More on Trusting Experts, Political Activism, and Why Everyone Is Miserable
So, per my last post, my lizard is sick and will probably die. I care but more so I just want to know the answer. The uncertainty of what the future holds—of whether I can be happy that he pulled through and appreciate him more than I have in years or sad that I wake up one day to find him stiff and cold and should like cry and mourn the memories of him and give him a proper send off and shit—is more of what is plaguing me.
This is not unusual and is generally the cause of any anxiety for me: I can tolerate just about anything as long as it feels like there is no alternative. It is the possibility that an alternative could happen and, further, that I can figure it out if I just think hard enough and the inability to make progress due to this uncertainty that is the problem.
What I have learned to do is simply to map out all possible scenarios and have a procedure for all possible scenarios and then emotionally prepare for the worst one.
This is a modified form of Fear Setting. It works for the overwhelming majority of things in my life. I feel resistant in this situation however. I can accept his death, but then what’s the point of going through all this work to give him all these medications and do all this shit to keep him alive? I can delude myself into believing that he will pull through but then will I ignore signs that he’s getting worse and/or give up on finding some alternative solution that might save him?
As is typical, I deal with this by feeling anxious, ruminating, and trying to cognitively find some “aha” moment that will cause a breakthrough solution. As well as endlessly researching to better understand the underlying mechanisms so as to increase the chances of that aha moment (in this case, the underlying mechanisms of infection, reptile husbandry, etc).
I felt relief for a moment when I thought something like “There is nothing you can do other than exactly what you are doing of giving him the medications every 12 hours. Everything in between is just wasted energy.” and I realized that I think this is how most people think and why deferring to experts is the standard.
If I trusted that what I have been instructed to do was exactly and only what I needed to focus on, this would go from something that I am spinning my mind at 100% capacity at hours of the day on to something that occupies half my mind for only about an hour a day (while I am performing the prescribed actions).
They said nothing about how often I should clean the cage to balance the humidity with any additional bacterial growth. They didn’t tell me anything specific about how I should clean the bath and the bath water that I soak him in to keep him hydrated. Did they not say this because it’s not important? Did they not say this because they didn’t think I’m retarded? Did they not say this because they are retarded? Etc.
So I spend hours worrying about or researching and cleaning these things, in ways that could be totally fruitless (or could even make the problem worse, as the chemicals I am using the clean things could easily harm him).
On the other hand most people just don’t even wonder about what they may have missed. Is this an intelligence thing? A neuroticism thing? A autodidactic capability thing (ie even smart neurotic people just may not be as skilled at becoming proficient at pretty much anything via Google so just assume the answer is unknowable?). Probably a combo. Plus just my general lack of trust in experts due to all the experts in my life failing me when I was younger. And probably a few other things.
Regardless of the reason, they just trust the experts. If you asked them, they’d probably say “sure the experts occasionally get it wrong, but they will get it right infinitely more than I will.”
And when the experts get it wrong they either just believe “that’s life” “you can’t know everything” “it was inevitable and nothing could be done” or they just get to blame the expert.
Like the people who “hate God” or spend years hating or suing the doctor that “killed” their loved one with “their incompetence”.
That certainly would feel a lot better. If Nothing was my fault. But I certainly would have no self respect if I took no responsibility for my life. But most people seem to have no problem with this.
This is what seems to drives most activism and grievance politics. There are the masters (politicians, billionaires, etc) and there are the good worker bee peasant slaves (most people). The good worker bee peasant slaves do what they’re told and they follow the rules and they trust the system and they expect the masters to take care of them. Some of them for whatever reason grow to distrust a specific set of masters (likely related to one or more masters in their personal life having abused the privilege as master), but they never distrust the idea of masters themselves. Even the one who explicity claim “No Gods! No Masters!” just believe in the distributed master of The progressive Cathedral. They just want their masters to reform their behavior or for new masters who are good to replace the old ones.1
The idea of becoming their own master either never crosses their mind or simply sounds so insane that they wouldn’t even know how to start doing it. So, they become activists of some kind, complaining in some public forum about how these masters have wronged not only them but you too and you should join them in nagging at the masters to reform.2
I understand why people choose this mental prison. It is much easier. If you are not at least 120 IQ it’s probably impossible to be your own master. The world is just too complicated. If you reject the “good enough” system and venture off into the unknown you’re more likely to end up just in some new confirmation bias ideology that is retarded and worse than the dominant one (most conspiracy people, Qanoners, most of the alt right, etc).
