Elessar2

Karma: 38

Elessar2 11 Nov 2025 22:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: The Onion Test for Integrity
Yeah. A more on-point and congruent 2nd level statement would be “I have several prescriptions to some opiods and am addicted to them.”

Elessar2 30 Sep 2024 16:48 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Shoshannah Tekofsky’s comment on: Runner’s High On Demand: A Story of Luck & Persistence
I guess I’ve crossed one of those plateau Rubicons several years ago and have managed to stay above it since-I too have done 1-2 hour workouts where I feel like I can just keep on doing indefinitely, tho I am well aware of the existence of The Wall (never hit it myself).
The high itself (concur with description by Shoshannah upthread) can last for many hours, tho it does slowly fade as the day goes on but never completely goes away until the next session. Note I use an elliptical, do very vigorous intervals once every 2-4 minutes depending on my mood. Typically do 2-3 hours/week but have cut back a bit having reached my target weight (170). Have also started pumping some iron too.
Thing is, I’ve managed to pull all this off at the ripe age of 62, tho I do apparently have my genetics to thank (my biological mother has several national track and field records at various ages). All my joints in excellent shape, heart in excellent shape (BP 111-71 at the doctor’s last week, resting HR 56]. I feel better than I did when I was in my 20′s.

Elessar2 28 Sep 2024 14:25 UTC
3 points
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on: Gell-Mann checks
If I am reading this entry correctly, I may beg to differ with it. It would be a sign of higher intelligence if someone IS able to be a generalist and collate and interpolate data and meaning across a wide variety of topics, but who also is able to wave the white flag of humility and admit when they are in over their head. If by contrast they are unable to do so, and just tend to forge ahead on the SS Dunning-Kruger to the Land of the Grand Fallacies of Ignorance, then yes I think I am justified to look down on their overall intellectual abilities. That they may be competent in their one narrow area of expertise may simply indicate that they have successfully absorbed the surface tenets therein (as put forth by people wiser and more knowledgeable) but without necessarily pondering them more deeply. That by itself doesn’t impress me (much).
[Newspapers are a somewhat inapt entity to focus such analysis on since we are by definition dealing with many individual minds and not just one, but even there implicit editorial and institutional biases may be at work. I’d rather focus on individuals tho.]
My fave example from my own sphere is the baseball analyst Bill James. I occasionally dropped into his own personal web site, and had always looked up to him as an impartial analyst who would bend over backward to be objective.
Imagine my total shock to see him casually dismiss some political positions of people he came across on another site as “social justice warriors”, a right-wing dog whistle term of course, which indicated that he at least has a lot of sympathy with MAGA views. I was thus instantly confused, since I’d figure a mind such as his would approach politics with the same exact objectivity and rigor that he did baseball, and thus grasping the subtleties of how out society and political systems operate that he would be the LAST pundit to use such loaded and biased language. I was wrong, obviously.
Note I had however by that point already noted some blind spots in his baseball analysis, and in fact had picked up on a subtle but telling little throwaway note in his The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract [from 2001], about my favorite pitcher of all time in point of fact, Greg Maddux. He had earlier outlined situations where a player misses playing time but still deserves credit, such as wartime seasons. However I noted that he DIDN’T include time missed due to player strikes, something rather glaring by omission.
Maddux’s two best seasons of course were the strike-shortened years 1994 and 1995; give him credit for the missed starts there and his peak in those seasons becomes one of the best ever.
He dismissed those concerns with a casual throwaway line, calling it “crying over spilled milk.” I was rather puzzled by such a lapse in his objectivity for years afterward, until I saw the SJW note, and realized that, being an extreme right-winger, he must have been HIGHLY biased against labor rights and thus the rights of workers to strike for better conditions, and allowed this bias to affect his baseball analysis. When I put 2 and 2 together I was yes rather appalled. His books lie in a box somewhere (after a couple of moves in the last 6 years) and I haven’t felt much of an urge to consult them since then, since noting these blind spots made me wonder where else his objectivity has lapsed. [In any event his work, while certainly groundbreaking, has been subsequently surpassed by others in the field.]
IOW if someone has a lapse or blind spot outside their field of expertise, it likely will feed back into their core profession or area of putative expertise as well, and you will likely spot such lapses if you dig deep enough, and in any event I think I am more than justified to judge anything they say (in or out) at least a bit more harshly, because such a lapse isn’t likely to just be a one-time thing but indicative of deeper deficiencies that will likely cut across a wide swath of knowledge in the case of the individual in question.

Elessar2 19 Sep 2024 21:06 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy
I’d go farther than zhukeepa goes, and declare that activating “unrealized afters” (higher perspectives and modes beyond mere conventional ways of existing) is potentially MUCH more transformative and powerful than releasing any childhood issues of the sort he describes. As in, ok got all the crap cleaned out of me-now what? There’s a limit to what that kind of therapy can do, IOW, as compared to the potentially limitless realms beyond the ego. In those cases, it is society itself which tries to keep them unrealized, not the ego so much. Since the perennial philosophy goes into quite of bit of detail about that, I’ll leave it there for his next entry on said subject.

