A redpill is traditionally defined as an uncomfortable, suppressed truth.

This is wrong. The test of a belief is not whether it is known, but whether it is applied.

II.

One of the most foundational experiences for youths is to lose faith in an authority: a child who distances themselves from a parent, a policeman who questions the limits of the law, or a Christian who has premarital sex and realises… it feels good. Although this is not a trivial experience, there is a greater than that, something that almost never happens to people before they turn 18.

That great experience? Being somebody with expert-level knowledge in a domain, and seeing how often authorities misinterpret information or even get basic facts wrong, yet seem to be completely confident in what they say and do.

For me specifically, I was disillusioned by the way the media treated the subject of intelligence research. Whether that was invoking the sociologist’s fallacy, always asssuming Flynn Effect gains imply changes to intelligence (this is still debatable imo), and the lack of empirical support for many of the ideas they promoted — like the one that high IQ people are more likely to be mentally unstable1.

This eventually evolves into Gell-Mann amnesia: what people experience when they know somebody is wrong about a subject they are an expert in, but continue to trust what they say when they cannot evaluate the truth of their statements.

Some people respond with resignation. “I might be able to see authorities making bold claims about subjects they know nothing about, but why should I think I can be better than them?”. Not an easy question to respond to; it’s easy to find fault in others, hard to try to be an exception.

Rebellious youth typically drift or realign. They might forget who they are, and the existential doubts they felt stop feeling relevant with time. Or, they reject one authority structure and accept another: a boy who rejects liberal values and embraces traditionalism is only a rebel before he joins the traditionalists, even if he still feels like one.

The higher disillusionment I speak of is different. With time, they should realise there is nowhere else to go to. This is especially true for those who go down the epistemic doubt rabbithole. At first they might start to doubt religion and maybe morality too. After interrogating all higher values, the last thing left standing, the truth, starts to become a little suspicious.

II.

‘Redpill’ has stuck. It works. ‘Woke’ used to mean the same thing, before it started to be used as a prejorative. The Matrix came up with the phrase, but the idea itself is ancient: as old as Plato’s cave, an allegory Plato used to distinguish between what the world is and appears to be. Inside this cave, an audience watch men cast shadows on the wall, believing that to be all there is to life, until they leave and find the real things: birds, trees, and pots.

Plato used this metaphor to argue that the world we experience with our senses is a mere appearance; the true reality is contained in abstract forms, which last forever and never change. An individual chair might move, rot, or break; the idea stays the same.

From my experience, the opposite is the case. The abstractions and categories we use to describe the world are imperfect proxies for what it actually is; the map can never be the territory, so to say. Many philosophical debates2: free will vs determinism, whether race is socially constructed, or whether evolution is ‘just a theory’ are downstream of where we set the definitional limits — what it means for an action to be caused by free will, what a social construction is, and what the various meanings of the word ‘theory’ are.

V.

Somebody already tried asking the r/slatestarcodex subreddit for what redpills they have encountered in their life. I had claude tally the responses:

1. Genetics trumps effort and upbringing (12).

2. There is no objective meaning or morality to life (6).

3. Institutions and social behaviour run on hidden functions, not the stated ones (6).

4. Status influences outcomes more than merit or morality (5).

5. Life is not meritocratic (4).

6. Dating is cruder than people admit (3).

7. Animal and human ethics aren’t that different (3).

8. Direct exposure to hardship changes empathy (3).

9. There are no adults in the room, nobody has it figured out (1).

These comments generated the most upvotes:

1. Health can fail no matter how well you take care of yourself3 (251 up).

2. Dying in a modern hospital is a bad death (102 up).

3. Liberal values are not universal, even in liberal societies (81 up).

Regardless of what one might think of redditors, or Scott Alexander’s readers, I think these are pretty decent answers.

The first thing I took away from the thread: the difficulty of believing something is highly subjective. Most of the answers the rationalists gave are non-agentic, answers that accept the absence of an option, rather than they existence of one. I’d argue that for the average person, it is harder to accept that a lot of the outcomes in their lives are determined by their own behaviour: their income, family relationships, romantic satisfaction, and health.

People differ in their locuses of control: some people more readily blame external events for their troubles than themselves; other people do the opposite. The tendency in psychology seems to be to tacitly assume that the right thing to do is to blame yourself; perhaps that is not the case. Maybe people should just believe in causes and effects, regardless of whether they are external or internal, and act accordingly.

What’s funny is that, in a weird way, I still agree with the voters: that it is more difficult to go from believing that your agency is boundless to bounded than the reverse. What is a redpill at the population level, might not be one at the path level.

Imagine a gay man who wants to blame his breakup on his ex-boyfriend4, when they themselves were actually the problem: they will find many therapists, friends, or family who will validate their beliefs. A few people will contradict them, but they can be ignored.

Now imagine the opposite gay man: one who blames themselves for their breakup, when their ex-boyfriend was the problem. Who is going to tell this person they are wrong? A lot of people, actually. Will the gay man believe them? Probably not. The people who tell him the truth, that he was not at fault — he will professionally disagree with. The ones who validate his incorrect opinion — he agrees with, probably with some residual pain.

The self-blaming gay man is not pressured to change. He finds people who agree with him uncomfortable, but correct; the people who he disagrees with are on his side, at least when it comes to the breakup. The gay man who blames his ex, on the other hand, is faces with people who disagree with him and do not take his side in the breakup. An more unambiguous signal.

Many people with a pathological tendency to blame others mature, and get more comfortable with blaming themselves as they age. People who pathologically blame themselves are less likely to do this: they will keep trying to find solutions or ways to improve, regardless of the cause of their problems. An admirable or tragic disposition, depending on the circumstances at hand.

I subscribe to the theory that people make their own world. That is to say: humans live in different worlds, depending on what choices they make, where they select into, where they were born, and how they perceive things. Some people tend to be more charitable, and others tend towards suspicion. Some people like to cooperate, others prefer to defect.

“Other people can’t be trusted” might feel like a redpill to somebody, something that is compatible with their life history. They might want that to be true for everybody else, that humans in every world are rats, but they can’t really know that. Perhaps their reality could be a simple function of their own life’s idiosyncratic circumstances: like where they were born, or selected into.

VII.

Where I fundamentally disagree with the spirit of that reddit thread is the idea that redpills are truths about the world that you overcome by accepting.

Take solipsism, for example. I’m willing to take for granted that other humans are conscious like me. Maybe Lana del Rey and every other human on the planet are just illusions created by some computer program, and I am the only real soul in the universe, but I feel like that’s not very likely.

Even with that leap of faith, I still can’t really see what goes on in other people’s consciousness. I can make guesses, but I can’t really know. I can’t feel another person’s tiredness the way they can.

This is kind of obvious. But it is not obvious that it is obvious, and most people do not act as if they even believe it. Personally, experiencing hypnopomic hallucinations made it easier to empathise with schizophrenic people. One time when I woke up, I saw my father try to rape and kill me. I knew he wasn’t really there, but I still felt pretty scared. I would never have thought that being aware that a hallucination is not real has little to do with how you emotionally react to it — before that happened, at least.

Depression sometimes makes people more viscerally aware of this: working on tasks when you feel tired and when you don’t feel deep emotions makes it much more difficult to do anything. People who haven’t experienced it might mistake it for laziness, or think it is something you can just snap out of.

People know status matters. But when it comes to constructing narratives about the haves and have nots, or the winners and losers of social life — we like to talk about authenticity, honesty, being yourself, or kindness. Not what moves the needle.

People know luck matters. Empirically, it does. The effect of the ‘unshared environment’ in classical twin studies is typically large — when it comes to income, education, or political beliefs. Does knowing this make people willing to try more things, meet more people, or acquire new experiences? Not really, and even the people who do these things, probably do not do them with that in mind. It might be mathematically irrational to buy lottery tickets, but I can at least respect the intent behind doing so.

Redpill-type awakenings often have very little to do with what people actually believe. More with how their ability to convert beliefs into actualised reactions to what they see; and how their circumstances alter their beliefs.

Everybody can see the ugly truth when it is shoved into their face. The important question is whether they are willing to remember them, to see the ugliness when they are under no pressure to do so.

The biggest redpills, by that definition, aren’t necessarily the most true or uncomfortable things. They are beliefs that are the most difficult to integrate with people’s active interpretations of reality and actions. Beliefs that have massive implications for how one ought to live and think about life, that we want to ignore for social or emotional reasons.

X.

“OK, I get it. What actually are the biggest redpills?”

Right.

At the top: there is no cosmic judge of what is true and good. Nothing will hold your hand as you die and say you did the right thing. It’s not surpressed knowledge, or something that is difficult to accept on its own, but the implications are fairly grand: in morality, religion, science, and emotional life. None of them are comfortable.

Besides that, I’d say health is a major functional limitation of human behaviour, and that the traditional paths to fixing it (diet, exercise, and lifestyle) are not that effective or have low effect/friction ratios. People prescribe them because they are actionable, socially convenient, and feel righteous.

Drugs and intervetnions — GLPs, tadalifil, psych meds, laser surgery, finasteride/dutasteride, birth control, steroids, anti-histamines — these have larger effect sizes. None of them are particularly cool. Good luck finding a higher effect size than the effect of stimulants on treating ADHD: d = 1.2.

VIII.

The TL;DR:

1. Nihilism is 100% true and anybody who says otherwise is absolutely wrong.

2. That is, by far, the #1 redpill in life. If, and only if, you take its conclusions to heart: in epistemics, morality, and religion.

3. What people are biased to believe at the population level might still feel like a redpill to individual people, especially specific types of people.

4. Redpills have very little to do with what people believe, and everything to do with what they feel, and how they apply their beliefs.

5. What feels like a redpill to you might be true for your specific world: the one you were selected into, and actively interpret.

6. A belief can be actively suppressed by society and be wrong/irrelevant (e.g. holocaust denial).

X.

It would probably be more convincing to identify the most salient topics where one of the particular answers is a redpill. Not necessarily a true redpill, but an answer that is polarising, big if true, and hard to accept. Among them, I would count5:

1. Is behaviour is freely chosen, or determined by cause and effect?

2. Are social outcomes decided through principles/rules or social currency?

3. Should status, money, or intrinsic goals should be sought after?

4. Can coordination failures be fixed?

5. Are modern, developed economies meritocratic?

6. Do people have mental depth — or is it all an introspective illusion? Can we really be certain about our own beliefs and motivations?

7. What racial differences exist, whether they are genetically caused, and whether said difference implies differences in social value.

We can already see some signs of its emergence. The case of Hank Green is interesting: he used an LLM to write a script for him, he got caught, he confessed, and now he claims to never use AI for that purpose again. The use of technology is starting to become something that is culturally regulated: “I don’t like AI art” and “I don’t use LLMs to write” are now social signals1.

Polling seems to reflect this too: about half of people in America are more concerned than excited about AI. Negative sentment around the internet is increasing.

Independent of whether this movement should happen, I see a large obstacles for its emergence: the use of technology is hard to police. Historically, its adoption has been more influenced by costs and benefits than abstract ideas and social movements.