Maybe if I was smarter this would be easier. Or maybe if I wasn’t such a perfectionist. I’m not really sure what it is that allows some postmodern rationalists (or whatever it is that we are doing here) to just tolerate the overwhelming complexity of the truth but I certainly don’t have whatever it is.
Anyway, this again comes back to priorities—and deeper—mission. What you aim at determines what you see. Overwhelming complexity is made simple by a goal. What is my purpose? What good am I? What is the unique thing I am supposed to do? Not until this is clear can one then determine how to prioritize one’s cognitive energy and shut out the 99% of the unnecessary data. Deferring to experts for things that just aren’t that important or which experts will do a more than adequate job is often more effective than trying to do 5% better than them but at the expense of 100x the cognitive effort for most things. Applying this selectively to the correct things, determined by one’s life objective—rather than applying either “trusting experts” or “distrusting experts” universally—is the most effective strategy. But it is impossible without a goal. Find your goal. Remind yourself of it.
It is impossible to build a larger scale structure than gets it right 95% of the time. Just look at statistics on malpractice suits. Angry, overly intelligent eboys who feel “screwed by the system” or are smart enough to occasionally outperform the experts but who have never actually tried to build anything don’t understand this. It is infinitely easier to state the result that you want than it is to build a system that will provide that result. And even if you can figure out how to build the system that gets the result that you want, there is a 99% chance it will create some kind of externality that is equally bad if not worse than the problem you were trying to solve.
This is the story of pretty much every political solution ever implemented. A bunch of resentful idiots at the peak of Mount stupid were absolutely certain they had a very simple solution to an unbelievably complex problem and because we are all idiots who oversimplify things and because all the people capable of being reasonably nuanced about are it too busy ruminating in uncertainty and reading books alone in their houses to say anything, the resentful slave-mindset grugs get control of everything and implement retarded solutions that only make things worse.
Confidence and conviction move things forward. Nuance only makes things less likely to go backwards.
Well, it’s a balance. You need to be uncertain enough to pivot but certain enough to take action. What the correct balance is depends on the person and the situation and the structure and it’s always changing.
Anyway, the slave mindset is pretty effective most of the time. At least 80% of the time. Nice comfy life in the suburbs, watching cable news, mowing your lawn, buying your wife roses or whatever it is that normies do.
The 20% for whom it doesn’t work go waste their lives as some kind of activist begging daddy to be nicer to them. He never is but they couldn’t care less because it gives them meaning to fight and that’s all we really care about anyway. Feeling like a victim, that you have no responsibility, and that you are owed is a great drug. And it is a highly effective at gaining influence and thus power if you have high enough conviction coupled with a reasonably compelling surface level case (as almost no one will look below that).
Everyone who isn’t a psychopath has sympathy for the weak and down trodden. The primary barriers to receiving massive sympathy and power via victimhood are only internal (ie your own self-respect, your own values against lying, hyperbolizing, and taking advantage). If this can be overcome, then it’s all smooth sailing from there (at least until you get caught).
But are people really actually happy? I don’t know anyone whose life isn’t a mess. Either they are dumb normies whose life sucks, but they are, intentionally or not, oblivious to it, or they are smart people who have actually pretty good lives and are useful and healthy with pretty good relationships and finances but the only reason they have this is because they find existence itself rather contemptible so just worked really hard to make their lives to the point of “tolerable”.
Even Elon Musk says shit like “you wouldn’t want to be me”.
Is everyone miserable and just pretending like they aren’t? Everyone is certainly at least twice as miserable as they let on to anyone but even their closest friends.
Why are we like this? It obviously serves some selective advantage. Does it still have selective advantage, or is it vestigial in the 21st century? Craving carbohydrates and having no cap on how much we crave had selective advantage too for 99.9% of our history. And now it’s arguably the single most harmful behavior in the human species. Could our desire to “look like we have it together” and speak superficially be in a similar (obviously must less severe but possibly more severe than we’d think) situation? Or is it just for me?
I don’t remember where I was going with this so that’s all for now.
During editing I realized this is a spectrum rather than a binary or ternary. Even I have my “masters”, they are just far more distributed into principles and theories. The deeper down the spectrum the more work and the more cognitive capability necessary, but the reward is more predictive validity.
There is a deeper insight in here that can be extrapolated by pseudo-factor analyzing this observation against that of nagging wives (some might call them naggers) and how this passive complaint mentality relates to trait agreeableness but I am not going to go off on this tangent right now.