brute journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: brute journal

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

@brute

“Life is fine, but nothing compared to the real thing.”

What, may I ask, is the real thing?

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

brute wouldn't know. maybe fiction or cheap thrills.

classical_Liberal
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Re: brute journal

Post by classical_Liberal »

...
Last edited by classical_Liberal on Fri Feb 05, 2021 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

daylen
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Re: brute journal

Post by daylen »

BRUTE wrote:
Sat Feb 10, 2018 2:48 am
sometimes brute has vague dreams of learning certain skills (un poco español, caralho), but then again most of them strike him as pretty useless, and it feels similar to grinding in a video game to ascend to Level 99.

this isn't to say that brute's life is picture perfect like a Hollywood movie, it's just that there doesn't seem that much to go for that brute really cares much about.

what is a brute to do who has easy money but only likes cheap thrills? brute has spent considerable amounts of his life trying to find meaning, but has given up on the idea of meaning as different from distraction. all those humans who find their life meaningful.. brute just finds them distracted. this is not bad, as the thing they're distracted from (the truth that life is meaningless) is not very important. brute couldn't care less if humans are distracted. but it does make him somewhat cynical. if brute's life were to end tomorrow, he'd be fine. pain, bad. the end? not that bad. life is fine, but nothing compared to the real thing.

at this point, brute thinks he has discovered most of his own desires and many of his personal quirks. it mostly boils down to steak, coffee, typing on keyboards, and debating pointless philosophical questions with good friends. in that regard, this discussion with Riggerjack is providing great value to brute.

If life truly were meaningless, then why do anything at all? You have motivation enough to act, therefore your life has meaning to you. These distractions have kept you alive so far, but what if these distractions do not provide you with the skills to stay alive in the future? Is the ultimate meaning just survival?

If so, living now in a way that allows your future self to exist is meaningful. Understanding the future so that the present self can adapt ahead of time will increase lifespan; to predict the future requires an understanding of the past. That should provide enough distraction (by this logic it is really an activity that contributes towards the goal of survival).

bryan
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Re: brute journal

Post by bryan »

I think @BRUTE (and others) will enjoy this: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/ ... /the-tower

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

daylen wrote:
Sat Feb 10, 2018 1:46 pm
If life truly were meaningless, then why do anything at all? You have motivation enough to act, therefore your life has meaning to you.
tbh it feels more like momentum than motivation. not doing anything at all is also a decision to make, for which brute doesn't really have a justification either.

Riggerjack
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Re: brute journal

Post by Riggerjack »

the point is that who Riggerjack wants to be "just happened" to him, just as it "just happened" to brute. trying to become something if something "just happened" seems somewhat absurd - like religiously sticking to the rules of a random board game, found on the side of the road.

there is nothing wrong with "Riggerjack does what Riggerjack does because that's what Riggerjack likes to do", but there isn't much advice in it.
I think I demonstrated in "the thread where riggerjack schools brute on free will" that I can't. I can't compete with your faith in determinism. I'm not trying. How, at the nuts and bolts level the brain works is not of much interest to me. All I need is a functional model.

brute isn't sure if it's "trying to reach the carrot" or "running on the wheel" that fulfills/distracts him, but it sure is fulfilling/distracting.

brute is fascinated by the live observation of internal, sub-conscious mechanisms. there are various mechanisms within "brute" than he can observe while they are happening, but it feels like watching an animal in a zoo react to a stimulus. besides the work carrot, another example is how the laughter of female humans makes brute happy. he knows that evolutionary biology just turned brute into a machine that wants to protect pretty human females so they can procreate, but it still works, even while brute is being cynical about it. it even works while brute is cynically commenting on it to said human female, causing her to laugh, making it work.

What I'm trying to say here is a similar dynamic applies to becoming who you want to be. It doesn't matter that you think your desire is random, or if it were assigned to you in a universe of clockwork at the big bang. What matters is the being, and the doing.

And it doesn't have to be a Quest To Fulfill Your Inner Purpose, it just has to be something that makes you feel better about you when it's done. Taking a trash bag along and picking up litter on your way to the office. Minimal effort, but for it you get a nicer commute, and you changed from a commuter to a fully functional human (one who is making the world better, intentionally) for a few minutes and a bit of effort. It's a small change, but worth the effort.

You have already done this with learning. In fact you did it so well, you probably specialized in learning. Me too. But what I found was that as I over developed my intellectual side, I left the emotional part of my brain to atrophy. I rarely feel very much, and what I do feel is often very strong, but unexpected and often only loosely associated to the situation. For instance, I have a strong emotional response to efficiency. When things are done as well as possible, I find that calming, almost comforting. When things are done inefficiently, well, let's say I lots of negative feelings get triggered by that.