At the moment, AI on its own is not replacing any job. Not even coding. What is happening is that the experience of these jobs is changing: software engineers are being replaced by… software engineers using LLMs.

The economic effect of this is a red herring. The fear of AI originates from immaterial needs: authenticity and competition. People build their identities around writing, programming, and making art. If other people can perform these tasks better than they can by using AI tools, that threatens their source of pride and self. These tools have also made it more difficult for them to use their abilities to signal competence and intelligence.

AI, however, does have one real externality: loss of meaning. Even if AI can make things that are high quality and pass as human, they will not carry the same meaning. It lacks an author: one who makes choices based on their values and circumstances.

Imagine you saw this painting and you were told it was made by an AI.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the output of a prompt, training data, and a bunch of linear algebra. Now imagine you were told it was the first thing a man painted after his wife died. It carries a different meaning; perhaps the colour choices were motivated by depression.

People can’t trust their eye test to tell them whether something is made by AI or not. Everything becomes less meaningful. There is no real solution to the problem. This is why, I think, opposition to AI is more concentrated in art than business.

Even though there are some legitimate reasons to oppose AI, I don’t think they will end up mattering. Technological adoption in humans has always been utilitarian.

It’s been observed that people disapprove of transhumanism in the abstract, but embrace it in their choices. Most Americans brush their teeth, use refrigerators, and drink caffeine. Controversial technologies are disproportionately new (e.g. GLPs) or unhealthy (alcohol), and the uncertainty of emerging technologies fades once they get adopted; Luddism is cursed to evanescence or primitivism. Sometimes, it’s harder to notice something when it is everywhere — like how a fish doesn’t notice he is surrounded by water.

Even then, cultural backlash against technologies doesn’t seem to dissuade people from using them when they need to: 12% of Americans are on GLPs, and 3% of American babies are born using IVF.

Empirics

It’s surprisingly difficult to prove what the effects of a technology are. There are many correlational studies and RCTs on the effect of smartphone use or social media on teenagers — their grades, behaviour, or mood. The observed effects are small if they exist; in one case, it appears that the authors of a paper on the issue refused to run the statitical tests that would suggest no effects exist. Particularly, the effect of social media on cognition disappears within families and the same person tracked across time.

Technologies have group-level effects, beyond what they do to people. I think it’s likely, for example, that innovations in home appliances were largely responsible for the increased presence of women in the workforce.

If social media collectively makes culture more self-centered, I’m not sure how you would prove that. Maybe you could make a measure of self-centeredness, and see if it increased at the time social media started to become popular, but people could always argue that the rise is coincidental, or that the rise is a statistical artefact of self-reporting or changes in measurement over time.

Don’t get me wrong: bad ideas supported by bad evidence can matter, they can be used for medical or legal justifications. People who emotionally dislike social media will not look too deeply into whether the studies suggesting it is harmful are legitimate.

The quality of evidence, however, does make a difference when it comes to convincing those who lack political or social incentives to believe certain things. These people will want practical, convincing reasons not to use it.

Personally, I think it’s more likely that social media has idiosyncratic effects on people — some people gain, others lose. In my own life, I have actually tried cutting back on social media use. I noticed that twitter became what I habitually defaulted to when I had nothing to do. So I started closing the twitter tab every time I opened it a few days ago. I think it’s for the best.

Kat also noted that the rise in anti-tech sentiment is happening on both sides of the political isle. This is true, with one difference: the right seems to be focused more on individual-level solutions to the rise of technology, like quiting social media or preventing their children from using it. The left is more legally and politically active: rallying against datacenters, regulating tech companies, and advocating for <18 restrictions to social media.

The right purity tests and cancels less than the left, and they often do it about different things. Like whether you did cuckold porn 10 years ago, or whether you are too pro-Israel, or not pro-Israel enough. They don’t really care about whether people use AI. Trump himself has already admitted to using it, and nothing happened.

Summary

I agree that there is a rise in anti-tech sentiment on the internet. I think that it’s dificult for it to succeed as a movement because it is harder to police the use of technology. It’s more likely that the sentiment will be more likely to lead to legislative disputes than anything else. People often disapprove of technology and transhumanism in the abstract, but embrace them in the present.

If an anti-tech movement does appear, it will be more affiliated with the left than the right, even if luddite sentiment is becoming more common on both sides of the political isle.

Ideologically, I am an accelerationist. The future economies of developed countries will suffer from lower birth rates and mass immigration, and the only viable path I see for humanity is technology. Perhaps productivity gains due to automatisation, transhumanism, and AI could outpace the declines in youth and human capital.

I do not like AI generated art or music; this seems to be a very common preference, and the insistence to turn it into some kind of political movement is unnecessary.

This is also the case for AI-generated writing, though for a different reason. The average quality of it is so low, that it can only be really used in the private sector or scripts for videos. What makes people enjoy nonfiction writers — their methods, tendencies, and values — can’t be replicated with current technologies. LLMs are also awful at creative writing. I wouldn’t be surprised if these limitations last forever.

Personally, I am poor and young. If technology disappoints, I don’t think either the United States or Mexico (my citizenships) will be giving out reliable pensions in 2070. My current options are leveraging my Jewish ancestry and immigrating to Israel — which does have good demographics, or getting rich enough to fund my own retirement. I have no idea if I will inherit enough from my father to retire; that’s not really something I want to count on.

Independent of concerns about safety or politics: if you are not old, not rich, and not Jewish, you might want to start thinking about how your retirement will be paid.

I love anime, but I don’t engage with the community. It would be costly in terms of time and money to attend anime conventions every month, especially relative to what I would get from doing so. I doubt I would be seeing the same people at these events. It is for the best that the anime community is overwhelmingly online only.

Politics in the west is going nowhere and doesn’t give people anything, both materially and intellectually. Countries cycle through political parties, which either do nothing or actively make things worse. People used to criticise Yarvin for taking elite theory and reheating it on his UR blog; now political discourse is 100% short form media ragebait, far worse than anything that came frm the blogosphere. I regret investing time into politics much more than the tens of thousands of hours I have spent playing video games — something that promised nothing more than entertainment.

Bodybuilding is different. It has an online culture, but there are also lots of places bodybuilders can meet locally: gyms. The cost of becoming a bodybuilder — going to the gym and living with discipline — is what brings the reward: strength, aesthetics, and health. Some communities, like frats, enforce entry costs into communities by hazing and artificially enforcing hierarchy. I’ve never liked stuff like that.

The outcomes are easy to see and measure: physiques, plates, and timelines. That doesn’t stop people from distorting the signal: lighting, denying steroid use, posing, and flexing. But there is a widespread understanding of these distortions, and an intuitive distrust of the fake narratives. ‘Chicken and broccoli’ went from an excuse to a meme; “everybody is on roids” is the heuristic.

Bodybuilding is not fair, but it is meritocratic. The Bilderberg group cannot stop you from going to the gym and eating properly. It’s a sport that transcends race, circumstances of birth, sex, and age.

The great tragedy of bodybuilding

The aesthetic and social rewards of bodybuilding are most prominent when people are young — dating, forming their identities, and paths in life.

The problem? Natural progress is slow, invisible, and difficult.

I myself have been lifting on and off for ten years. I’ve managed to maintain motivation and routine for the past 4-8 months or so (don’t remember when I started again); I lifted at home, and combined moderately high intensity with moderately low volume. My physique is decent, but not notable.

In terms of strength, I’m about average for a lifter1, given my weight.

The first few months of lifting are soreness, embarrassment, and a sense that you don’t quite belong there yet. You are often making mistakes. Gains in health and aesthetics are slow, even at first, and especially if you are not lean or living a disciplined lifestyle.

Starting and committing young is a massive advantage for natural bodybuilders, who will be able to peak in their 20s — when it is most optimal. People who start later will not be as aesthetically and socially rewarded from their commitment, no matter their motivation or talent. Recovery and growth are biologically rate-limited.

Steroids work better than people think they do, even at moderate doses. They are also safer than commonly believed — particularly, if they are not used chronically or at high doses. This is one area where I disagree with some online… taking steroids lifelong is a bad idea, even simple TRT might shave a few years off one’s lifespan. Maybe I will post on this.

GLPs, tirzepatide specifically, are underrated for bodybuilding. The drugs do reduce lean mass, but that is because they reduce caloric intake. Independent of that, I think there is a case to be made that they might slightly increase strength by increasing insulin sensitivity + lowering fat content in muscle; they also make cutting and maintaining leanness easier.

I also think myostatin inhibitors work, though I’ve heard they are bad for joints and lipids as well.

I actually have wondered what it would take to have steroids become vaguely socially acceptable… I think that we would have to get the ozempic of steroids. Something so undeniably safe and effective that its very existence shakes the world. This would probably be some kind of designer SARM; it would inevitably induce T supression, which would have to be countered by using a T base + HCG or a PCT to maintain testicular function.

Bodybuilders suffer from some stereotype inaccuracy — the average person at the gym is not a meathead secretly suffering from body dysmorphia. What brings people to the gym is usually extrinsic motivations — aesthetics, wanting to find dates, or social incentives. But those rewards take time to attain, so people who are only in it for that tend to leave. Those who remain keep doing it because it is their identity, or because they are wireheading: chasing the rush of blood through the muscles, goal-setting, or breaking records. People who hate weightlifting quit, and maybe they should.

The sport generally attracts good people: grounded, disciplined, healthy, young, and attractive. The online communities bodybuilders frequent also tend to be the more interesting and vibrant ones: right wing politics, health, longevity, and biohacking.

I went to a local, small gym for the first time a few weeks ago. Previously, I typically trained with weights at home or did calisthenic exercises. Those were useful, up to a point; my physique stalled, as I couldn’t find anything heavier than 35 lbs to lift. A real gym was much more helpful in that regard; the cable machine in particular, which is easier on my joints. I liked it, so I returned.

I still plan to defy ZOG’s health orders. I will not adopt a healthy diet. I will not do cardio. I will still avoid sunlight. I will still use the grey market peptides and Indian armodafinil. My lipids and insulin sensitivity already mog, and if they get any better, Peter Thiel will hunt me down and use me as his blood boy. I am O+, after all.

These are good explanations as to why zyzz is popular.

Zyzz is inspiring for a different reason. He’s an example of somebody who transformed themselves, and is open about how he did it. He was a skinny nerd who decided to sell his WoW account to pay for a gym membership when he was 18. At some point, he started taking steroids — people have speculated he did a total of 7 cycles between the ages of 19-22.

He also provided an alternative to a culture that pathologises the pursuit of a greater appearance. That if you are dissatisfied with your body, that means you are insecure, or have body dysmorphia, and that means you need to go to therapy. Zyzz says you should go to the gym instead, and that there is no shame in being insecure or wanting to be a different person.

Zyzz combined two things that seemed impossible: shamelessness and and a focus on appearance. He wanted to be good looking, attended to, and liked. He was open about that. The informal rule is that you are rewarded for being attractive and popular, but you are not allowed to want those things. Zyzz knew about the rule and didn’t care.

