SelfAdoration.com

Building on the idea of the number line of morality discussed in Chapter 7 of Man Alive, this video from September of 2012 takes up the idea of ripping off the band-aid — getting pain out of the way quickly — and why this cannot occur as long as you insist to yourself that you have not acted to your own self-destruction.

We end up talking about cognitive dissonance — attempting to “should” the nature of reality with elaborate lies — and why this not only must fail, but why that failure is itself still further self-destruction.

Your mind works the way it works regardless of the lies you attempt to tell yourself, and, therefore, the appropriate thing to do is to respond accordingly, in consonance with your true, objective nature.

An audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

The subject of muscle memory came up yesterday on Facebook, just in passing. It’s one of those fascinating topics that drives reductionist scientists crazy, since they can’t figure out how to duplicate it with Legos. Fascinating to me, too, albeit for different reasons:

Actually, what’s most interesting to me about habituated phenomena are people who don’t trust them. This is why some Cautious temperaments are such awful drivers, because they can’t stop the fearful micromanagement that makes what I call the empathy for the machine impossible. If you can tell someone how you surf – you can’t surf.

I live this all the time on the guitar. I don’t play well, I am the first to declare, but to the extent I can play at all, I do it by means I could never micromanage directly. I just play, often with my eyes closed, and the sounds I make are a conspiracy between my over-arching intentions and the ‘memory’ in my hands of how to get the job done.

I wrote about this phenomenon, a species of what I call the empathy for the machine in Nine empathies.

I like to say that every work of the mind is poetry first, and I’ve always lived that way. I’ve never swept a floor without dancing and I’ve never done any sort of drudge work for long without breaking into song. Code can be poetry, but poetry is code – me leading you by words and emphatic gestures to my preferred future. Accordingly, if I can’t say something memorably, mellifluously, I will juggle words in my mind until I can. My wife is enthralled by the middle-brow art of musical comedy, so to tease her with the trickster’s (more…)

I’ve been organizing this year’s work into quarters, just to keep track of how I’m doing. I don’t know if this makes any difference, but keeping the inventory is impressive – to me at least.

And my third quarter turned out to be a pretty big deal. I wrote two new books, both of them based on new and deeper understandings of the idea of the self I’ve been playing with for the past 35 years. Nine empathies illuminates the biological basis of empathy in self-preservation strategies, and Shyly’s delight demonstrates how those strategies play out iteratively in human social relationships.

Both of those books owe to my thinking on the astoundingly destructive Stefan Molyneux cult-of-personality, about which I wrote a ton along with making several videos. The net result is that I finished the third quarter with a grand unifying theory of human social interaction. This is impressive to no one but me, so far, but that’s the way things always work around here.

At the beginning of the year, I made a video explicating my plan to build The Church of Splendor. I’ve not moved beyond making videos, so far, but I’ve made a bunch of them, preaching ‘religiously’ every Sunday. I know someday many more people will be interested in what I have to say, but I know, too, that someday my faculties will fade. I’ve been on my very best game for the past three years, and I am pressing as hard as I can to get said what I know while I am best able to make my case.

My video output for the quarter consists of ten new hours of Splendor, typically accompanied by my (more…)

Me: “They cannot jail everyone. They depend on you to jail yourself.”

More: “An affectionate relationship will get better over time, and an aggressive relationship will always get worse.”

Much more, from The Church of Splendor last Sunday: A discussion of affectionate versus aggressive social strategies, illuminating why the affectionate approach works so much better.

The modern university is dominated by Marxism. This is not a controversial statement, but if you insist on disputing it, I’d appreciate it you would wait until all the college Fresh Meats come home for Thanksgiving. Once they have had a chance to tell you how evil you are for pissing away five figures a year on their indoctrination, you’ll have a fuller understanding of the actual objectives of the professoriate.

Even so, it doesn’t do to assume that every academic is a Fifth Columnist. Most of them are simply rent-seekers, doing copiously-documented busy-work in exchange for a paycheck.

That’s worth remembering every time you run across a breathlessly-reported retelling of the results of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary, multi-million-dollar “study” of mindless minutiae. The reported conclusions might be obvious to any five-year-old child, but at least that particular team of plodding mediocrities did not have to go out and find productive work to do. Thanks to the miracle of tax-payer funded “research,” pedantic geeks who are inept at everything except taking notes get lifelong sinecures at the boundlessly beneficent university welfare trough.

Here is an example I saw cited today on Facebook: Are We Drawn To Music That Includes Reproductive Messages? I cannot imagine how many advanced degrees you have to accumulate in order to pretend not to know that the purpose of popular music is to induce sex — not reproduction, mind you, just sex — but you can be assured that no one would spend his own money “studying” something this obvious:

A total of 174 songs were included, and the lyrics of each song were coded by two independent raters to determine the extent to which they revealed “reproductive messages” (e.g., references to genitalia, hook-ups, long-term relationships, money, etc.). Results indicated that fully 92% of the songs contained at least one such message.

