[wizerno]

This is so important and underrated in life.

> "This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold."

[bloopernova]

After a divorce, I met my soulmate. We're both weird and silly together, and together we discovered that we're both people with autism.

We've stopped masking around each other, and we both support each other's growth in self understanding.

The passage quoted in the parent comment really resonated with us both. We both know we're incredibly lucky and privileged to have found each other.

[mettamage]

Same, I have approached more than a 10000 women to find her. In the grand scheme of things, fearing rejection is silly. Every time rejection was painful, never fully got over it, but the journey was fun nonetheless and in the end so worth it

[jalapenos]

Around what age did you divorce, and what age did you meet this person?

[bloopernova]

Married at 25, divorced at 35, met my new wife about 6 months later.

[seper8]

Thats quick! Lucky you :)

[bloopernova]

heh, thank you!

We actually got married on the 10th anniversary of our first date :)

We had known of each other online for a couple of years, but hadn't interacted much. She was going through a nasty divorce, so I offered some support. We'd known that we were somewhat alike just by being on the same site, so we had a baseline of common views to start from.

[jalapenos]

This is a very powerful concept, but people don't trust in it as much as they used to, because our culture has become hostile to it.

Sexual promiscuity is counter to it. This level of fine detail requires a culture of commiting to a specific individual rather than a quantifiable generic gain.

School is counter to it. It wants to shoehorn people into a specific definition of achievement.

Internet is counter to it. The internet creates a top 5% winner takes all format of personal value to others.

Government is hostile to it. If you fail to reproduce, they'll replace you more than twice over anyway with immigrants from cultures which aren't as broken.

It's unfortunate people have become so hostile to each other, almost reducing society to a me (predator) vs others (prey) situation.

[cpill]

Having lived in Germany for about 10 years (I'm Australian) I found their attitudes to most things more mature than ether Australia or what is portrayed in American media. Europeans always seem to step back, try to find a compromise and ideally mutual benefit. Asian cultures have also quite different again. I found the refreshing thing about 'Spirited Away', the animation, is the character arc for the "adversarial" characters which was they are like that because of pain, lets understand them, and then help them thought it and grow together. Whereas in American content it predominantly seems to be they are just "bad" so if they beat us just get a bigger gun and that will solve that/all problems. Always zero-sum games with shallow looks into who people are any why they are like that. Its almost like the dog-eat-dog spirit of the wild west is still prevalent somehow...? You see this played out in American politics too. No attempts at compromise or understanding, opposition must be annihilated, no middle ground.

[jalapenos]

Yep, narcissism 101, any conflict is to be remedied by increasing force on the other side until they're defeated.

[luzojeda]

>It's unfortunate people have become so hostile to each other, almost reducing society to a me (predator) vs others (prey) situation.

This stems from the same increasing winner takes all format that it is not only predating the internet but many other environments as well. Inequality is another factor in the equation. When you don't have a social net, it's a winner takes all/ everyone against everyone/last man standing situation..

It is sad. But I wonder if this is the average human, in its sedentary way of living as it has been for the last 14k years approx, situation. And what we've lived the last 60~ years was just an anomaly product of the huge and numerous industrial revolution benefits and advancements.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

You're right about the Internet. But being promiscuous and not having children is what I want for myself, at least for this year

[vinnyvichy]

[EDIT: might be relevant to AI safety

https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/strange-intelligence-strange...

> It might even, sometimes, strike us as remarkably, foolishly wrong. ]

DOUBLE THIS! From time to time, some person I've just met would either assume I have no friends, OR wildly popular. Although both untrue, I never try to correct them, though it does kinda tickle me in a weird way.

The truth is what you just said above (though it's more like a quasicommunity than a friend group -- the difference, I surmise, being that a quasicommunity still has potential for coevolution).

I'm also guessing that if you integrate the opinions of strangers, it converges towards a correct label of strangeness.

[deprecative]

The inverse seems true. I'm someone that was essentially socially isolated until college and neglected broadly the entire time. I am hyper aware of what I need to do to blend in. I hate being acknowledged or praised and I really do not like attention. Essentially, I feel zero security in myself and have no idea who "I" am.

[skummetmaelk]

Humans are very good at pretending we are more than just biological machines acting according to genetically imposed network structure refined by lifetime history of training inputs.

[keybored]

Nerds are good at pretending they understand everything by way of reductionist metaphors.

[InDubioProRubio]

I prefer mimicry of understanding attempts to defensive aggression against anything new and "threatening". One has the chance to develop into actually understanding, given time

[keybored]

I don’t even know what you are talking about.

Both of our comments are equally aggressive since I mimicked the delivery.

> to defensive aggression against anything new and "threatening".

What’s new. You can take this back to Cartesian Dualism (or further) where animals where just “machines”. Same thing: oh we have these levers that we’ve made and understand, huh I guess rabbits and storks work the same because why not?

[jalapenos]

He's above us because he could reduce human life beneath his sophisticated sentence. Maybe nerd is a type of narcissism.

[skummetmaelk]

Do you feel attacked? Nobody is above anyone. Seems like that's your defensiveness reading something between the lines which isn't implied.