Beyond combatting modern attitudes towards the body, he also went against the grain in the bodybuilding movement. Away from powerlifting and mass-type physiques, toward more aesthetic ones: one where all muscles are trained but not extremely so, and body fat % is very low. Away from the geriatirc and dated masculinity, towards a style that suited him personally: his vocabulary, music, dancing, posing, joking, and (lack of) clothing.

Clavicular is often compared to Zyzz, and in many respects they are similar: mild autism, IRL streaming, looksmaxxing, and similar rejections of both masculine bodybuilder and mainstream culture. They differ in their focus: Zyzz was not as interested in status as he was in being hot and having fun; Clavicular is interesting in “mogging” — the very act of being positioned above others.

They also differ more in their style of popularity. Zyzz was not famous in name, but he had he has an extremely dedicated and passionate fanbase while he was alive; most people who have seen his physique and videos probably don’t even know his name. Clavicular is extremely famous, but does not have that many dedicated fans, maybe even less than Zyzz did.

Bronze Age Pervert essentially took Zyzz and made his lifestyle into a philosophy. That there was no shame in striving to be something different and exceptional, that aesthetics and pleasure are their own reward. That modern life suppresses greatness through its mocking of effort and sensitivity around hierarchy. Many modern, normal people feel elated and relieved upon encountering these people; they feel like they have found somebody who understands the superficiality they feel ashamed of, the ambition they are afraid to show the world.

His existence also debunks a lot of ideas people still have on life:

>Women don’t like muscles

They do, though I think that highly muscular physiques are effective in dating for different reasons. Few guys are both very low in body fat, and high in muscularity. Even if the average preference in women is less extreme than Zyzz’s physique, his body will still attract more attention than the most theoretically optimal one. The math on this is a little iffy, but this is the idea (applied to women in the chart):

>People are born nerds or jocks.

Nope. Fake identities. What’s funny is that zyzz never really changed: he went from being a hedonistic and obsessed gamer to a hedonistic and obsessed bodybuilder who liked dancing.

>Muscles and parties are all superficial nonsense

What’s interesting is that zyzz himself eventually came to something close to this position; he was reconsidering what to do with his life and where to take it. Whether he enjoyed the life he lived while he was living it is the litmus test by which it is valid. My intuition is that he did at first, but eventually got bored of it, the way he got bored of WoW. People naturally cycle through things.

>You need to be an asshole to be popular

People like vividness; Zyzz combined this with niceness and it worked… nicely.

>Steroids will give you acne, gyno, and make you lose your hair

Only to some people, and typically at higher doses. They did eventually contribute to his death, but only when they were combined with drugs and a genetic defect.

I’m not sure if this means I can tolerate sustained walking, as in like 15000 steps over multiple days, which was what caused the initial recurrence of pain.

I’m personally not a fan of the GLP flattening and decrease in motivation. Some people like it because it reduces their impulsive behaviour, but I never really had an issue with that to begin with. I’ll stay on reta until I hit 60kg, then quit or go on a microdose.

Despite my mixed experience with retatrutide, I think GLP drugs are somehow still underhyped. They work incredibly well, and 90% of the US would have something to gain from losing weight, or making it easier to maintain leanness. The gastro side effects can be mitigated by titrating the dose and waiting a few months for them to go away. Most of the other side effects (bone loss, muscle loss, ozempic face) are probably just due to caloric deficits.

The algernon argument: that large enhancements always come at a cost, isn’t really relevant here. We didn’t evolve in an environment with tons of palatable, tasty, and processed food. There wasn’t time for evolution to adjust and make it easier for people to stay lean. I’ll do a larger and more complete post on them on technotheoria… soon.

Yesterday, I went to the local gym and found that my legs are quite weak. I can do squats for 10-20 mins in a row, but in terms of maximum strength, I can’t do much more than a one legged squat. They have endurance, but no force. So I will start using the machine + bulgarian squats to bulk them up.

I’m nor sure why, but I’ve developed chronic pain in my lower back. If strength training and losing weight worked for my legs, then it should work for that too.

Rationalists want to be people who care about the truth: they write down epistemic statuses and walk through the muddy statistical waters. They like to write down their mistakes and talk about times they changed their mind. They try to decouple facts and values — which is impossible.

These are methods that are easy to see, easy to be. It’s easy to write down ‘epistemic status: unlikely’. It’s not even that difficult to read scientific studies or books.

The problem is that excellent thought is not something that can be easily seen, sometimes not even by another excellent thinker.

Consider the question: ‘how heritable is athletic ability?’

• An awful answer: 0%

• An ok answer: aren’t there some identical twins in the NBA?

• A good answer: 50-80%, depending on the measure.

• A great answer: 50-80%, but partly because motivation, diet, and training style are also genetically influenced.

• An excellent answer: ask a different question — is it possible for you to go from a poor to great physique, given your individual circumstances?

The kind of qualities rationalists value — precision, demonstrated effort, self-consciousness — encourage people to give good answers.

They do not encourage excellent, or even great answers to questions. Looking back at the example, what makes the great answer great is that it answers an implict question: ‘if athletic ability is overwhelmingly genetic, then why even try?’. The answer: wanting to try, and trying well for that matter, are also influenced by genes.

Great thinking is not legible; only answers are.

III.

“Does exercise make people more intelligent?”

“Does exercise treat depression?”

“Does exercise…”

I’ve realised that none of these questions matter to me. The amount of exercise I would do in my daily life would not change if I was certain of any of their answers. I do resistance training for aesthetics, strength, and pain management. It turns out that weightlifting is pretty good at giving you those things, and that is all I care for. With time, I have come to derive an intrinsic enjoyment of weightlifting, something I have not always possessed.

For some people, whether exercise treats depression really is an important question. It defines whether weightlifting is worth it, or not.

Taste in questions isn’t even legible to people with good taste in questions.

X.

Often, I find that great answers are not defined by their logic. What convinced me of hedonism’s truth was a redefinition of what pleasure even is: it’s not “dopamine” or eating deep fried weed. Pleasure and pain are the valence by which we evaluate our feelings. People can find a counterintuitive pleasure in refusing to drink alcohol — which I partake in; or they can enjoy being consumed by hate and rage.

No philosopher has crowned Bronze Age Pervert with the honor of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of hedonism. Not like any of them would dare to in the first place.

A lot of good thinking I admire in others is automatic and the result of years of conscientious practice. An example: some guy posts a study saying “lower PISA scores mean IQ is declining”. Then, one of our guys drops in and says “not when you account for measurement invariance and demographic trends”.

That’s not a rebuttal that can be genetically encoded. Any >160 IQ person could have come to the wrong answer, and any >100 IQ person could understand the reasoning behind the true — correct — answer. What makes people able to understand and grasp the truth is not a pure function of rationality.

I am not making the case for domain expertise or tacit knowledge. In many cases, I have seen the boys dunk on supposed experts for not remembering what publication bias is, or not knowing how to interpret p-values.

II.

Sometimes, a question can be poorly asked or just useless. Many perennial philosophical debates are like this. Other times, philosophical debates recur because the answers are not comfortable. “Is solipsism true” — yes. “Is there free will” — no. “Is there a meaning to life” — a nonsensical question.

I used to have trouble accepting that people are selfish and that incentives run the world. Even as little as a year ago.

One day I eventually accepted it was true despite the discomfort. Only recently, did I realise why I didn’t like the idea. It’s that I have a set way of interacting with people: I’m polite by default. I don’t like arguing or defecting. Those aren’t saintly qualities; they are preferences. The fact that my preferences are not morally justified does not mean I cannot have them.

This is the snowclone. A person does not want to believe X is true. That is because they believe that if X is true, then Y must be too; or at least, they consider it a possibility. And it is Y that they have an issue with. And maybe there is nothing wrong with Y; there is something wrong with them. Y — a simple letter — threatens their identity.

I.

There is a temptation here that must be overriden. That is the tendency to dissolve and dive into depths, when there is no reason to. Sometimes, the surface is all there is.

V.

A smart man wants his answers to be accurate.

A strong man wants them to be true.

A genius wants them to matter.

A week ago, I quit the stimulants and started 1mg of KLOW (BPC-157, GHK-cu, TB-500, and KPV) every day. The caffeine withdrawal was pretty awful, and ended up tapering down with 50mg of caffeine to get rid of the constant headache, the kind that worsens when you move your head around.

The diarrhea stopped within a few days. I had planned to do a 2-4 week cycle of KLOW, but the condition stopped so abruptly that I am not going to bother to keep taking KLOW.

Prior to this, I had tried using KLOW to heal a shoulder subluxation, and got anhedonia, and ended up quitting. I suspected that the cause was a bad interaction between adderall and KLOW, but I wasn’t sure. This time, I haven’t really had issues with anhedonia, so I think that the KLOW itself wasn’t responsible for the anhedonia.

The bad news is that, without stims, I have been sleeping for 10-12 hours a day.

The good news is that my modafinil order is on the way.

Representing this era: Fight Club, American Pie, South Park, Jackass, Eminem, House MD, and American Psycho.

I think it’s real. What’s more interesting is why it died. The Lindy Man seems to think that it’s because of the rise of progressivism, demographic shifts towards female/international audiences causing incentive shifts, and more pro-career values among young men.

I don’t entirely agree, particularly when it comes to incentives. There was media that broke the vulgar wave model — like Lost — and was still incredibly popular. I haven’t seen the statistics on pre-2008 demographics of television viewers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than 45% female.

A lot of the vulgar wave might just be the television writers/directors of that time being disproportionately male. And being men, they didn’t really care for the tastes or opinions of others.

What happened later is that directors/writers became more conscious of female audiences, partly because of political reasons and the internet. The amoral vulgar chauvinistic storytelling works better when the women can’t see it. Their monetary incentives were already aligning in that direction.

III.

Let’s talk about anime. Anime can be extremely transgressive and male-oriented. So why does anime feel so disconnected to the vulgar wave era media? Some of it is just the aesthetic and cultural difference, but part of it is also that it isn’t mainstream. Anime is willing to be weird, cutsey, and layered (e.g. super ironic or sincere) in a way that the vulgar wave was not.

Anime, among many other things, absorbed a lot of the transgressive and oppositional energy that always has existed. It’s more accurate to say the vulgar wave was absorbed. Prestige TV like the Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad can be quite vulgar. The same goes for progressive media.

In other respects, the vulgar wave won: now, the expectation is that popular media is sexual, profane, violent, and full of obscenity. What characterised the vulgar wave was chauvinism, cynicism, and light-heartedness; comfortable and palatable to the intended audience.

Some of the wave remains in the mainstream. In one offs like Rick and Morty and the Wolf of Wall Street, or in some politicians like Donald Trump. Otherwise, it’s been channeled into subcultures — podcasts, twitter, forums, and the underground.

What if I told you: nobody cared about what you think about yourself? That all they want for you to do is LARP as your God-given role, or deliver results?

What if I told you that confidence didn’t even affect performance that much?

V.