That’s 92% — not 91%, not 93%. A mistake about a matter this momentous could result in someone getting screwed — someone other than the tax-payers, that is.

In Man Alive I cited three very common types of breathless “news” reports on academic “studies:”

As a sort of pocket-reference to the kinds of (more…)

One of the reasons I do most of my talking in sites I control is that I get thrown out of every other joint eventually. My take is that I get tossed for winning too thoroughly, but your mileage may vary.

In any case, I took apart an only-I-am-smart-enough-to-live-so-we’re-all-doomed! argument lately, and my reward was yet another unpersoning — with the usual full helping of cowardly silence. I saved nothing of what I had said except for this, alas:

The essence of these kinds of despairing laments is that there is some ontological difference between the humble-bragging champion of ennui and other people. This is false to fact.

There is nothing you can know that other human beings cannot learn. The obvious proof is that virtually everything any one of us knows was discovered by other people, and each of us was lucky enough to master those hard-won discoveries in Fathertongue, in man-made notation systems.

If other people make choices you don’t like, that’s their business. If you want for them to learn what you know, in the hope that they will choose differently going forward, what are you doing to share your putatively better knowledge?

If the answer is nothing, you may have found the reason for your despair. But the sky will not fall, no matter how cloudy your mood.

Organisms seek to thrive. Us, too. People can be fooled, but no one wants to be fooled. In the end, the truth will out. It always does.

If you do not intend to shove yourself into a gas chamber, if you want to live your life, I recommend you read Man Alive repeatedly until you see for yourself why evangelizing egoism to everyone you know is the best means you have of changing the world now, while there is still time.

Or: You can stick your fingers in your ears and make believe your problems are someone else’s fault. My fault, perhaps, for holding you accountable to your humanity. Feel free to shun me if that helps.

Either way, everybody’s gotta take a side…

If people lie and cheat for casual and largely pointless reasons much of the time, and if, in consequence, the social sciences are mostly bunk — the assiduous tabulation of deceptive testimony — what might be the implications for the hard sciences? More bunk, of course. Selection bias, confirmation bias and plain old lying and cheating are rife in the “peer-reviewed” scientific establishment, with the result that a claim of “settled science” should provoke unsettling doubts in thoughtful minds:

In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. In fact, even when numerous variables were controlled for—Jennions knew, for instance, that the same author might publish several critical papers, which could distort his analysis—there was still a significant decrease in the validity of the hypothesis, often within a year of publication. Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”

What happened? Leigh Simmons, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, suggested one explanation when he told me about his initial enthusiasm for the theory: “I was really excited by fluctuating asymmetry. The early studies made the effect look very robust.” He decided to conduct a few experiments of his own, investigating symmetry in male horned beetles. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the effect,” he said. “But the worst part was that when I submitted these (more…)

Here’s a fun article from LewRockwell.com: The Disappearance of the Fat Libertarian. The gist: Libertarians (broadly defined) have been strongly influenced by “paleo” web sites like Richard Nikoley’s FreeTheAnimal.com, with the result that folks who once lived on a diet of Doritos and Jolt Cola are now slimmer, trimmer and healthier than they have ever been.

But, but, but — Free will is an illusion! If you’re born to be fat, you can’t do anything about it!

This is false, of course. The human mind is free to pursue better outcomes — among those outcomes that are actually subject to change. A favorite dodge of the exponents of the ruling class is to conflate things you cannot change with those you can, thus to convince you that you are a helpless pawn in a game far beyond your control.

If you submit to this nonsense, and many people do, your life will get worse and worse. And if you rebel against this evil game thoughtlessly, without thinking about what you actually can change and how to go about achieving that change, you risk the added misery of failing at something you know in your heart-of-hearts that you should be able to do.

What is necessary, as always, is to correctly identify your true nature as a human being. What we are is everything we are. You can’t control your height, but you can control your weight. Arguing to the contrary — either way — will induce cognitive dissonance in your mind, and trying to shout that dissonance down will be a constant (more…)

This is the introduction to Shyly’s delight: Work, play and love like a Labrador, which is brand new at Amazon.com today:

Introduction: Why aren’t you dancing?

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle

Do you like self-help books? I don’t, to say the truth. They’re all full of bullshit promises. Here’s the thing, though: This one delivers.

No fake, no fail. Your life, just the way you pictured it – a loving, passionate marriage, a happy, successful family, a fulfilling home and work life – everything you’ve ever dreamed of. And when you die at last, you will die at peace, leaving your world a better place for your having lived.

You can have all that, everything the laws of physics will allow. You can’t change the cards you were dealt, but you can play those cards to their fullest attainable value, reaping everything from life that can be had by commitment, attitude and effort.