So I had this situation. I took years to figure out the why's and how's of my emotional triggers. And I would go from reasonable, thoughtful, interested me to the other version in a drop of a hat. Not that I would feel frustration and snap. I would feel frustration, and try to contain it, suppress it, and shortly after, explode. This never worked out well for me. I started a lot of fights, that I then promptly lost. I'm not much of a fighter. But I learned early that emotions are dangerous and often lead to pain, so my first solution was to suppress the emotional part of me, and emphasize the intellectual. I was doing this from preschool through my 20's.

One of the nicest things about basic training is how overwhelming the experience is. Whatever your defensive mechanisms, there is a team of dedicated professional drill sergeants there to break them.

For me, who thought of emotions as weaknesses, this was where I learned to use emotions as strengths. And going through the same thing with hundreds of other guys is a great way to overcome the devastation of having all my defensive mechanisms trashed.

But it took that long, drawn out inescapable stress to break my habit of over intellectualizing and processing to remove emotional content. When I was young, I would have been eagerly reading all you have written. Now, it seems familiar. It seems like the way I thought, before. Instead of reading and agreeing, when I read your posts, I start to agree, and then a "yeah, but" kicks in. This happens all the time with your posts. Like you are describing the intricacies of the room you are in in the minute details, but never look out the window, or go through the door.

Cold, sterile intellectualism is a good thing, and having a ready place to do that, easily, is a great thing. But it's not the only thing, and if all you allow your brain to do is process, you are failing to use half your brain's capacity.

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

Riggerjack wrote:
Sun Feb 11, 2018 9:57 am
For instance, I have a strong emotional response to efficiency. When things are done as well as possible, I find that calming, almost comforting. When things are done inefficiently, well, let's say I lots of negative feelings get triggered by that.
fuck yea. when humans say they'll get right onto that, and then brute has to stand there, watching them peck at the keyboard with 2 fingers, re-reading the first 3 letters of the word, and then hunting for the backspace key to correct themselves. brute is physically in pain when humans are inefficient.
Riggerjack wrote:
Sun Feb 11, 2018 9:57 am
When I was young, I would have been eagerly reading all you have written. Now, it seems familiar. It seems like the way I thought, before. Instead of reading and agreeing, when I read your posts, I start to agree, and then a "yeah, but" kicks in. This happens all the time with your posts.
it feels similar the other way around, although the order is different. upon reading a lengthy Riggerjack exposition, brute typically thinks "well, that didn't help at all, it wasn't even related to the question". then brute sits back and thinks "but it was a nice story, and brute had a good time reading it".

maybe brute should also say that he doesn't sit around all day, wallowing in nihilistic depression. he's typically having a jolly good time. but when asked in an intellectual manner about his thoughts on meaning and why he doesn't have a dog, brute is just too happy to explain his thoughts on the matter. and apparently, these thoughts are unfalsifiable, because so far no human has ever managed to disprove brute. these thoughts also seem very common, as pretty much every other broody teenaged human boy has had them, and written them down in an angsty manifest. this is why brute doesn't publish his thoughts in a broody manifest - they might be true, but they're also not that special and they're out there and most humans either already know this or want to forget or wouldn't be better off learning these things.

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

bryan wrote:
Sat Feb 10, 2018 4:45 pm
I think @BRUTE (and others) will enjoy this: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/ ... /the-tower
uuuuh not sure what brute just read, but he liked it.

Riggerjack
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Re: brute journal

Post by Riggerjack »

maybe brute should also say that he doesn't sit around all day, wallowing in nihilistic depression. he's typically having a jolly good time.
Yeah, that was my impression. I have no issue with the nihilism, and no need to convince you that life has Meaning, or meaning.

As you pointed out, it is the realm of teenagers, finding that life is more complicated than advertised. But there is more, beyond the nihilism, that most folks find more easily than you seem to, and I'm trying to point out where that is.

Begin awkward metaphor.

But, if your brain were a car, you can't drive there. You have to get out and walk. So I'm talking to a driver, trying to give directions that are completely unrelated to cars, it's going to require some interpretation on your part.

Awkward metaphor complete.

Good luck.

bryan
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Re: brute journal

Post by bryan »

Yeah it was an entertaining read. I thought about sharing it on some other thread, but wasn't sure which one (here it made perfect sense, at least, considering your ~nihilist tendencies). @Riggerjack, if you are bored, I think you might enjoy it as well. Touches on a lot of stuff: memes, art, narcissism/neurotic, nihilism, entropy, rationality, pc culture, ruling class, media, etc.

Riggerjack
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Re: brute journal

Post by Riggerjack »

@ Bryan,

https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/ ... ikes-again

Is where I would recommend to start. Tower was, overly artistic.