Let’s say you’re a 1600 SAT megautist that has been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. After researching the condition for years, reading medical textbooks, clinical trials, and even forums, you find out about AMT-130 — a drug you are convinced works.

So you walk into the doctor’s office. You request a prescription for said treatment. The doctor gets uncomfortable, and tells you you are just a patient, and don’t have the medical knowledge required to treat yourself.

You could say “I got a perfect score on the SAT and I’ve been researching this disease for years — I think I know what I am doing”. Would the doctor appreciate that comment? Probably not.

Regardless of whether you understand your own medical disorder, what you said was a confident statement. That you probably believed. Some doctors might take more kindly to a patient who disagrees with their doctors respectfully, or just shows their passion, but not all of them do.

The problem is that it’s not “your place” to be confident here. It’s the doctor’s place. Also, the confidence through a frame people find uncomfortable — test scores, genes, IQ, and whatnot. People like sheepskin. Not what actually makes that sheepskin worth anything.

Imagine you are getting interviewed for graduate school, and you are asked whether you can write a dissertation. You say ‘I don’t know’… I don’t think the people interviewing you are going to like that. Even for 90% of the people already in grad school, that’s the most honest and calibrated statement they could make. But people hate ambiguity even more than they hate insecurity. Here, the applicant’s role is to be confident.

Who knows. Maybe the average person who says ‘I don’t know’ is better equipped to write a dissertation than people who say “no” or “yes”.

II.

People have roles in societies. Executive, doctor, patient, employee, and whatnot. They care more about whether you act in accordance with your role, than whether you believe are full of the right stuff. If anything, they don’t like that. It makes them feel threatened.

It’s been observed that, generally, people’s self-reported intelligence/attractiveness/etc doesn’t map well to objective measurements. The better than average effect is real too: people tend to overreport their positive traits, and overestimate how confident they are about what they know.

Rationally, people’s default response to high and unexpected confidence is disbelief.

Whether said confidence is “genuine” is uninteresting.

What does matter, is that confidence is overrated when it comes to performance. It will not turn an illiterate into Peter Thiel. Thinking you are a 10 probably makes you uglier. Results give people calibration, and that calibration allows them to make better decisions.

The word ‘confidence’ is a classic example of a bundled word. There is confidence as a feeling: self-esteem; confidence as belief: calibration; confidence as presentation: theatre; and confidence as personality: some mix of extraversion, risk tolerance, and low inhibition. Self-esteem is uninteresting, calibration is cool, theatre is boring, and self-confident personalities are typically big winners or losers.

People with confidence issues sometimes just have confidence issues. They should think they are more attractive and competent than they do, but they can’t bring themselves to believe it. That is an actual problem that can cause people to make inefficient or passive decisions. Other times, a person with “confidence issues” just likes feeling like they are Napoleon. They don’t actually care about whether they are.

Confidence doesn’t really matter when it comes to performance in something like math or programming. It matters the most when somebody’s assessment of themselves and their own competence influences the decisions they make: dating, entrepreneurship, or the highest levels of competition. Even in these areas: a naturally assertive and grandiose person with no talent will flop like a fish; somebody who is naturally unconfident can replace their genes with calibrated beliefs about their skills and selves.

The idolisation of “jocks” over “nerds” has something to do with this. Traditionally nerdy areas like programming or math hardly require any confidence; people who are good just get the job done, regardless of what they believe about themselves. The best people win. The people who become successful in the jock areas have a rarer neurocognitive type — somebody who is competent, knows they are, and acts like it. Most people fail at all three of these things.

Old, established successful people don’t show off their confidence. It’s unnecessary. At some point, their reputations and titles change the way people respond to them. If they are asked a question, and don’t know the answer, they can safely say “I don’t know” without looking like an idiot. At least, to anybody with any discernment.

People don’t like it when unestablished people show confidence, because they find them hard to believe. As such, only eccentric or maladjusted people are willing to be openly confident.

I’ve noticed people like to get past this by “inadvertently” leaking status/competence/etc correlated details of their lives, so they can make confident statements about themselves through the social theater. “I met my girlfriend at the math olympiad”. And I support what they are doing; their options are limited.

III.

The reason I used medicine as an example is that it’s a field that needs credentials; outcomes are noisy, irreversible, and high stakes. Normal people aren’t into stuff like math or programming, and if they are, then they are probably good. But everybody has a body, so we need titles to determine who is allowed to evaluate bodies. A 5 minute conversation isn’t going to distinguish a crank from a mediocre doctor. But it will distinguish a mathematical illiterate from an actuary.

Privately, what matters to you is being right and getting results.

What matters to others is what your role is, and whether you are credible.

The tweet stuck with me, since I had come to a similar conclusion on my own.

When it comes to managing pain, “just stop monitoring it” is a bad idea. The pain could be a sign of overexertion, and functionally stops your from moving in ways that are harmful to you. It could also be a sign of an injury that has not healed properly, and requires surgery.

Sometimes the pain really is neuropathic or unhelpful. And even then, “just stop monitoring it” is still bad advice — “focus on something else” works much better. With others, the equation changes, since your attention and bodily movements are less of a function of your own will, and more of a function of the surrounding environment.

“Just stop monitoring it” is a simple answer to a complicated problem.

II.

I see this wherever I go. I read a tweet about a book that advocates that life is short, so we cannot invest in too many things, and that we should just settle and commit as hard as possible:

I’m reading a book that’s so depressing that it has made me happy.

Its called 4000 Weeks. 4000 weeks is roughly the average human life.

The premise of the book is:
1. We’ll all die any minute now.
2. Time efficiency hacks just make you more busy.
3. Accept you can do very few things in life and commit to only a few things.

The last thing on commitment, I think is the most important:

“And not only should you settle: ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child.

The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude - to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options - is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result.

We'll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we're generally pleased that we did so.”

There’s a problem. People like the idea of commitment more than the real thing. You can’t really blame them: most businesses fail; most artists and athletes never make it; ost people dislike their jobs; and most people get divorced or have unhappy marriages.

Bad commitment is worse than no commitment.

It is true that some people avoid committing because they are afraid of the unknown, or just do things that are bad for them. That doesn’t really require an explanation. But the observation goes both ways: some people are too ready to invest into bad commitments.

Distinguishing between bad and good commitments, and acting appropriately, is difficult. It requires a minimum of intelligence, health, and character that is often absent or limited. So we return to axioms; “just get smarter/healthier/stronger” isn’t exactly good advice either.

Taking our propositions to their full conclusion, it looks like there is very little effective advice people can give. Especially, when it comes to the perennial debate of ‘keeping options open’ vs ‘choosing one thing and focusing on it’.

Sometimes, the difference between one thing and many things is hazy — a polymath might be applying their statistical and philosophical principles to everything they touch; a businessman might need broad skills, but they are still committing themselves to one trade.

III.

The fact/value distinction is a joke. Values decide what facts matter.

Sometimes, all people need to hear is the simple advice. A boyfriend in a great relationship might need to hear the words “just propose bro”. One who is in a merely tolerable relationship shouldn’t take that advice. He needs to hear something more complex and true to his context.

V.

More examples of ‘simple answers to complicated problems’:

• Think positively

• Trust your instincts

• Be willing to doubt yourself

• Leave your comfort zone

• Reduce stress

• Eat intuitively

• Ignore what other people think

• Delay gratification

• Never quit

Simple advice often assumes everything else is working; it pretends to be for the masses, is accepted by the masses, but it will not even work for them. “Eat intuitively” only works if your appetite, diet, and metabolism are in sync, it doesn’t otherwise. “Never quit” only applies if you already are doing something of value.

‘Assume a spherical cow’, as the physicists say.

Real problems require classification. Dealing with pain involves properly classifying it: acute, post-injury, or neuropathic. Dealing with social feedback requires being able to assess somebody’s worth and alignment with you.

Classification is hard. So we are sold compressions of reality.

V.

When do compressions work?

When people are undifferentiated. All weightlifting will result in gains for most beginners because of the way hypertrophy works; it will fail if you are a special snowflake with something like super low testosterone or a muscular dystrophy.

“Just study” is actually great advice for trying to get a high SAT score. Practice tests, khan academy, regular homework — it all works.

“Just buy an index fund” is also sound advice… though I think assets may start declining across the board in the 2nd half of this century because of birthrates and mass immigration. The inflated overhyped dragon that is AI will probably do little to stop this; I suspect it’s not a financial bubble, though.

The rule for advice — the more concrete and actionable, the better.

XX.

In some ways, compressions are better than their evil twin: complex advice that is advertised for the masses. The book that will make any struggling person confident. The 250 step scientifically validated exercise protocol that will make you jacked.

At least, the compression has the decency to pretend to be nothing but itself.

IIIIIII.

What content on the internet matters, then?

• Facts. Stuff like “X medication has Y effect”.

• Simple, generic advice for undifferentiated people.

• Complex, specific advice for the differentiated.

• Memes.

XD.

Metal Gear Solid, of all things, was what helped me realise this.

Initially, the hypermobility was benign, but I began to develop persistent pain in joints, particualrly knees, as a teenager. So much that it became difficult to walk, and had to limp, bandage my joints or sometimes even use crutches to move.

I spoke to a doctor about the issue, and they told me it was likely joint hypermobility was the cause of the pain, and that it was not curable. Hypermobile joints are more likely to overextend and get injured; muscles have to put in additional effort to stabilise them. I was rather upset about what he said, but he told me what I needed to hear at the time.

XIX.

It’s not possible to know which medical conditions are the worst to have. My vote goes to neurodegeneration disorders (e.g. Huntington’s) or severe anorexia/depression. People often don’t think about the latter problems, because they consider those problems to be agentic. Alzheimer’s is something that happens to a person, while anorexia is something a person does to themselves. Makes tons of sense — an anorexic person surely wants to be dangerously underweight and ridden with guilt.

Fate is a nasty whore, and she hates us all equally.

That debate aside, chronic pain is still pretty bad. There’s a medical condition called ‘cluster headaches’, which involves experiencing a severe headache for 15-180 minutes every so often. Patients hate them so much, that they’ve started calling them ‘suicide headaches’ instead. Few medical conditions are so bad that they cause people to want to kill themselves.

I’ve felt the worst of acute pain, a knife to the eye1. Of all body parts, the cornea is the one with the highest density of pain receptors — 300-600x more than in the skin. The knife hurt, but the pain went away. Chronic pain usually doesn’t.

XI>S.

When I flew over to America to study, I began to lose weight. I dropped from 75kg to 65kg (1.71m tall), and I could now walk normal distances without feeling pain. Walking long distances for multiple days still screwed my joints over, but that weight loss still made a dramatic difference.

I was depressed for most of my time in university, and spent lots of time playin multiplayer games. I used to think I wasn’t a competitive person, which is partially true, but it definitely wasn’t when I was playing Overwatch.

I eventually began to develop pain in my right wrist, to the point that I tried using a mouse with my left hand or just didn’t play games. I initially assumed that the cause was the same hypermobility disorder that caused the knee/ankle pain. At some point, I started to doubt that, and read a book about chronic pain that a pro gamer, Mikyx, recommended.