Elessar2 26 Aug 2024 21:23 UTC
1 point
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on: Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims
Interesting to see this entry this week, as it dovetails very closely with a lot of conclusions I’ve come up with myself of late.

You use the term “Stockholm”, as in identifying with your oppressors, be they individuals or organizations, if not the entirety of human society. Me, I’ve used the term “institutionalized”, from the film Shawshank Redemption:

• Red: These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.

• Heywood: Sh*t. I could never get like that.

• Ernie: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.

Whether you ascribe to this happening over many incarnations, or just the one, all the duality in this world gets to be a habit, no matter how painful or dead-ended it gets. The familiarity of the suffering becomes preferable to the unknown territory of total radical transformation, and that assumes one even perceives such an out as the whole culture continues to gaslight you that such a way out doesn’t even exist in the first place.

It thus takes a VERY strong will, typically rejecting the social milieu one finds onself in and its assumptions and coercions both subtle and overt, to overcome said conditioning.

Several of the wisdom traditions make it very clear that such downward forces work on a moment-to-moment basis, and not just (putatively) before any physical rebirth. Thus physical death likewise doesn’t necessarily provide any sort of “out” as all those inimical forces in one’s psyche are still at work trying to pull one down once again (be it moment-to-moment or incarnation-to-incarnation). So one doesn’t really “go” anywhere (such as heaven or hell) other than the mental “space” one has become habutuated to.

But the “outs” (transformative perspectives) likewise are always latent, even if the dissolution of the physical form may provide the best path out of said patterns.

If I get some engagement here I can go a bit into my personal journey along the above lines.

Elessar2 6 Jun 2024 13:11 UTC
1 point
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on: Open Thread Spring 2024
Is this site just riddled with spammers anymore? Or is the way the site works just arcane or something?
I keep seeing ancient posts (usually by Eliezer himself from 2007-08) popping up on the front page. But I’ll scroll through the comments looking for the new one(s) which must have bumped it onto today’s list, but they’re nowhere to be found. Thus someone is bumping the things (if that is indeed how the site works), but if it was a spammer who got deleted before I saw the thread in question, I wouldn’t see said spam post.

Elessar2 31 May 2024 22:19 UTC
4 points
1
on: Is suffering like shit?
The above just goes to show just how abnormal true 100% contentedness is seen by this society, esp. for someone to even think that such a state would be “boring and empty”, or that the individual(s) in question are somehow repressing their pain and/or dualities.

Elessar2 6 Apr 2024 13:31 UTC
1 point
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on: The EMH Aten’t Dead
Please state the nature of the financial emergency.

Elessar2 28 Mar 2024 12:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Carl Jung is a perfect exemplar of all of that, because when he had his extended episode of such after his break with Freud, he indeed had a period where his ego was completely toast and nonfunctional, as he tells it.
BTW when I was 16, and my family and I had landed in Germany, I was suffering from a very bad case of jet lag, and in said state of utter exhaustion dreamt of Jung’s Man Eater:
https://jungcurrents.com/carl-jungs-first-dream-the-man-eater
Every basic detail was the same: the underground cavern, the sense that the thing was alive and very dangerous, the platform it was on, and most certainly the primal terror. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice tho-my family was actually eating dinner at the time (I stumbled out of bed in my extreme panic to try to find them in the hotel restaurant, ended up wearing my younger sister’s jeans which of course were too small, wrapped a towel around myself, to their amusement).
An ancient phallic fertility god, as he described it. It happened in Baden Baden, 100 years after his and about 100 miles north of where he was living in Switzerland.

Elessar2 27 Mar 2024 15:45 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
I am retired more or less, but aside from a bunch of financial loose ends that my late mother bequeated myself and my sister, no racing rats here. [Sunsets maybe, in my car] I have connected successfully with fellow wildlife volunteers and plan to start doing that again later in the spring (the key for me was birds and nature—a close encounter with a peregrine falcon got my all turned around, had 3 more subsequently, one where I could have reached out and touched it as it flew past me on a highrise balcony).
I like the “theft” angle, because in my case I know that is exactly what it was, when I was severely depressed. “Oh pity poor little old woe is me!”

Elessar2 27 Mar 2024 2:20 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion
Me, I’ve found that I connect much more readily with animals than I do with humans. I went into a local shop the other day, and one of the owner’s dogs approached me, so I let her sniff my hand. A few minutes later I was petting her head. He was utterly beside himself, said she was a rescue from an abusive owner, and NOBODY other than himself could touch her like that.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in. I’ve also found that my energies put people off, incl. women I’ve tried to date; one, a coworker who developed a weird kind of crush on me, couldn’t work with me anymore because the energies were feeding back on her and making her sick.
Tl;dr trying to engage on that level with others usually proves futile. Animals don’t have all that egotistical crap blocking their spiritual arteries I guess. It’s more fundamental than just a mere difference in beliefs or a desire to socialize, or not.

