you, and how you use your time is your own prerogative. If this is boring you then by all means, I'm not otherwise trying to keep you here. 

Unless this is some sort of 'last word' struggle you're finding yourself in as the true culprit of why this discussion is continuing. 

So my question is: as one of the two interlocuters, would you say this is because of something wrong with me or just because I'm smart?

The point of the discussion was moreso the journey, and if you're still sitting there thinking it's for the same reason then my thoughts on it likely won't change that. 

If it's something wrong with me, then what is it? Why do you think I could predict so well what you were going to say?

You set the constraints for the conversation to become about teleporting chickens, and otherwise demonstrated discomfort over the ground we were formerly treading. Rather than push over what you were avoiding, I decided to follow your train instead. If you don't want to talk about these things then that's you demonstrating that you aren't ready to. 

Do you see how being in control of the conversation is what robs it of it's room for novelty? By comparison I feel like I got something out of this by being the secondary role in the conversation, because instead of focusing on myself I tried to let it be about you. 

You do have unique insight into my problem here now, and I'm being genuine in my question, instead of asking it in tongue-in-cheek style.  I want to know.

If you wanted to know, this discussion probably would have gone differently. 

More likely you want your belief confirmed as a second opinion. 

I didn't say the conversation was boring, dont take it he wrong way, I said it lacked novelty and thought. I know it takes effort and time to engage in the themes and interests of other people and to help them out, so I'm grateful for that, and I'll remember it in the future.

So what was I avoiding? Mensa? Some issues within me? I was going to go with your fantasy thing but then you said you care about objective facts, hence the epistenology rant. But let's pretend I'm wrong about the whole objectivity thing and see where this goes.

I've stated I don't like Mensa as a matter of principle. But let's say my mensa score was 80. In your world view what should I do? What's the root cause of my struggles? Arrogance? I could see how you would misconstrue that I'm arrogant, given that I'm claiming I'm smarter than everyone. However, it's moreso a statement of facts than something I'm proud of. You dont even need to think I'm smart, just that I think more, if that makes it easier to "swallow". The amount of thinking has nothing to do with Mensa, so it's kinda irrelevant, and we all know where discussions with dares go, like they did with Chapo. It'll turn into pure entertainment for the customers, which, while on another day I'd be willing to engage in, I'm not looking for right now.

You're still missing the broader picture. You suggested that the pervasive lack of thought in my discussions was caused by me dominating the discussion, but you landed us here for the most part. What happened was that I explored your example, not my example, in depth, but then realized we would need to.go at a pace more suitable for you because you hadnt thought about the issue nearly as much as I had. This does go into what I had mentioned about you taking one part that you dislike, that i am self aware of already, and propose it as an explanation. My own thinking is that we could've gone with any of the other topics you'd suggested and it would've still landed us here, with me being capable of going into depth in your own arguments and us needing to.slow down, even if you were in the driver's seat. I k.ow it sounds arrogant and a bit defeatist, but it's what I think, so let's not filter thoughts for a second here. I know it also casts a shadow on the next reply, so normally I wouldnt say it, but Id be sacrificing thought in favor of niceties.

But let's go with the proposal anyway. What should I do to cater to other people to make conversations more exciting? Let's say clean sleet and I haven't tried for a decade.

 Birth, sickness, old age and death according to the Buddha. Good that you are able to recognize this. Now do something virtuous and tame your mind. Also Google terror Management theory. 

Jada said: 

I just woke up to the fact that I've already lived most of the good portion of my life where I'm healthy and happy. I think this is the first time I've grasped how long my lifetime is.

Fuuuuuuck. Better start my bucket list.

Terror Management Theory. Sounds like a fun rabbithole, I'm in. I think it's anyway connected to TC's constructivist theory of media that I need to think about some more.

Do you believe in that theory, Friedrich? How much do you reckon it's reading too much into one interpretation among many and coming up with ways to explain things after the fact?

What the wikipage said about self preservation and the realisation of our own mortality hit me hard.

Jada said: 

So what was I avoiding?

With how often you kept changing the focus of the discussion, almost all of what was being said. The stubborn refusal to perspective-take is also slowing a lot of things down, as has the "I think we agree" portions you'd use to try to talk about something else. What you're referring to as "having to slow down" is an impatience with your audience, and through going too fast and presuming to know where it's going in advance you're ignoring large portions of the message. While this can work in a classroom setting it doesn't tend to translate quite as well outside of it.