Essentially, the book was arguing that a lot of chronic pain is psychosomatic — in an academic and socially palatable way. I didn’t know what to think of it at the time, but I thought it was an interesting theory.

In my particular case, it’s very unlikely hypermobility contributed to the wrist pain. My small joints aren’t hyperflexible, and the wrist movements you make when gaming are narrow; your wrist is almost never streched to the limit. I was under a lot of stress and emotion when I played games, and that was part of why I liked them. On the other hand, I was playing games quite often, and it’s possible I developed ligamental damage due to repetitive motions.

One day, I got in a bike accident which resulted in my right wrist getting sprained. It took months to recover, and to this day, I don’t think it has recovered completely — it’s maybe 95% of what it used to be, but prhaps I shouldn’t be too picky...

I haven’t had many difficulties with wrist pain after that; maybe the accident had something to do with it. Personally, I think the wrist pain was both psychosomatic and tissue-bound; in fact, I don’t think those are meaningfully distinct categories.

We have tissues that die and regenerate every day. Our body doesn’t register the death of every cell as an existential crisis. Instead, it broadcasts signals based on different criteria: whether it predicted the body’s state, and whether the state is desirable or undesirable. Those signals have parameters: amplitude — the difference between pain and no pain, threshold — at what level of damage the body decides to feel pain, and calibration — how correlated the pain signals are to tissue damage.

When people talk about “psychosomatic” pain, they could be talking about several things: that a person’s body systematically over-thresholds, so they feel pain too often; or maybe the calibration is off — their nervous system has bad taste.

My intuition is that the brain can adapt to chronic pain. It can dull a person’s perception of pain, so that they can act without being limited by pain; and being more likely to interpret signals coming from the body as dangers, because it is used to detecting damage. If so, then their their brain is more likely to make false positives: believe there are dangerous levels tissue damage, when there are not.

The whole debate about psychosomatic vs “real” (?) pain is nonsensical. All pain is real. You wouldn’t call it pain if you did not dislike it and feel it. Doctors seem to have learned not to use the forbidden word ‘psychosomatic’; all it seems to do is bruise patients egos. ‘Neuropathic’ is the new fashion.

If I walk a long time, and then am unable to walk properly due to pain, that can mean many things. Maybe my ligaments are so damaged that they cannot heal unless I am immobile, or they are just mildly damaged and just need to be careful about putting weight on them. It’s hard to tell the difference. If I think the damage is mild and continue about my day, then perhaps my ligaments could either heal slowly or not at all. And then I have to rest.

Fortunately, I think my brain has dulled my perception of pain over time, which has made it easier to walk around and function as a person. I don’t think I’ve developed many issues beyond that. I have neuropathic itches from time to time, but they aren’t bothersome.

It’s been observed that lonely individuals are more likely to have issues with pain and health. I myself am an incel; it’s possible Nietzsche, who suffered from chronic pain his whole life, also was.

Predictably, people assume the causation goes from loneliness to health; ignoring the elephants in the room: that people who are bad at dealing with pain are also bad at dealing with people, or that pain causes loneliness. It’s also easier to deal with pain when you are alone. I don’t exactly see the mechanistic pathway between socialising with other people and what enzymes are in your muscles, or the quality of your digestive tract.

It’s also worth mentioning that self-reported loneliness hardly tracks how much time people actually spend with others; it’s either tracking their personality or the quality of their interactions. People can give you advice, which is sometimes helpful — thanks to the guys who recommended PCSK9 inhibitors and LD Naltrexone. Most of the time, it isn’t.

Pain is solipsistic. Your doctor can check your blood, temperature, and heart rate, but he can’t know how much pain you feel. Some chronic pain patients seek solace in showing their pain to otehrs, wanting them to understand, but they are searching for something they will never find.

Social interaction isn’t bad, or useless per say. I just don’t believe in magic.

The one lifestyle change that does help with pain is getting obsessed about something. Anything, really. Never underestimate how much monomaniacal focus shoves pain into the background. Consciousness focuses on one thing at a time.

IIX.

Hypermobile patients are typically advised to engage in strength training to fortify their ligaments and strengthen their muscles.

Weightlifting has been… a struggle. Ever since I was 15, it was something I was into, but I often started and quit sporadically: due to pain, fatigue, or different reasons. If I exercised too frequently or intensely, I injured my joints. If I didn’t lift enough weight, then I didn’t get any stronger. If I quit exercising, my muscles would atrophy and the pain would get worse. A catch 22.

The same goes for dieting. Throughout the years, I have bungeed between weighing 58kg and 70kg. The knee pain is much more managable on 60 than 70. I have always wanted to keep a low weight, but it’s been difficult — I have had to cut dinner or change the foods I buy. Which worked, but eventually I regained the weight again. Many such cases.

A few months ago, I was checking out my genome, and found out that, on top of having hypermobile joints, I was AMPD1 deficient. So I have not one, but two medical conditions that cause fatigue and pain in my muscles. Only about 7002 people in the United States have this specific combination of genetic disorders.

That disorder is caused by a nonsense variant that leads to the absence of an enzyme that converts AMP to IMP. AMPD1 deficiency is relatively common disorder, affecting ~1.5% of whites. Quantitatively, it’s a ~1SD penalty in sustained performance.

The current theory is that the disorder leads to excess adenosine in the muscles during exercise, which temporarily relieves pain, causing the body to over-exert itself. Once the exercise is over, adenosine then causes sedation and fatigue; the receptors get downregulated, causing lingering pain in the muscle.

That feels like a very accurate description. One time, I spent 2 hours walking outside and running errands, sometimes carrying packages. When I got home, I was overcome with fatigue and pain, and was bedridden for a long time — somewhere between a few hours and the rest of the day, if I recall correctly. Yet I felt fine while I was actually walking. I had no idea if that was normal, or what exactly was the problem. Turns out the cause was some random genetic disorder.

Around a year ago, I decided to quit exercise for good. Predictably, I gained weight and got weaker. Which brought the pain back. So… I started weightlifting again.

I started reading Mentzer too. Great thinker, who thinks about weightlifting philosophically and scientifically, from facts and first principles. Not a bunch of marketing garbage. Essentially, he thinks that muscle growth happens fastest when people optimise higher intensity and lower volume exercise, training to failure. Recovery is essential, not something people do out of laziness or vanity.

Big if true. So I started training under his philosophy. And it’s working. Following master Mentzer’s teachings, the grip strength in my right hand went from ~38kg to ~47kg. More than an entire standard deviation3.

Believe, it or not, my arm4 hardly grew during that time. It’s pretty insane how much stronger people can get by training appropriately.

XD.

…I still need to lose weight.

I recently started taking retatrutide. I injected 0.5mg the first time, which is 4x less than the normal starting dose. It still made me feel incredibly nauseous for an entire day. The following week, I took 0.25mg, and still felt nauseous. I suspect I am a hyperresponder to the drug for genetic reasons; my uncle failed to stay on GLPs, despite his best efforts — switching doses or drugs.

The bright side is that I really am losing weight. I’ve gone from ~67kg to ~65kg in the last three weeks, it should only take a few more months to reach 60kg. Currently the plan is to stay on reta, cut to 57-60kg, and then start bulking.

As of recently, I damaged my left ankle and knee badly from walking too much after going to a conference. I thought the injuries healed yesterday, but I woke up with pains in my knee and ankle, and bandaged them back up. Fortunately, they feel fine now.

So, yeah. Things are looking up. The pain is never going to go away, but I should be able to decrease the amount of time I feel it.

In terms of interventions, I’ll try these no matter what:

• Injected NA-semax/adamax. They are painkillers, apparently.

• LD Naltrexone

I’m pretty sure body recomposition + a painkiller will be enough.

If not, I will try the following interventions (in order):

• Suzetrigine

• CARTALAX

• Ketamine

• Buprenoprohine

• Methadone

• Tesamorelin

• Run my own scientific study on BPC-157 to see if it actually causes cancer

• Steroids (lol)

• Myostatin inhibiors

• …Not sure what’s left at this point.

Many of these choices are dangerous and not ideal. But if I am out of options, I will try them. Not trying isn’t an option; I’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work.

I’ve spoken about the pain several times in scattered posts and tweets, but I wanted to unite the entire history here. Hopefully, I will not have to write about it again.

I also may as well clarify all of my health issues:

• Hypermobility in pelvis/knees/elbows/shoulders. Cause is unknown.

• AMPD1 deficiency. Saw it in my genome.

• Allergies. Diagnosed. Easy to treat with levocetrizine, but want to try immunotherapy.

• Some sleeping issue, probably narcolepsy. I wake up tired every day, and have uneven sleep, sometimes not sleeping enough or waking up at night. I’ve had vivid hallucinations + sleep paralysis occur upon waking. Early signs started as a child — extremely deep sleep and random sleeping; the condition accelerated around 15-20 years of age.

• Some minor health issues, which all are suspiciously correlated with hypermobility disorders, but don’t really bother me.

1

I can see perfectly in that left eye. But it will complicate getting laser surgery…

Wrong questions.

There are answers to these questions, at the individual and group level. Rich people don’t seem to be more or less agreeable than the average person, so it’s safe to say it’s not a big factor in professional life. There’s scientific literature that evaluates the effect of agreeableness on relationship outcomes (e.g. # of people slept with, relationship status, relationship satisfaction); personally I find it uninteresting. The effect sizes are weak, and even if we can identify correlations between personality traits and outcomes, it’s not clear if the trait causes the outcome, or if the outcome is even desired.

Beyond outliers, there seems to be a small negative correlation between agreeableness and income. My guess is that is because agreeable people are bad at negotiating salaries; a skill that can be learned.

Let me try a different starting point. Pesonality is highly genetic, particularly if you base your studies on peer-reports over self-reports. Agreeableness and disagreeableness correlate with a several different behaviours, some of which are positive, and others which are negative. Ideally, agreeable people would try to embrace the good disagreeable behaviours, and vice versa. They would be mistaken to fight against their natures.

In terms of my own value judgements, this is what I value in disagreeableness: standing up for yourself, contarianism, unashamed selfishness, and groundedness. I appreciate the forgiveness and friendliness in agreeableness. These aren’t contradictory behaviours. Unfortunately, the kind of wiring that produces these behaviours is anti-correlated.

In some cases, there isn’t a right and wrong leaning. It’s difficult to walk the tightrope of being too trusting vs paranoid; or being too full of yourself vs unconfident.

Rather than debate who was born with the best genes, perhaps it would be better to determine what behaviour is and is not valuable to us. That is what I mean when I say that ‘should I be nice’ is the wrong question to ask.

XI.

The optimality of being nice vs mean depends on the situation.

Iterated games reward cooperation. Others don’t. Not very deep.

This complexity encourages people to think that being mean or unrestrained can be “excused” if you are tired, in pain, or undergoing any other personal problem. It’s inevitable, of course, that tired people will say stupid or confused things. They rarely actually start confrontations or drama. They are tired, after all. People who start fights under the influence of drugs might not be starting them off drugs, but they are still choosing to use drugs that make them fight people.

