I’ll stop here then, but allow me a final attempt at explaining the potential problem. If you realize the legitimacy and pros and cons of every viewpoint, it may be difficult to create or believe in your own viewpoint. The “inside-out” perspective becomes inaccessible, one is stuck in the outside-in, detached, analytical, impersonal birds-eye view. This likely makes it hard to hate others or even get angry at them. It can also make it difficult to be assertive, as every viewpoint cancels out. Everyone is right from their perspective. One becomes a mere observer. And a therapist or doctor-like relationship to another person allows for quick intimacy, but it’s not personal nor equal. A programmer and a player will experience videogames differently, the latter having a much more magical experience precisely because they lack knowledge. It’s this magic that a lot of rationalists rob from themselves through knowledge, and it applies to relationships as well.
These problem led me to change my approach. One of the changes being intentionally lowering my own self-awareness, letting system 2 do as it pleases despite its irrationality. If you’ve managed to avoid these problems and/or you live a happy life, there’s likely no issues! It’s important for me to share these insights though, as they don’t seem to exist anywhere else in the world.
Posts like yours are gold, and contain a lot of obscure/rare knowledge, so you have my full appreciation! For now I will act on my knowledge rather than collecting more of it, but I will be reading your future posts
That’s a funny coincidence! I came up with the concept independently. I will share a few thoughts here, as I don’t yet have a substack account. If I make one, I will definitely subscribe to you :)
If we generalize the problem of asking “who am i?”, perhaps we can conclude that assertions are valuable. Not discovery and doubt, but creation and affirmation.
Outside-in perspectives aren’t inherently bad, what’s bad is increasing the scale too much. Feel free to include your friends or perhaps family. But if you zoom out to the entire nation, or the entire universe, and you lose yourself. Even your friend and familities are reduced to nothingness. I wouldn’t go beyond Dunbar’s number (~150 people) myself. The more things you compare, the smaller the overlap between them. Regression to the mean means that, as you zoom further out, you destroy the particularities/uniqueness of every individual (and their values, etc). At least that’s my intuition
I’ll stop here then, but allow me a final attempt at explaining the potential problem.
If you realize the legitimacy and pros and cons of every viewpoint, it may be difficult to create or believe in your own viewpoint. The “inside-out” perspective becomes inaccessible, one is stuck in the outside-in, detached, analytical, impersonal birds-eye view.
This likely makes it hard to hate others or even get angry at them. It can also make it difficult to be assertive, as every viewpoint cancels out. Everyone is right from their perspective. One becomes a mere observer.
And a therapist or doctor-like relationship to another person allows for quick intimacy, but it’s not personal nor equal. A programmer and a player will experience videogames differently, the latter having a much more magical experience precisely because they lack knowledge. It’s this magic that a lot of rationalists rob from themselves through knowledge, and it applies to relationships as well.
These problem led me to change my approach. One of the changes being intentionally lowering my own self-awareness, letting system 2 do as it pleases despite its irrationality.
If you’ve managed to avoid these problems and/or you live a happy life, there’s likely no issues!
It’s important for me to share these insights though, as they don’t seem to exist anywhere else in the world.
Posts like yours are gold, and contain a lot of obscure/rare knowledge, so you have my full appreciation! For now I will act on my knowledge rather than collecting more of it, but I will be reading your future posts
I get where you’re coming from and appreciate you “rounding off” rather than branching out :)
I wrote a post on “inside-out identity”, here: https://honestliving.substack.com/p/inside-out-identity
Also, I only post some of my writing on lesswrong, so if you’re interested, I can recommend subscribing to my substack :)
That’s a funny coincidence! I came up with the concept independently. I will share a few thoughts here, as I don’t yet have a substack account. If I make one, I will definitely subscribe to you :)
If we generalize the problem of asking “who am i?”, perhaps we can conclude that assertions are valuable. Not discovery and doubt, but creation and affirmation.
Outside-in perspectives aren’t inherently bad, what’s bad is increasing the scale too much. Feel free to include your friends or perhaps family. But if you zoom out to the entire nation, or the entire universe, and you lose yourself. Even your friend and familities are reduced to nothingness. I wouldn’t go beyond Dunbar’s number (~150 people) myself. The more things you compare, the smaller the overlap between them. Regression to the mean means that, as you zoom further out, you destroy the particularities/uniqueness of every individual (and their values, etc). At least that’s my intuition