How do I know you can do all that?

Because I watched my Labrador mutt, Shyly, do all that and more with her life.

Am I seriously offering you life training as taught to me by a dog? I am. And you’d be wise to heed it, too. Shyly didn’t build a business or perform surgery or even write a poem. But she lived delighted and she died delighted and she never lost one minute of her life to sorrow or guilt or shame or regret. If you want to learn to live a delighted life, you’ll learn it best by studying under a master like Shyly.

Here’s what she’ll teach you: (more…)

From Chapter 7 of Man Alive, “A calculus of morality on a first-grade number line.”

Spirit your mind back to your first-grade classroom. Can you see that number line tacked up above the blackboard? In the middle is the number zero – one of the most important inventions in mathematics, incidentally. To the right are the positive integers – 1, 2, 3 – up to 10 or 25 or 100. To the left are the negative integers – and take a moment to salute the incomparable genius of subjunctivity who first thought to count things that are not in evidence to be counted. Your teacher used that number line to demonstrate to you, by moving his hand to the right or to the left, that 3 + 5 = 8 or 9 – 11 = –2. In other classrooms in other times or places, teachers might have used stones or sticks or an abacus, but the essence of the demonstration, whatever form it took, was that arithmetic is an ontologically-consonant notation system: The map is not the territory, but the map is demonstrably correspondent to the territory. That sort of demonstrable one-to-one correspondence is present in every practically-useful Fathertongue notation system, obviously, and absent from all the useless ones. This is what it means for an idea to be ontologically-consonant.

It seems plausible to me that enumeration – counting things – was the birth of Fathertongue in the mind of the proto-human who passed the idea of notation systems down to us. Real estate is all about location, location, location, and the locations that would have been most valuable to starving ex-brachiators stranded on the savannah would have been those spots on that veldt that were home to the greatest number of things worth eating and the fewest ferocious predators. That’s the kind of multi-variable problem we solve today using game theory and linear programming, but the father of Fathertongue – and each one of the failed fathers of (more…)

A few people have mentioned Sam Harris to me, but, until lately, I haven’t paid him any mind. Harris is one of a half-dozen or so currently-publishing pop-sci writers who inflate absurd academic claims all out of proportion and then sell them as intellectual cotton-candy to thoughtless people — who in their turn like to affect to pretend to make-believe that not-actually-reading EZ-reading non-fiction books makes them intellectuals. This is not a new scam, but the plummeting profits in book publishing — along with the ease of promulgating scathing debunkings of this nonsense (about which more below) — promise to make it an obsolete con-game in very short order.

But I happened upon a link to an essay by Harris called The Fireplace Delusion at Billy Beck’s place, and I clicked through to see if there was any there there.

There is not.

Most of the article is devoted to endlessly masticating the obvious fact that wood smoke is toxic. If this is news to you, it could only be because you don’t read the news. But Harris treats it as a huge, world-shaking revelation that requires paragraph after paragraph of completely redundant defenses.

His actual point is to claim that, because the mindless people he dines with refuse to accept obvious facts of nature that don’t conform to their thoughtless prejudices — buttressed in many cases, I am sure, by completely useless graduate degrees — that this is in some way analogous to the reluctance of some religious people to conform their supernatural claims to the laws of nature.

Your first thought, on reading that summary, might be to argue that Harris is committing the fallacy of the specious analogy, since the two categories of error are so different. But I would go one further and say that (more…)

A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”

My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”

“Huh?”

“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”

I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.

You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”

You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”

You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But you would be no less honest to say, “I just might win.”

The statements you make about yourself might seem to you to be statements of fact at the time you are making them. But whatever truth there might be in those expressions right now, you are also writing the script for your future. Saying “I’ll probably lose” is functionally equivalent to saying “I’ll never win.” If you don’t mean to say that you can never, ever get anything right, (more…)

From Chapter 10 of Man Alive, “A mindful catalog of mindlessness.’

I told you how you came to be a self, but how did you go about failing so completely, so consistently, to be a defective, bungled and botched not-self? You worked at it, that’s how.

It really is a testament to your fundamental goodness that you have tried so hard, for all of your life, to conform to ideas of moral virtue that no one can live down to fully and yet still manage to remain alive as a human being. You were thoughtless – mindless – and so you did not know that the cause of your repeated failures at attaining those “virtues” was human nature itself. But you were damned if you didn’t try to be what you sincerely thought was “good,” and that much is all to your credit. You may have behaved mindlessly, but you gave your mindless pursuit of ethical perversion everything you had.

But how did anyone gull you into behaving so thoughtlessly so scrupulously and so relentlessly for so long?

Here’s one good way: Inclusion and exclusion. It worked great when you were five years old and it still works great today. Obviously, no one can indoctrinate you before you master Fathertongue. Before then, words are semaphores to you, ciphers, with no more conceptual content than the (more…)