Dunning Kruger, Trusting Experts, and How I Killed My Lizard
Pulling all my “diary” posts off Minor Dissent. Here is the first. Please pardon any email spam. There are about 20 of these.
Original publish date 6/5/21.
I killed my lizard. I am a loser. I want to appear smart and successful. I hide my flaws. I don’t publish anything because I try to write what I think other people will read rather than what I want to write.
Only 10% of me is edgy reactionary philosophy. Another 10% of me is self improvement/business crap. Another 10% is crypto/technology/finance. 50% of me is neurotic self awareness idea machine. Theres more. It doesn’t matter.
I am incoherent. Always have been. It allows me to know a lot about a lot of things and be on the forefront of multiple domains. But I communicate nothing. Partly (mainly?) because no one cares about all the things I’m interested in so weeding through the 90% they don’t care about just isnt worth it (or at least that’s my assumption).
I am better than I used to be. I used to hide 90% of my internal world. Now at least 50% of it is expressed, though compartmentalized.
I want to be coherent. I admire coherence. I believe that if I could communicate effectively that I could contribute positively to many domains. But I do not know how to organize it.
What happens if I just post whatever I want here? I assume it will have a similar effect as twitter has. A cathartic release that allows me to feel I’ve “checked that box off” that zaps all motivation for further distillation of the idea into “high quality” poasts.
If I write like this will I never write anything useful again? Will I destroy my credibility with people who are not neurotic and crazy?
I had a goal to post one post a week regardless of how shitty it is. I set it two weeks ago and haven’t published because my lizard got sick. I made a dumb mount stupid mistake trying to help him and he actually is recovering from the initial sickness but now he will most likely die from something I caused.
I feel embarrassed for having a lizard. Well I don’t really care—I like lizards—but I fear it will reduce my credibility for making it known. Im supposed to be a cool edgey smart and dangerous Curtis Yarvin who is even more nuanced and also redpilled about wahmen. In my head I’m just a little boy trying to be useful.
I spent five years in therapy. 90%+ of my correctable defects have been corrected. What’s left is just the way I am. I generally like me. But I cannot figure out how to be useful. I bought Bitcoin at $100 and now I might never have to work again. But I’m still not useful.
I don’t respect neuroticism. I hate people who complain and play victim or even are weak. I do respect courage. There is a demon in my head who I am battling valiantly. Is that courageous? I respect what Egg Report dude has been writing. And far more so than if he were not neurotic. I read all his poasts in one day. I am only writing this because it seems to be working for him. “Wait that works? That’s actually useful to people? Fuck I could do that!”
I guess I feel a little superior that we had the same personal/familial problems and I solved mine. But he clearly has solved the fitness problem much better, and probably several more I do not know about. I like him and think he’s useful and he’s probably not much better than me so maybe I can be useful.
Neurotic think bois are trying our best. Get up every day and try again.
I killed my lizard. What does this say about me? Certainly that I still do not have enough humility. I have always had a tenuous relationship with humility. I always believed it was the correct way to behave but in my head I always thought I was smarter than everyone.
I despised those who expressed cockiness and self assurance but I also envied their inability to know and/or care how they came off. I tried to be cocky self assured guy for a year or two and it didn’t work. I lost credibility with a lot of people and it affected me. Self assurance cannot be “faked until make-d”. I mean it can but not as much as one would think. At least not for me, who is not the captain of this vessel but instead the crew. But the captain is a force of nature? Perhaps I am a captain of a vessel but the sea is trapped in here with me.
I create all these systems and stability in my life not because I like it but because my ship is getting tossed around in the storm of my mind. It works reasonably well. My relationships are great. My health is decent. My finances are solved.
But I am still useless.
I only consume information. And that which I naturally produce is too incoherent to be useful. I have ten unpublished post for every published post. I could probably increase my output by an order of magnitude if writing like this was allowed. I literally have twenty five journals full of writing like this.