Elessar2 19 Jan 2024 1:08 UTC
5 points
1
on: Why are people unkeen to immortality that would come from technological advancements and/or AI?
Because there is a very strong possibility that the “I” that achieves this immortality won’t be the “I” that I have been in this biological package up to this point-the technology required may very well grossly distort (or even destroy or render irrelevant) my consciousness beyond all recognition or similarity, and I could end up as a slave or addict to the technological AI overmind in question as it subtly morphs my mind into a compromised mess. Even if the key to I. turns out to be biological more or less, I’ll almost certainly have to navigate the AI gauntlet in any event sooner or later. I’d rather take my chances with transcending this plane altogether for a more benign and less dualistic one.
In a less dire era of history I’d be all in favor, esp. given how healthy I am right now (age 61), esp. also given how much I’ve honed my mind to overcome as many dualities here that I can, but all bets are off from here on out.

Elessar2 14 Jan 2024 22:35 UTC
4 points
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on: What good is G-factor if you’re dumped in the woods? A field report from a camp counselor.
As I read this, I actually put myself into his shoes, as another quirky gifted kid...but MY very first impulse upon reading about the fish was that my younger self would have insisted on putting him into an aquarium, keeping him there all summer (along with whatever other critters we can find: frogs, crayfish, snails, salamanders), releasing them on the final day. Vote on names for him and his friends too. Even back then I had zero interest in any Quien Es Mas Macho status games, but bring an animal into the mix and I am there front and center.
Same planet, different universes...

Elessar2 3 Jan 2024 22:57 UTC
21 points
14
on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
Unfortunately, in a substantial segment of society if one were to apologize and admit the actual truth, his or her status in that segment would go way down, likely to zero, esp. if it goes against the prevailing mores of the group in question who would rather keep on believing the Big Lie vs. admit that it and they have been wrong.
Usually when I see such an apology, it isn’t directed at the in-group in question at all, but instead at the out-group who has been at odds with the in-group and is more receptive in principle to the said information. In that case it often has been perceived as an inauthentic, manipulative, and disingenuous attempt to garner sympathy and yes status from this new group, if not to troll them.
In other words, authentic apologies are only as good as the authenticity and honesty of the individual or audience that you are apologizing to. If they put little to no weight on such ideals your attempt at apologizing would be worse than useless.

Elessar2 10 Nov 2023 16:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Craving, suffering, and predictive processing (three characteristics series)
He spells his first name “Jeffery”, that’s likely why. The Finders is the book title.
I’ve read that book, and a fair amount dovetails well with my current existence, but quite a bit of it doesn’t. Strange that I cannot find a community of fellow Finders anywhere on da interwebz happily discussing how their lives are with each other and comparing notes and etc.-most Googling of the (correct) name and book title simply brings up a bunch of people going off about the author’s course.
Anyway, I get frustrated with a lot of Buddhist thought & discussion on the ’net, and this one is no exception (the companion entries occ. get rezzed here as well note). Nobody ever discusses what happens if you reverse the polarities, so to speak, and, instead of egoic cravings, you allow the will of the universe to flow through you. Wu wei. [we need some Taoist entries actually in point of fact]
Where does authentic creativity and selfless manifestation lie in this wasteland of viciously craving beings? It’s always ascension, all of the time, forsake forsake forsake. I feel that this singleminded focus on suffering and craving, and transcending such, just leaves a LOT out of the picture. For me (having-mostly-mastered my emotional world) it’s like reading a 3rd grade primer, when I hunger for graduate level work.
For example, if these craving beings were to TRULY experience real, unmediated, 100% pure A-grade ecstasy, they wouldn’t embrace it, they would flee in terror from it. I am well nigh convinced that the problem doesn’t like with attachment, but with fear of actual transcendence, and the cravings and such are simply side-effects of the core issue there.
It may be that the number/% of authentic Finders is much less than the number of self-proclaimed ones (and don’t take my word here either, nuke the Buddha with an RPG).

Elessar2 5 Jul 2023 23:05 UTC
2 points
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on: Optimized for Something other than Winning or: How Cricket Resists Moloch and Goodhart’s Law
American baseball went thru something like this in 1908, the Merkle Game. Fred Merkle of the Giants was on 1st when a teammate singled to apparently win the game-but Merkle never touched second. Cubs got the ball out of the madding crowd and touched 2nd for the force, nullifying the run.

Merkle was roundly reviled for his boner, but just like in the cricket game the common practice at the time was to not run to second. But this time the defense broke the unwritten rule in question and the umpire likewise enforced it.

As an idealist I appreciate the sentiment of the entry here. But we I’d say are delving a bit into game theory. The danger of these unwritten rules is that they can be broken at untimely junctures-all it takes is one bad actor and the unwritten rule is destined for the scrap heap. In a more enlightened realm we’d likely not need any rules at all (Calvinball über alles), but not here at this time in history.