I'm from the PNW, if you have heard a broadcaster's voice that lacked a local accent, that's what we sound like. Oh, we have a backwoods version, with a bit of drawl, and and extra "r" occasionally added, but regionally, not much of an accent. This makes me a bit accent deaf. When I hear someone with a strong accent, I have a hard time following what they are saying. The more time I spend with them, the more of what they are saying makes sense, until I don't have to interpret what they are saying, I just have to listen, much easier.

The linked hotel concierge blog is like that. It had interesting concepts, but was written in such a stylized way that it was hard to follow.
Art is compressed communication. The better the compression, with regards to both perceived fidelity and amount of information contained, the more artful the art. Limitation—poetic meter, scene-cut-scene, verse-chorus-verse—is the essence of every form because removing redundancies and noise, unnecessary memes, is how one creates a map. Satire is effective when via exaggeration or noun-swapping absurdism it calls attention to the underlying pattern. A twelve minute ambient or noise track may lack musical structure but conveys a precise-yet-generalizable mood to the listener; a random field recording feels less artful because it does not. A Pollock canvas may be composed through randomness and chaos, but the choice to use randomness and chaos…and so on. Life itself is walls between fluid. Beauty is objective, because we all interpret beauty by this criterion, and subjective, because experience dictates the extent to which we can unpack a given compression.
With tower, I think he was writing with too much compression to unpack if one is still adapting to his style. I didn't feel like it was clicking until section VI, and the other posts he wrote this year were much clearer. Rereading tower after getting used to his style made it much clearer.

He has a nice grasp on group interplay, and breaks down the coreography of media campaigns very clearly. I agree with his ideas, and he states them in ways much more step by step than the ways I have tried to describe it in other threads.

There's much there to learn, in patterns and models we should all have, but rarely do. I recommend everyone read some of it. But it's way too rich in pop culture for me to be a regular reader. I had to keep a Google page open to look up abbreviations and celebrities, because I have dropped that stuff off my personal radar. Younger audiences probably won't have that obstacle.

bryan
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Re: brute journal

Post by bryan »

I haven't yet gone through any other posts of THC's. It's definitely quite an abrupt writing style. I had to start over after getting about a quarter of the way through.

I'm kind of sad the PC thread was locked. Lot's of PC running amok recently (e.g. Quinn Norton).

Riggerjack
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Re: brute journal

Post by Riggerjack »

Yeah, I hate to see threads locked, too. But I can see Jacob's point. Even agree with it, eventually.

THC seems to spend a lot of energy unpacking the public relations/press release meaning from the stated content. It seems like this should be clear, but I seem to be the only one who thinks so.

Putting yourself in the shoes of whoever you are paying attention to, seems like the best way to understand what someone is saying, and not saying. I don't know why it is so rarely done. But THC does it well. Once you get past the associative writing style, he has some good stuff in there.

Though I prefer the more direct and deeper thought SSC brings to his blog.

bryan
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Re: brute journal

Post by bryan »

One gripe I have with rationalist folks (or those who read them) is the tendency towards hubris.

edit: of course I wasn't implying SSC himself (or his writing) is like that. It's more of a perceived quality of the average rationalist or those who assign a heavy weight to rationalist analysis/thought as input to their own systems?

daylen
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Re: brute journal

Post by daylen »

bryan wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:14 pm
It's more of a perceived quality of the average rationalist or those who assign a heavy weight to rationalist analysis/thought as input to their own systems?
What do mean their own systems?

Also, doesn't it make sense that rationality is coupled with confidence? The validity of an analytical statement is more easily determined than that of an emotional one; this naturally leads to more confidence in the validity of analytical statements as opposed to emotional statements.

Perhaps your gripe with rationalists stems from your preference for not wanting to evaluate the logic of others?

bryan
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Re: brute journal

Post by bryan »

> What do mean their own systems?

In simple terms, their preferences, biases, heuristics, decision/thought making systems etc.

> doesn't it make sense that rationality is coupled with confidence

Sure, if just limiting the confidence to the appropriate scope. I mean more the tendency to have increased confidence in 1) various conclusions given the statement is just one variable and 2) the aforementioned preferences, biases...

Just because you can be quite confident in one specific thing doesn't mean you now know how it all fits together or how things ought to be. I have a soft-spot for (and respect) the chaos.

> Perhaps your gripe..

No, I'm quite a rationalist myself. My gripe (err, one of them) is laid out plainly, I think. I like to inspect the state of being/mind, logic, incentives of others.

I admit I may myself be guilty of some attribution error, even if I tried to point that out ("or those who read them"). I do believe it (just as a I believe medical doctors have more of a god complex than most), for now, though.

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

brute has yet to see a self-proclaimed rationalist be more right than the average. or as convincing as the average.

BRUTE
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Re: brute journal

Post by BRUTE »

5.3 years of expenses

daylen
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Re: brute journal

Post by daylen »

What makes a statement more right or convincing from your perspective? Also, what is the "average" and how do you determine that?

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