I used to have a substack for Actualization Hub but then I converted to a website and did the same with Minor Dissent cause I thought I was going to write high quality distilled ideas for the normies there and for the naughty boys here.
It is a huge chore. I really don’t enjoy it. It feels like work, distilled coherent ideas.
Maybe I am fooling myself. Maybe I am still trying to be something I’m not.
I’d just start an email list through squarespace but it’s like $15 a month. I hated moving everything off of substack. Maybe I will just publish in both places and if anyone cares I will just ask them to also click the link so that gets traffic or something.
I am ashamed that I want to matter. Perhaps if my skills were in something less pretentious I would feel less ashamed. It is reasonable to want to matter. And I guess it is only those who want to matter at pretentious things like “being a philosopher” that end up becoming one.
I guess I don’t care if no one cares. I mean it will be embarrassing but what’s new? I still feel ashamed for mistakes I made ten years ago.
I will communicate what is happening in my mind. And I will do it confidently and with acceptance of my nature. If I hide, I will never matter anyway. So I might as well not matter with pride and dignity, and be the Daniel Johnston of philosophy except without the happy ending of getting a cool documentary and people caring later.
What else does killing my lizard say about me? That I still have the wrong priorities about money. I procrastinated taking him to the vet because I didn’t want to spend the money. I over estimated how much it would cost. I also should have thought it through more sooner. “If I knew he would die if I didn’t take him and would survive if I did, would I?” I didn’t ask this until after he was more likely to die than live.
Part of it was just that I didn’t know enough to know the danger level. I learned just enough to make it worse and then was already out of energy to get on the other side of dunning kruger on the next bit. This is a common problem for me. It’s never killed anyone before though so I never realized it. I guess it almost killed my dog once.
My threshold for deferring to experts is the issue. I have basically written off all experts since I was fifteen. My life was a disaster and I hated who I was and what was going on. I concluded that no one in positions of authority around me knew anything.
After I tried to kill myself I became afraid of death but didn’t have a path so I just did nothing. Played a lot of vidya. Then I fell in love with a girl even more fucked up than me. After five years she dumped me because I became very beta (didn’t realize this until years later). But at that point it became “kill myself or figure out how everything works so my life can function”. I chose the latter. Now, almost ten years later, I know enough to out perform the experts 95% of the time, at least in regards to things relevant to my life.
The problem is that it’s a huge amount of work. I procrastinate and avoid solving many problems because I don’t trust deferring to others but also don’t have the energy to spend fifty hours figuring it out.
I’ve never been so harmed by taking action during Mount Stupid phase before. I guess I’ve never had such high stakes.
I still wouldn’t trust a doctor about my health. But animals are simpler. And the sense making apparatus around their care is nowhere near as corrupted by power. I could easily trust them.
Same goes for like a plumber. I think. There is a gradient. But a vet definitely gets an A on “worth deferring to an expert rather than figuring it out myself”.
I’ve always been hyper frugal. Fix everything myself or don’t get it fixed. This allows me to retire at thirty. But now I think I need to develop the skill of delegation.
My cousin died a few weeks ago. I was never close to him. But he is the only person I know that has died who I have any memories of.
Having someone close to you die is a rite of passage to life. A shift in consciousness. It’s like moving out or getting your first job. You just have a giant gaping hole in your understanding of reality until you experience it.
Most people have this very young. I did not have it until now. I have another lizard that died when I was twenty three but it wasn’t my fault. He also had nine lives and almost died a lot. For some reason it felt different than this one. I didn’t question my life like I am with this one.
In a lot of ways, the death of my cousin and my current lizard are compounding on each other to create one “normal” experience of death. A human in your family dying. My lizard, Bok, was much more of family that my real family. I could go on about why this can be reasonable and healthy but I don’t care right now.
I need a better model for when and when not to delegate to experts. I need to write my thoughts rather than what I think other people would respect. I need to process the (almost certain to happen this week) death of my friend who has been with me for over a decade. I need to make a sub stack and publish this there. And then do many more.
That is all for now.