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@Hyolobrika This is a really cool set of articles! just read it all.

It started out strong, and the criticism of introducing postmodernism to a mind that hasn't reached rationalism sounds a lot like my criticism of critical theory being applied (haha) uncritically. You're intentionally breaking the rules of logic in the hope of getting meaningful data, but if you aren't trained to rationally analyze the output of the tool and separate the wheat from the chaff, then you will present the unfiltered results uncritically and look like a monster.

The second article I think was really broken in that we know the press just lies, and in ways that obviously don't always rely on hypotheticals.

The final article I found very entertaining, but I'm not sure it was particularly persuasive.

That being said, it's sort of unfair to judge too harshly because we've had much better arguments present themselves since 2018. I feel a lot of the divide in the past two years better illustrates the writer's point -- On one side you have people asking "but what if the vaccines turn out not to be safe?" and on the other side you have people saying "but they said it's safe so it must be safe", and the difference between people who consider the hypothetical unintended side effects of massive policies versus the establishment's stated effects of the same policy.

Another one of the discussions in the original posted video I think was about nested conversations. If you have two named characters having a conversation about a conversation two other named characters had, that's something even a lot of people of average or slightly above average intelligence can struggle with, and it will increase in challenge as the layers of hypothetical increase. If we consider that ability to have a nested hypothetical to be another layer, then I can see looking past the presented official narrative as a similar sort of nested hypothetical. Deeper, looking at what a hypothetical response to a hypothetical response and the consequences of those responses is getting into some difficult stuff but it's absolutely doable and why the "conspiracy theories" that were simply considering responses to responses have largely turned out to be true.

@Hyolobrika @mattskala Well, if you look at it in terms of what the article is talking about, the benefit of it is basically that it represents mastery of rationalism.

There's a few steps to mastery. First you don't know the rules, then you are learning the rules, then you master the rules, then you learn how to break the rules in useful ways.

As I mentioned before, critical theory is in part essentially breaking the rules of logic. Instead of starting with the initial parts and moving towards a conclusion, you start with a conclusion and work your way backwards hoping to find a path to the initial facts. This can be useful because for example if you look at 19th century texts through a contemporary lens you can get further insights into the work and maybe into humanity. In that sense, it's sort of like the historical practice where gold companies would go back and reprocess their tailings using better technology and retrieve more gold.

Thing is, let's say that if instead of reprocessing tailings from a gold mine you repocess tailings from an iron mine. You might get something out the other side, but instead of gold you might have nothing but impurities, and then if you don't have the mastery to identify that you don't have anything but impurities, you'll parade around your impurities and claim it's gold.

@mattskala @Hyolobrika That's a really cool article! I wrote about an existential crisis that looks an awful lot like "stage 4.5" that occurred during my STEM education in my book The Graysonian Ethic. What was written is exactly what happened -- having mastered rationality, you realize that you can't apply it universally because you can't derive any universal first principles. To get out of bed in the morning is irrational.

I can't say that I transitioned into a stage 5 postmodernism because I can't say for sure what that looks like -- maybe I devolved into stage 3 pre-rationalism since the answer I came to was embracing my humanity to find first principles as an answer to the first principles problem -- but regardless it was a very interesting article given the parallels I saw.

@Hyolobrika @mattskala Ultimately, my solution was to essentially appeal to your intuition while running sanity checks to make sure the ideas were workable and internally consistent.

I remember the moment my existential crisis ended vividly. I was in class and the teacher, this little skinny stereotypical 70s nerd, was talking about hiking through the mountains in Kenya, and I was really impressed with his story. Here I was in the middle of this terrible existential crisis of nihilism and my heart was moved by this story.

It made me realize that I didn't need to appeal to some incomprehensible universal, I've got a set of values built into me that doesn't care about the earth will be bathed in atomic fire for billions of years after the solar cycle changes from hydrogen to helium.

Later on I came to realize that many of those are a gift from my ancestors, from a library written over billions of years, and it's useful and I should listen to it, but I also have to understand that not every lesson is relevant, such as social lessons for a 50 person society where we live in a world of 8 billion, or lessons on conserving and storing excess energy that saved my ancestors from starvation but isn't particularly useful in a society where I can get unlimited food at any time. You have to use your brain and your willpower to temper pure instinct and pure societal pressure. That's how you end up as the person you want to be.