It’s not that phsyiological limits aren’t impactful, or can’t be socially dealt with. What I am arguing against is people who want to be morally excused for behaving in ways that others dislike; things they probably would have done regardless of their own physiological limits. I find it pathetic.

Many amoral people, including myself, do not act nicely out of strategy. There’s an aesthetic to it — there is nothing wrong with kicking a dead dog. It’s just ugly. People have often highlighted that Nietzsche was polite and friendly in real life; it does contrast wito his amoral philosophy, but I wouldn’t say it contradicts it.

IIII.

Some find nice people fake — a bit of a loaded word. Agreeable people will do the thing where they notice things that are off, and not say anything about them. I would consider that to be reticent behaviour, not inauthentic. A lot of nice behaviour is practiced; though it would be a category error to call that fake. Then there is the issue that we can’t see into other people’s souls; a disagreeable person cannot really know whether an agreeable person behaves that way because they are being strategic vs whether they do it because it is innate.

Since agreeableness doesn’t seem to correlate much with real world success, I’m inclined to think most nice people are just “like that”. They don’t get reliably punished or rewarded for what they do, so people who try to be strategically agreeable are likely to quit when they do not get what they want.

Agreeable encounters can be a little anxious. Two people being friendly with each other could be acting on their base instincts, but might be afraid that the friendliness might not be lasting. There’s a certain ambiguity about friendliness that can’t be dissolved by being smart or stable. Hostile encounters are also tense, but in a different, and more intense way. Presumably, people differ in how tense they feel in friendly vs hostile encounters; they might be pleased with agreeableness, but find it streessful. I will say though, that if people didn’t like friendly encounters, they wouldn’t feel anxious about them being fleeting. It’s evident people like friendliness in isolation.

There is a certain type of neurotic who likes being demeaned. They don’t believe they are entitled to anything besides it; a nice person makes them feel too unworthy.

There is another problem — that different personality traits can cause the same behaviour, or one personality trait can. A guy who looks nice might just be anxious or have an overly manufactured personality. People notice this, then blame the niceness.

People have tried to solve this problem with dichotomies: kind vs nice, or empathy vs sympathy, or affective empathy vs cognitive empathy. These can be clarifying in some respects. For example, a person who throws away drugs you are addicted to is being kind, not nice. These dichotomies are still unhelpful, and frame the discussion in terms of morality, rather than value or utility.

On the question of women. Those guys who neg and push women’s boundaries and get laid anyway do exist, but women vary in how they respond to them. I’ve heard stories of men who decided to play the asshole or start negging, and say it worked. Whether what they describe actually occurred, or occurred the way they think it did does not interest me.

What does, is why that would be the case. The obvious answer nobody talks about is novelty. Most guys don’t approach. If they do, they aren’t charming or interesting. A guy who walks up and starts being an asshole is different and memorable. It signals attitude.

It’s easier to be boring if you are being nice. Niceness beats meanness, but vividness beats niceness. For both sexes. This is why women argue about whether they should be nice, when it is obvious that men like nice women; they just like the lively ones more than the nice ones.

Before the event, I was recovering from a subluxated shoulder, withdrawing from amphetamines, and going through a few other personal + health problems. Not in the best state to take a flight, or attend a multi-day conference for that matter.

I went anyway. It was a nice experience.

Zagrebbi helped me find somewhere to stay; a mutual was living in SF, so I stayed at their house. For the purposes of opsec, I will not say who it was. They were… not close who I expected them to be. This is the second time I’ve struggled to keep up with somebody else in conversation — the first was with Michael Woodley of Menie. Often, I’ve found I have to hold myself back from talking about my interests in philosophy/genetics/psychology/etc, so that we could talk on the same level.

Most of the individual talks were uninteresting, so I spent almost the entire event talking to people. I took the initiative and talked to quite a few people, often people I didn’t know.

The results of doing this varied. Several times, I accidentally met people I was already mutuals with on twitter. Sometimes I ended up talking to a random person who recognised my blog; in fact, a few people just asked me directly if I was, well, myself. Once I ended up chatting with a billionaire by accident. Only a few conversations were awkward, none were outright negative.

I wore a burzum shirt most of the event. A few people recognised it. When I was walking home at night, a car shined its lights on me when I was looking through stuff in my backpack. I was wondering if this was going to be my first mugging, but they ended up telling me… they liked my shirt. I don’t even remember if they were a man or woman.

By the third day, my knees had given out. I had been walking ~15,000 steps a day, not too much, but the problem was that the event was really crowded. I had to torque my body around people when I wanted to go places, and that put a lot of pressure on my ankles/knees. Beyond the baseline effort my muscles/ligaments have to exert to stabilise the joint. Today I flew back, and the pain had gotten so bad I was limping around the airport. Fortunately, I don’t feel it anymore. Chronic pain comes and goes.

I heard Worst Boyfriend Ever was in the area. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet him.

I also got a Galton board. Cool.

III.

I also attended the California Peptides Club. I carpooled with somebody else at Manifest who was going — thanks for that — and we drove on up.

I felt a little out of place at first. I was probably the youngest person there, and knew few people there; it took place in what appeared to be a fairly expensive house, and we got there a little late. Eventually I got bored and started chatting. Turns out that most of the people there were either businessmen, founders, or tech workers.

I remember two different business proposals. One was from a young white woman who was intrested in selling condoms that changed colour when exposed to STDs (?). Alright. Peptides too — PT-141 and Oxytocin — ones that increase sexual arousal. I’ve heard PT-141 makes people horny, but nauseous; Oxytocin intensifies emotional connections with others. I’d do the due diligence of researching before investing, though. Best person to ask about these is probably Cremieux or Julius.

The second company was announced by an Indian man who was interested in finding cures to chronic disease. From what I remember, he is building a platform where people open source their blood test results + health information + peptide stacks. They’re running a 100 person trial for reasons… I forgot. Sorry lol.

I ended up talking to a guy who is also having issues with joint pain caused by hypermobility. Apparently, he’s taking PCSK9 inhibitors instead of statins because they aren’t as hard on your joints. Not sure if they are safe, but I’ve been off statins for a few months, and am in need of a replacement. He also used to work for the narcolepsy scientist, apparently. He told me that if I got diagnosed early enough, that I might be able to keep some of the neurons that secrete orexin. That’s, well, useful information. Thanks bro.

Of all of the people I asked, none were taking peptides (?) besides myself — a microdose of retatrutide every week. That was… unexpected.

I grew up mormon, and coincidentally tried coffee for the first time a few minutes before getting drove there. I quickly felt nauseous and dizzy. Not because of the caffeine — I’m a 400-600mg/day megadoser — but because of the coffee itself. Several trips to the bathroom were required.

I was also compared to Michael Iskander for the 2nd (?) time. Now I’m keeping count.

IIEJ.

It’s a bad idea to ask people about AI timelines or p(doom)s. Important questions, but these topics have an awkward balance of strong opinions, uncertainty, and rigour that is hard to translate to real-time speech. One person gave a surprisingly decent answer on the question of AI safety: the threat of some rando creating a supervirus with a lab/money + AI isn’t that implausible, and the technology should be regulated accordingly. The idea of flying people thousands of feet in the air would have once sounded ridiculous, now it’s regulated — too regulated perhaps — and a part of ordinary life.

Before coming I here, I thought socialising was overrated. I still think it is, and that the holistic benefits people think it has on health, mental stability, and life are either exaggerated or nonexistent.

There is still a certain magic to meeting people in real life that does not exist on the internet. xQc once talked about this on a podcast — taking a relationship from meatspace to the internet feels deflating; the opposite always feels great. I believed him, but it was different to live it.

People’s faces, body language, speaking cadence, and clothing tell you something you can’t see online. You can ask whatever you want. I remember that Cremieux and I had a disagreement regarding whether BPC-157 causes cancer; I asked him about it in person, and he gave me a very good justification for why it is likely. I thought about it, and went back and corrected my old article on KLOW.

Anons are often not what you assume them to be — in terms of age, nationality, appearance, or personality. People frame this the wrong way: that the anons are faking it, or too scared to show who they are. The way I see it is that the world can be full of surprises, and that you should embrace them.

I’m also quitting adderall. I initially thought I had attention deficit disorder because I had some of the symptoms, and tons of family members with the disorders. Turns out that I can get by just fine without amphetamines, even withdrawing on them. The symptoms: issues staying awake, affective dampening (this is a bug and a feature), inconsistent productivity, fatigue — I think they come from a sleeping disorder. I’ll manage on caffeine/nicotine, maybe modafinil too, until I find out what that the problem is.

Socialising is fun and useful. It doesn’t have to be anything else to be worth it.

Physiologically, the answer is motivation. We make choices based on outcomes we wish to create or avoid. The traditional advice adds moral gloss — internal motivation is nobler than external, so follow your passion instead of the money. Which is incmplete advice: energy is king.

II.

Beyond being incomplete, the traditional advice is also metaphysically confused. The linguistic barrier that we erect between internal and external rewards doesn’t exist. The external rewards people receive — validation or money— changes their behaviour and cognitive reward structure. Nothing privileges internal over external motivation in a cosmic sense.

As much as women are made fun of for saying they “look good for themselves”, I think it accurately describes their internal experience. They enjoy improving their appearance because they think it rewards them. I see some of this in myself; the looksmaxxers have discovered this too — it’s not about the women, if it ever was.

There is some truth to the advice, that people mistakenly idealise high status occupations. They see the fame and money that come with them; not the pressure to perform and the monotony of the daily work. George RR Martin has received dozens of awards and plenty of time in the public eye, but the vast majority of his career, he was writing alone.

There is nothing wrong or “narcissistic” with wanting fame and money, but the lived experience is what decides motivation; not the idea of what it will do.

XXII.

Career choice is strange because we insist on treating an energy problem as a moral one. We ask what we should find motivating instead of noticing what we do. Occasionally these coincide — the kid who's loved math since he was four becomes a mathematician and it looks like destiny. Usually they don't. Someone inherits the path of least resistance and dreams of the kitchen instead.

People are good at predicting which careers would work for them. The illiterate man doesn't aspire to be an editor; the six-foot child suspects he can play basketball well. What people are terrible at is the fine prediction; wildly overconfident that they'd hate a job they'd in fact find tolerable, and that they'd love one that would grind them flat by year three. You cannot know this from the outside. Which means the rational-looking move: line up talent, market, and interest, solve the equation — quietly assumes you have information you can't get without trying.

This makes the case for internal motivation stronger. What is externally rewarded depends on circumstance, but what people innately gravitate towards is more lasting. Money habituates, status is comparative, and novelty wears off. Even improvement tapers with time.

V.

Some people like their jobs. Other people get paid.

Choosing a job looks like an antagonistic optimisation problem. "Follow your passion" claims there is no tradeoff — that energy and success are the same axis. You can have your cake and eat it too. There is truth to this: reward raises motivation, motivation drives skill acquisition, skill raises reward. A flywheel.