[jalapenos]

Could just say "yeah what I said was nerdy" and call it a day.

[skummetmaelk]

You expect the person whom you just called an arrogant narcissist to agree with you? Good luck with that.

[satvikpendem]

They don't pretend they understand everything though, just as we do not "understand" everything about LLMs even though we know they run on electronic computer systems; some properties are simply emergent via structure, and the same properties can emerge via biological computers too, but again, to notice that fact does not mean we "pretend to understand."

[keybored]

All of the assumptions (and the metaphor) contained in that response of yours seems to contradict the statement itself.

By using “just” you’ve already asserted that there is nothing more of relative importance to figure out—it’s done, figured out.

[pjc50]

These days "just" is a huge red flag for me. It's saying "my thinking stops here, yours should too".

[satvikpendem]

Yes, by using "just," it is a thought terminating word. However, again, I do believe we have it figured out, based on how we understand the rest of the universe to be physically-based as well. It is, in my experience, human arrogance that leads us to believe that we are somehow more than physical structures. It makes people feel uneasy to believe that so they invent something to solve that cognitive dissonance.

[keybored]

The relevant comparison isn’t to people who think we are “more than physical structures”. It is to people who are a bit humbled by the complexity of the world and how when you seem to learn something new about it, ten more questions pop up. Which must be a forced attitude that some scientists have.

Contrast that with the arrogance of creating a neural network in your garage and thinking to yourself: “well I guess as a side-effect of this all of existence makes sense now.”

[llamaimperative]

Sure some people believe that, but there’s still an interesting and worthwhile path of inquiry along the lines of: “it’s remarkable how such fundamentally simple systems can generate such profoundly complex and varied structures.”

The discovery of evolution in nature, for example, could be seen (and was seen by Darwin as) an increase in the wonder and awe we can find in the world.

[paganel]

> biological computers

Using that as a metaphor is telling in itself, as we're far from being (just) "biological computers".

[satvikpendem]

> as we're far from being (just) "biological computers".

What part is? Or rather, how can you show that we are not? Note that I use "computer" in the general sense, that which computes, by taking in input and emitting output.

[walterbell]

Start with the work of Heinz von Foerster and his Biological Computer Laboratory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Computer_Laboratory

> The focus of research at BCL was systems theory and specifically the area of self-organizing systems, bionics, and bio-inspired computing; that is, analyzing, formalizing, and implementing biological processes using computers. BCL was inspired by the ideas of Warren McCulloch and the Macy Conferences, as well as many other thinkers in the field of cybernetics.

1969 zine from BCL students, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825918

2003 essay collection, "Understanding Understanding", http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/foerster-2003.pdf

  In the late 1940s a group of people had begun meeting every year in New York under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation to discuss “circular causal and feedback mechanisms” .. The group included Norbert Wiener, who had coined the term “cybernetics”; Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory; Warren McCullough, one of the leading neuropsychiatrists—he called himself an “experimental epistemologist”; Gregory Bateson, the philosopher and anthropologist; his wife Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who made Samoa famous; John von Neuman, one of the people who started the computer revolution..

[atoav]

And your 18th century equivalent would have said the same using a mechanical metaphor using gears and sprockets.

Chances are you are both equally wrong.

[skummetmaelk]

What makes you believe it is wrong? Can you construct an argument which does not require the existence of a supernatural "divine"?

If you presuppose such things exist, of course we reach different conclusions.

[atoav]

No. I just don't think using the current hot technology as a metaphor for human behavior is as smart of an idea as some think it is. In fact I think it displays the opposite of what is necessary to reach actual artificial intelligence.

[satvikpendem]

You are arguing different points. Just because we use different metaphors over time does not mean the core analogy does not hold. Mainly, systems that intake input and emit output, whether they be in the form of silicon based computers, steam powered machines, etc, seem quite similar to biological machines that also take in input and emit output. Unless you can show that there is some outside process between the intaking of input and emitting of output, physicalism is the most definite and empirically supported conclusion; when I remove part of someone's brain, I can predict with high accuracy how they will behave.

[keybored]

> You are arguing different points. Just because we use different metaphors over time does not mean the core analogy does not hold. Mainly, systems that intake input and emit output, whether they be in the form of silicon based computers, steam powered machines, etc, seem quite similar to biological machines that also take in input and emit output.

And what part of that do people like to pretend is not the case (see OP)? That we have senses and that we act on sense information?

If input-output is the only message here then it’s a boring and obvious one.

[skummetmaelk]

The terms used to describe the modern technology are derived from early neuroscience going back to the late 19th century. Our understanding of how biological neural networks operate lead to this conclusion. Not the other way around.

[atoav]

A fact which hopefully most people are aware of. I did not question that.

[piva00]

In a reductive way we're just that, the actual human part of it comes from the many loops this machine runs on to create emerging behaviour.

You could be even more reductive and just say we are chemical machines, or an agglomeration of molecules. Or that even the whole Universe is just a soup of vibrating energy. They aren't untrue but the reduction to such statements don't capture what emerges from.