It reminds me of struggles I've otherwise seen from people in the ADD and ADHD ranges, or from people taking speed, and it's easy for me to presume this "arrogance" you keep referring to is likely a result of being amped. At the extreme end the thoughts can end up so quick and fleeting that they're already moving on mid-sentence, and can even feel this impatience demonstrate struggles with their ability to enjoy other things like music and film, finding the beginnings of them over how slow it is physically painful to try to sit through and adjust to the speed of. 

I've seen people on Adderall behave strangely similarly, struggling to slow themselves down enough to have an actual discussion in lieu of filling the air with their own words. Listening to people requires slowing your own mind down, and by contrast a racing one often struggles to shut out their own thoughts... to the point of vocalizing them for their own benefit similar to other displays of forgetfulness that people can find themselves plagued with. Having to both listen to their own brain yammering on at the same time as other things can prove overstimulating for these cases. 

TLDR; You're avoiding the other people in the discussion followed with a myriad of excuses to stick to yourself instead, and I think the culprit might be the brain's speed. 

But let's say my mensa score was 80. In your world view what should I do? What's the root cause of my struggles? Arrogance? I could see how you would misconstrue that I'm arrogant, given that I'm claiming I'm smarter than everyone.

See this right here gives me the impression that you weren't really reading my posts, but rather skimmed and presumed to know the entire thing from seeing familiar words. 

My point is moreover that your intelligence is an independent variable from the struggle you've been discussing here. Through other intelligent people managing to avoid the problem, and through others over various areas (such a strength and aesthetics) at differing levels of ability (ranging from retarded to gifted) sharing this impression over different criteria, demonstrates to me that the problem is not about Intelligence in the first place. 

If both idiots and geniuses can share or avoid this struggle in a similar way, doesn't that make it not a struggle over Intelligence, but rather a problem in another area? 

I'm again inclined to think this could be the symptoms of a racing mind, which can be of any intelligence. Your own words becoming ramped into a state you find embarrassing enough to apologize, insist isn't you, and log off from in the past also supports the mind being faster than your self-constraint. 

However, it's moreso a statement of facts than something I'm proud of. You dont even need to think I'm smart, just that I think more, if that makes it easier to "swallow". The amount of thinking has nothing to do with Mensa, so it's kinda irrelevant, and we all know where discussions with dares go, like they did with Chapo. It'll turn into pure entertainment for the customers, which, while on another day I'd be willing to engage in, I'm not looking for right now. 

Basically it'd paint one of two scenarios. Either: 

a) You fail to make it into Mensa, and therefor have room for your supposed genius to be questioned (ignoring that you have already excused yourself in advance over potential failure just like Chapo did). 

b) You succeed at making it into Mensa, and can now mingle with other geniuses. If the problem goes away, then perhaps it was about intelligence? If the problem remains, it'd be an opening for further exploration over what might actually be going on. 


Either way, you've found yourself in a rut within your current explanation, which for me is when I'd explore other possibilities when it comes to myself at least. Much like how presumptions of Conspiracy tend to show more about the one believing it, so too tends to be the case for when someone presumes something about "everyone" or "everyone else" (with room to note that "exceptions exist" rather than have those cases challenge their view). 

Typically if someone wants to change there has to be a clash present in their thinking, a contradiction of two co-existing thoughts. If there's no problems then they tend to just let it habituate undisturbed and unquestioned. 

You're still missing the broader picture. You suggested that the pervasive lack of thought in my discussions was caused by me dominating the discussion, but you landed us here for the most part.

This to me appears as you aiming to externalize the blame, as you aren't even denying that you were dominating the discussion. 

It's like when you went on about airheads. 

What happened was that I explored your example, not my example, in depth

Did we? I mostly saw you saying "no" a bunch of times and then trying to change the focus of the discussion through a variety of means. 

, but then realized we would need to.go at a pace more suitable for you because you hadnt thought about the issue nearly as much as I had.

"Empty Your Cup" applies here.

How can you gain anything if you presume to already presume to know everything about the discussion in advance? 

But let's go with the proposal anyway. What should I do to cater to other people to make conversations more exciting? Let's say clean sleet and I haven't tried for a decade.

I've already explained it. 

If you want novelty, you'll need to let yourself allow it to be about the other person. If you're to be believed, then people are learning from you while you feel you aren't gaining anything over how you keep trying to control the conversation. 

How often do you let others be in charge of what you're doing that day? Is how slow they are a thing that renders that somewhere between difficult and impossible, like as if you're running on a motor while they're stuck on foot?