The backlash crowd tell us that we should follow your passions, because you'll probably fail. 70% of college basketball players think they can make it to the NBA, but only 1.1% ever do. Similar statistics exist for musicians, actors, and artists.

Let me get this straight. You shouldn’t try… because you might fail.

That is the way losers think. You are not a lottery ticket.

The catch is that, if you work for somebody else, there is no certainty that your productivity translates to promotions or payment. Statistically, supervisor ratings and salary increases hardly correlate when one controls for experience on the job. 10x engineers don’t get 10x the pay. Follow your passion is a reliable strategy when it comes to self-employment or entrepreneurship, but not industry.

What people call passion might just be personal compatibility; it’s been observed that different personalities gravitate towards different types of work. Almost all writers and scientists are ‘intuitives’ on the MBTI scale — more interested in abstractions.

I.

Should people work for money?

Well, if you didn’t need money, would you be asking that question? If you have money, your behaviour is the answer. If you don’t, then you need to work for money.

The better question is how salient finances should be when making career choices. My intuition is that they should be a large factor when making macro-level decisions, like deciding whether to go into mathematics or massage therapy. If the lucrative career is awful, then the lower paying one can be tried; they are easier to get into.

In all honesty, I don’t really have a strong opinion on the question. What I will say is that a person who wants lots of money would be making a pragmatic mistake by choosing a vocation that pays well, but doesn’t motivate them. If they get paid, it will be because of their behaviour, which is downstream of motivation.

It is true that the effect of money on happiness is small, and stronger for some people more than others — particualrly introverts or neurotics. The relationship between money and happiness survives twin controls, and is observed longitudinally — which suggests there is a causal relationship at play. There are many variables that correlate with happiness, but very few have shown even suggestive evidence of increasing it.

IV.

Jack took my advice, abandoned his job of becoming a reseacher, and became a singer. Something he always liked to do, no matter the time and place.

The problem? Jack sucks at singing.

Many people, even if they do not want to admit it, see ability and talent as things that are stable and innate. There is some truth to that, insomuch as they are heritable traits, but they can still change over time.

More importantly, stories about talent depend on how they are told.

I taught myself to read when I was four1. I took the SAT and scored well on the reading portion, even though I never attended a real English class. You could then argue that, based on that information, that I am an extremely talented reader.

Or, you could make the case that my inborn ability to read is merely average using different datapoints. I never became fully fluent in Spanish, even after spending 9 years in Spain. I struggled with reading comprehension as a child2 and got a mediocre score on the SAT-R when I took the test for the first time. There is no contradiction here: hyperlexic children learn to read quickly, but comprehend later.

It’s also not true that practice has no effect on standardised tests, like the SAT. That theory is based on faulty intepretations of the literature, often ones that the authors make themselves. For example, it’s been found there is almost no difference in scores between tutored and untutored students, but that does not imply that practicing has no effect. Practice the students do themselves or at school is not considered; it’s likely that uncoached students compensate by studying on their own.

There are many individual cases of people who improved after studying for tests; it would be obtuse to dismiss them out of hand. Jeff Bezos claims that, when the data and anecdotes disagree, that the data is often wrong. I am inclined to agree.

In a weird way, this is a more pessimistic and unnerving conclusion. If you have perfect knowledge of yourself, then you can pick according to your talent. But if you don’t know what you have a gift for, then you could be sinking years of time into a career that you will never get good at, no matter how hard you try. You might have been good at a job you don’t even know exists.

Still, it is true that talent beats hard work. The correlation between the hours people play video games and how good they get implies that about 10-20% of the variance in ability can be attributed to differences in time spent playing. This is also true for wealth; hours spent working only account for 6.6% of the variance in lifelong income, if they made the statistical mistake I think they did3 (26% otherwise).

Personally, I think motivation beats both. No evidence, just an intuition. Motivation is what makes talent to develop into ability, and ability become results. Hard work is the bandaid that is applied for when the work itself doesn't motivate. It holds for a while, then it falls off.

“Motivation is king” might be the philosophy of a spoiled rich kid. And I still believe it. The fact of the matter is that almost everybody in the developed world is fed and sheltered. People who want to surpass the median will have to be motivated by something beyond their bare necessities.

Starting young at anything is an advantage. The ability to learn decreases with age, starting with the end of puberty4. It does not decline as much as is commonly thought; IQ scores are about the same in 20 and 35 year olds.

Specifically, it’s an advantage because starting young gives you the experience of a veteran and the vitality and time of a young man. It’s most important in highly competitive and cognitively demanding areas — almost every top chess player becomes a grandmaster before 18 years of age.

XIII.

If there is a cheat code to career selection, it is getting good at generalised skills: language, mathematics, statistics, computational literacy, software engineering, and management. Somebody excellent at even two of these things could work anywhere. The catch is that these skills are kind of boring. They are means, not ends.

The easiest way to learn something is to do it. Far transfer and generalised learning are memes. When people practice IQ tests, they get better at the subtests that are worse at measuring intelligence; if they were actually getting smarter, you would expect the opposite to be true.

There is also a debate about keeping options open and exploring vs doubling down on one thing. Career advisors disagree on this: Thiel is pro doubling down; the 80,000 hours guys are pro exploring.

On the MBTI scale, this maps onto J (double down) vs P (explore). My impression is that most highly successful people mix both of these tendencies: openness coupled with conscientiousness. They are open-minded enough to consider different options when others would be stuck in tunnels; conscentious enough to double down when things get difficult.

Even the data bears this out:

UZI.

I started to think about my career seriously around the age of 15-16. I was the second worst athlete in my class, only ahead of an overweight Dutchman, so anything physical was off the table. My social skills were mediocre, and I didn’t find most interactions with other people motivating or pleasurable.

The obvious choice was something cognitive. I had little interest in hard sciences or most of the humanities; I liked politics and economics, but questioned whether becoming an academic was a good idea. My father is a businessman, and I wasn’t interested in living his life.

That left math or doing something with computers. Both seemed like fitting choices at the time, since my father runs a tech company.

I did find math motivating in high school, but I don’t think that I found it intrinsically rewarding. I liked it because I was good at it, found it useful, and… it gave me validation. My interest in it decreased as I got older.

So I decided to major in computer science in college. I was ok at it, but it was not a good fit for me. I didn’t code in my spare time, turned things in at the last moment, and always felt like the “impostor”. At this time, my uncle called me and asked me if I would like to work for him; I rejected him because I thought I wasn’t good enough. Which was a stupid decision, regardless of whether the job would have worked. He would have been mature enough to fire me if I underperformed; I would have been mature enough to not take that personally.

Instead of blaming my mood and behaviour on what I was trying to do, I blamed it on myself, and didn’t do anything about it. All I did in my spare time was watch anime and play video games… for two years. The most hopeful futures I saw were being a nepobaby or a mediocre white collar worker.

Around my 3rd year, I was talking to a classmate and he told me that he was double majoring in statistics and computer science. I looked into the details, and it turns out I could do the same thing, and take very few extra classes, since I completed my math coursework in my first year of college or so.

My statistical reasoning improved rapidly with time, and I considered the decision a success. Initially, I thought it was because I was more passionate about statistics than programming. Which was wrong. I didn’t care much for either vocation, and just happened to learn statistical concepts when I was diving into scientific research. Reading Scott Alexander and gwern was helpful too. I started my own blog out of boredom a few months later and slowly grew a readership.

Now four years have past. I enjoy writing, and Technotheoria has done well for itself, far better than I expected.

The blog doesn’t pay for itself, so I’ve thought of different avenues of work. I haven’t sorted everything out yet, but I think I’ll work as a data analyst and think of writing about different types of things. I got a (likely) offer to be a funded economics PhD student at George Mason University a few months ago, but rejected it, as I didn’t want to become a researcher or professor.

VIIII.

If you have energy and are doing something that rewards you — socially, financially, and personally — that’s it, the solution to the question of career selection. Victory.

Following your passion is good advice. It just happens to be confusing because it’s not clear what passion is: energy, motivation, evaluation, or something between all of these things. It’s good advice insomuch that careers cannot be chosen rationally, they have to be reinforced by energy and rewards.

If I had to reduce everything to one variable, I would say energy. A good career will result in an optimal flow of energy where long periods of work feel effortless… most of the time. Every job has its version of faculty politics, university admissions, and peer review.

And then you might still fail because aren’t talented enough.

1

From my mother’s (defunct) blog.

2

t.:

Everything on the inside must collapse into a mere appearance.

The world is more negative, banal, and safe than we give it credit for.

I.

Health, exerise, and diet are overrated.

The majority of Americans die between 70 and 90 regardless of what they do with their lives. Exercise makes people healthier, but not smarter or happier; the causation goes in the opposite direction. Its popularity has less to do with health-related reasons and more to do with recreation, social bonding, and aesthetics.

Being overweight isn’t that unhealthy. I did the deep dive, and people with BMIs from 17-27 die at more or less the same rates when you adjust for reverse causality and confounding. Diseases often make people lose weight and kill them, so having a low BMI looks like a causal effect on mortality; and then people who are overweight often have worse habits which translate into higher mortality. People focus on fat loss because of aesthetic reasons, not functional ones. And there’s nothing wrong with that, being thin makes most people look much better.

All of my real health problems: recurring joint pain, allergies, inconsistent energy levels, and dysfunctional sleep — they don’t need to justify themselves to me. They are visceral in a way that makes engaging with them feel natural and pragmatic. Doing anything beyond that is just theater or marginal gains.

III.

Inner locus of control, “self awareness”, and optimism are all overrated.

All of these traits that have visible and grating failure modes. Nobody likes to see somebody fail and blame everybody else for their problems, but people don’t notice the guy who blames himself for things that have nothing to do with him. The problem is of calibration, not tendency.

Knowing you cut off your own legs does not grow them back. Neither does blaming what happened on your parents.

Some people are more different and exceptional than others. We don’t like to acknowledge it, because exceptionalism and dissimilarity are the foundation of people’s identities. Cutting the tall poppies preserves social balance. Again, this is an issue of calibration.

I remember walking for 2 hours one day, and then feeling so fatigued that I was bedridden the rest of the day. I had no idea if this was what everybody else went through. It turns out that I am AMPD1 deficient, which impedes the amount of energy my muscles can generate, causing them to get more easily fatigued. People with the disorder are about 1 SD worse at sustained exercise.

Another time I saw that I had tested positive for a gene mutation which causes neurofibromatosis. At first, I thought that was impossible, since I had no visible signs of the disease. I dived into the rabbithole, and convinced myself it was possible. About 50% of people who test positive for that marker lack an NF diagnosis due to the variability in how the disease manifests (this part actually is true, as hard as it is to believe); perhaps I could be in that 50%…

It turns out this was due to a miscall due to an error on the ancestryv2 chip.

Perhaps the average person is too willing to think they are special. True, but otherwise banal observation. What’s more interesting is that it is genuinely difficult to tell when you are the rule or the exception — you are the only one who can feel your pain, thoughts, and emotions. There is no cosmic judge in the court of life.