[theonemind]

That's too reductionist to be an useful model. Humans are extremely complex systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system . You're describing them more like a complicated system.

[pjc50]

You could believe that, and it might even be true, but it's no way to live your life.

[satvikpendem]

One does not imply the other. Just because they say the above does not mean they actually live their life like that.

[nonrandomstring]

I'm not sure deflationary statements like this are "beliefs", rather defence mechanisms to truncate further difficult thought.

The article has some extraordinary demands; radical openness, reflective practice, co-evolution, mentalisation... all things you'd associate with high emotional intelligence and hard inner work.

Some people just aren't up to that. Maybe we need to be able to say "that's okay". Humanists need not feel threatened by reductionists any more than reductionists need feel upset there is a bigger world "outside the test-tube".

Perhaps we should focus more on why some life-stances expressed by others feel uncomfortable for us.

[satvikpendem]

Actually it's quite the opposite, I've seen people who cannot accept that they are biological machines start inventing new and novel reasons for their existence, such as beliefs and religions, even though empirically physicalism is the logical conclusion. This really has nothing to do with the article though, it could've been about any topic regarding humans and their beliefs and we would've likely still had a comment like the grandparent.

[keybored]

The discourse marker “actually” seems to signal a counter-argument, but your reply does not counter that speculation/claim; that people in the other camp—there are of course two camps, we’re good dualists after all—act with deflection using religion or whatever says nothing about what the motivations for the other camp are. They could both have twisted motivations.

Of course the downvoted comment is just speculation about people’s inner life and motivation. Just like the claim that it might

> [pain] people to admit

to your viewpoint is. Or “I really think it stems from religious biases”.

[satvikpendem]

It's not a counter argument, it is a perspective from the other position while offering evidence towards the main argument that one should examine where they are getting their beliefs from.

[skummetmaelk]

I think it is interesting that you are imposing a value judgment on the humanist spiritual belief being better than the "reductionist" one through your adjective usage. It is perfectly possible to live well and enjoy life knowing that you are fundamentally not different than any other object in nature. No higher divinity required.

[nonrandomstring]

Could we not say that if science is exploration a scientist is kinda honour-bound to investigate everything that "is the case" [0], every corner of life, and incorporate that into his/her model of whatever they're working on?

What makes life enjoyable for me is exploring it so I've not found a dichotomy between a "humanist spiritual belief" and a "reductionist one". That's a smouldering flame war that started half a millennium back between Copernicus, Galileo and the church. May I suggest a cool read is "The Two Cultures." by C. P. Snow [1]. Snow thinks, as I do, that this artificial split holds humanity back. Albert Einstein is also a great study to get into this groove.

If I am objecting to anything (not sure if I am really) it is the strident certainty with which some who have explored part of the territory declare that there is nothing more to see. That applies to either side. Maybe there's stuff that would make the material facts of physics and biology that much more wonderful and enjoyable to behold.

[0] "The world is all that is the case" - Wittgenstein

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

[satvikpendem]

Agreed, as a staunch physicalist [0]. As well, I don't think people need anyone else to grow into their own, unless they've been socially (or perhaps even physically) repressed. None of the people I know who are eccentric have really been molded that way by others per se, it was an inherent personality that came out because of precisely the opposite, they simply didn't give a shit what anyone else thought.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

[1659447091]

> it was an inherent personality that came out because of precisely the opposite, they simply didn't give a shit what anyone else thought.

A possible missing step here. While maybe true for some, many of (the few) eccentric types I know grew up bullied or ostracized in some small ways and after repeated failings to "fit in" or please others expectations said f-this and embraced themselves. It still came about from others, but in a not so pleasant way

[satvikpendem]

Hence

> unless they've been socially (or perhaps even physically) repressed

[1659447091]

I took repressed to mean a far greater extent than typical school yard bullying I meant to convey

[satvikpendem]

Repression comes in many levels. It does not mean to be psychologically beat down until one is a shell of a person (and indeed, even typical schoolyard bullying can create such an effect in certain individuals).

[hypertele-Xii]

You might have existential imposter syndrome.

[riehwvfbk]

Your illusion of higher purpose is part of the very same evolutionary loop ;)

[hypertele-Xii]

The evolutionary illusion of a loop is part of the very same higher purpose :P

[atoav]

This is why much of the advice online pundits give on how to "get a woman" is so misguided — because it usually is advice on "in which Bretzel do I need to twist myself in order to make woman like me".

The issue with that advice is, that once you found a woman that likes that Bretzel, you can't know whether she liked the Bretzel or the person behind the Bretzel. Even better if she twisted herself into a Bretzel to make you like her. Good luck with that then.

The only good relationship advice I can give is to be honest to yourself, train to listen and empathize and put yourself into situations where you get to know people in situations where they don't have to twist themselves into Bretzels

[pjc50]

> "in which Bretzel do I need to twist myself in order to make woman like me"

Much of it is even worse than that - it's oriented towards people who want to get a woman in order to impress other men. The Andrew Tate school. The woman in this is a trophy. Unsurprisingly women are wise to this and want nothing to do with it.

Once you see that, suddenly the contradiction of a womanizer who hates women makes sense.