Other examples of traits that work this way: sensitivity, stubbornness, wanting validation, suspicion, negativity, risk aversion, defensiveness, idealism, nostalgia, zero-sum mentality, fatalism. None of these things are bad in isolation. It just so happens that these traits carry more visible and embarrassing failure modes.

II.

Self-awareness is defined as being conscious of the social perception of your behaviour — it’s replaced the word self-conscious in the modern lexicon. It’s knowing people will judge your appearance, what those judgements will be, and reacting accordingly. It has nothing to do with being aware of your own affective reactions, or even the ability to construct accurate theories about your own actions.

There is not one general, agreed upon perception of what is based or cringe. Some people think that questioning the consensus and doing your own research is a mark of a genius, others think you’re “that guy”.

Not having to care about other people’s judgement is liberating. But it’s a privilege: the judgement of employers, recruiters, committees, and groups dictates whether you are hired, promoted, accepted to an institution, or in a relationship — things that people care about for reasons beyond social status.

Because of that, people have to play a weird game. They have to stand out, but conform; be friendly, but compete; care about how they look, but not look like it.

People follow the social panopticon’s judgement because it is highly intelligent, at least in some respects. It’s groked that anime, energy drinks, having tattoos, piercings, and video games are associated with low class — no statistics required. It picks up on embarrassing behaviour: photoshopping yourself next to your favourite actor, filming yourself in front of a shelf of books you have never read.

People don’t do this kind of stuff anymore:

The panopticon can be useful, and highlights behaviour that is embarrassing or inefficient. But I don’t feel like that explains its dominance, particularly among a certain type. The panopticon is safe; it liberates people from the inherent loneliness of the human experience. An emotional crutch that keeps them walking, a jury to fill the void of a cosmic judge.

Nonchalantly doing something that is low status to the modern person looks naive or performative. “Surely they’re as weak as I am, right? They must rely on social validation as much as I do. Surely they are not aware of what they are doing. How sad.”

Caring about what random people think might feel stupid, but people can’t stop themselves from doing it. Sometimes I can’t either. The cure to histronicism is discrimination — people who are competent, knowledgeable, and similar in values to you have opinions that matter. Everybody else can be ignored.

V.

The entire way we think about action is wrong. There is no ego that just tells the brain what to do. Costs, benefits, rewards, and risks are all that matters. People’s assessments of those things can be incorrect — they might actually feel better if they did the things they should — diet, socialise, exercise. Perhaps, they are correctly following their psychological reward structure, but what they are doing looks pathological from the outside. It’s hard to tell. Both from the outside and inside.

Something in the brain can force actions even when the cost/benefit analysis looks bad or ambiguous, but cannot (and should) not sustain that effort in the long run.

This happened to me several times with exercise. First I tried getting jacked at 15, and injured my joints. So much that, when I went to see a doctor, they thought I had some hypermobility disorder1, but couldn’t get a diagnosis due to the lack of genetic testing.

Then I tried weightligting again in college, being careful with the amount of weight I lifted to avoid injury. I never got as large or strong as I wanted. Something in me always waned to keep trying, but the situation on the ground was always on or off. I’ve since accepted that my body just isn’t genetically capable of becoming strong on its own — it needs specialised training (Mentzer) and enhancement (peptides).

One genetic defect, maybe, is possible to overcome. Two is a big ask.

IV.

What is trait conscientiousness then, if not a lack of laziness or the presence of will?

Another compression of reality. The trait exists somewhere between different concepts: friction tolerance, sensitivity to abstract/delayed rewards, energy, ease of habit formation, and more functional responses to external structures — deadlines, schedules, validation, and criticism.

These are all things that are good in moderation, often lead to effective and meaningful actions, but they also have their failure modes. Psychologically, people who tolerate friction are not as motivated to reduce it. You can plan for a future that doesn’t exist. Habits can be built too quickly — it’s a lot harder to quit a habit than to start one. People can be too responsive and compliant to the people and institutions around them. The mindset should be that trust, complaince, and responsiveness have to be earned; not deserved.

The idea that conscientious people are uncreative dopes has some truth to it, but I do see a little resentment between the lines. That a certain type of person cannot stand to see somebody rewarded and valorised for a trait they don’t have.

Laziness doesn’t really exist. Neither do “A players” and “B players”. Nor does “the it factor” — that’s just prole mythologisation. Those are models, compressions of information, that those who manage others use. An employee is unmotivated — he’s lazy. Lazy works kind of like a made up medical diagnosis: somebody is not doing something because of a lack of ‘will’ — something that does not exist.

It’s metaphysically retarded, but it’s retarded in a locally optimised way: managers don’t care about why their subordinates aren’t doing what they want them to do. Why exactly an employee is losing motivation doesn’t matter to his boss — whether due to genes, a breakup, lack of incentives, immaturity, or some other problem. He probably can’t fix it. The label does its job — for him.

What matters to the employee is whether being productive at his job does anything for him. Are they building a skillset? Preventing themselves from getting fired? Looking for a promotion? If work isn’t doing anything for them, then the better question is why they are doing it. Perhaps, they should strive to be lazier. More accurately — better calibrated.

VIIIVIII.

The boomer “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” stuff was always fake. Hard work is a temporary solution to not seeing the light at the end of the cave. The better question is: where does the difficulty of breaking that mindset come from?

It is simply true that there are people who go from being born in bad circumstances to finding better ones. I saw my dad and many others like him do it — the heritability statistics back it up. That observation alone breaks the narrative that some people are in bad circumstances because they were either born in them, or because some evil system them into them.

Funnily enough, my dad ended up immigrating to the USA because he heard about BYU on his Mormon mission. He had actually planned to study in Mexico, if I recall correctly. Had he not heard of BYU, well, I wouldn’t even have been born.

It’s not like he didn’t try hard. He put in >80 hour weeks to save up about a thousand dollars, went through the trouble of applying for a visa, and took a bus from Mexico to Utah. The fact of the matter remains: working hard is not sufficient or even necessary for success, and it’s not possible to homonculus yourself into doing anything.

That gives the boomers the wrong idea. That if everybody thought like my dad, they would all be happy and rich. All of those people who talk about systems and privilege are still wrong, but the protestant work-ethic enjoyers have their own vanities and virtue signalling: “things were harder back in my day”; “these goddamn kids paying onlyfans thots and not buying homes”.

I should clarify — Boomers are an overhated generation.

XIV.

People have spoken of the hedonism paradox. That optimising for happiness or pleasure is self-defeating. I’m not even sure if that’s true.

Somebody who gets addicted to opioids might look like a junkie. Well, definitionally they are. But addictive behaviour has less to do with pleasure seeking, and more to do with a deficience in baseline functioning and affect regardless of the presence of the drug. Few happy people just decide to start doing heroin.

Addiction and drug use counterintuitively can give people a sense of stability. The effects of drugs become familiar; pain and pleasure change with time, but predictably.

People have this terrible counterargument: that if pleasure is all that matters, then that means we must become WALLE-MEN living on the wheelchairs, watching TV, and eating burgers. Pleasure and pain are multifaceted things: there is a strange pleasure in fasting, and pain in being complimented for your looks.

There is still something to the paradox, though. That you might have an idea of what you should do to make yourself feel happier, but you might not do it. And even if you do, you could just be wrong about what you actually like.

Which circles us back to the older point: that we often do things that we think are bad for us, that we know are bad. But we keep doing them, and we don’t know why. In a sense, that is inevitable. If we knew why, well, would we keep doing them?

Another problem here is an inherent limitation in self-perception. The part of your brain that builds an identity is part of the system it it is trying to examine. Perfect self-perception is impossible, not just because of inherent limitations in intelligence and information, but it’s also logically incoherent. Emotionally detachment is an effective calibrator because your beliefs change more easily, independent of the discomfort of revising your own identity. Perhaps that detachment comes at a price; I’m not sure.

In other cases, some states — flow states — are broken by self-perception. Asking whether you enjoy them chips at their magic.

IV.

Everything is escapism: from a transactional, unfair, ambiguous, and cosmically meaningless life. Not just video games or tiktok, but work, partying, reading…

TLP was right. Media is used as porn. It’s what people turn to when they can’t act.

Porn can be pornography — substituting sex; video games — replacing life’s games with synthetic ones; social media — replacing human interaction.

Porn is escapism, but not all escapism is porn.

Even when people can and have acted, they still turn to the substitutes. Many people who are economically successful play video games to unwind. Their gaming is not pornographic. Which is important to highlight; otherwise this gets too meta — complaining about social media on social media.

Porn gives you the superior but evanescent reward, without the friction of the alternative — cold approaching, apps, dates, fatigue, bodily insecurity, and whatnot. That doesn’t mean porn is bad. It just means that if something wants to replace porn, it has to measure up to it. Life can’t claim to be better through moral grandstanding. The semantic difference between porn and real life does a lot of work rhetorically.

There is no quitting porn. Even in an ideal world, where everybody is 200+ IQ, attractive, partnered up, and happy — sexual pornography, escalism and fantasy would exist. People enjoying exploring alternative worlds; the first step to improving the world is thinking of a different version of it. In an ideal world, we would still be able to think of greater ideals. Even porn — the TLP-type — would still exist. A world where people could act and solve their problems at any time would probably not be an ideal; who knows what would have to change to make that possible.

Porn reveals something uncomfortable about human motivation, which is that people are engineered to choose pleasure over pain. Feelings reveal our values, and to some extent, are the values themselves. Society likes work and exercise because they accomplish other things indirectly — they give you money or make you healthier. Monkeys see the word ‘porn’, and begin to scream like they have been shown a mirror.

Wireheading is here: we call it porn.

I.

Self-improvement is not masturbation, it’s porn.

It doesn’t even have the decency to admit to being false, like sexual pornography. The only way self-improvement can measure up to the real thing is by pretending to be it.

It’s what people pivot to when the big things in their life — troubles with family, relationships, jobs, or large health issues (e.g. obesity, cancer) — either cannot be fixed or are being avoided. Self-improvement makes people feel fulfillment without getting anything they actually want. Low stakes.

Girlfriend never wants sex? Porn. No progress on the job market? Time to improve my diet. Feel low status? Any self-improvement feels meaningful if it’s socially sanctioned, but it never lasts; the neuroticism remains.

Sometimes, people actually can’t solve their own problems. And it’s tragic. But they should at least try a different escape valve. Once you see how self-improvement functions psychologically, it dissolves like peptides into water. People understand why video games and drugs are so entertaining; but they do them anyway, don’t they?

Life improvements are specific: wealth allows you to buy things, but doesn’t transform who you are. Weightlifting improves aesthetics and cardiovascular function, but doesn’t make people smarter (there’s meta-analyses on this). Having a high IQ barely correlates with attractiveness or happiness. Getting better social skills will improve your social relationships, but not much else.

Learning transfer sometimes exists. If you see map vs territory one time, you can see it every time — but it will not necessarily happen. Noticing how unreliable experts can be, or the brittleness of social norms works that way too. But learning doesn’t really make you smarter, and most valuable learning does not generalise. And the general lessons of life can be learned doing anything — if that wasn’t the case, would they really be general? On that subject: learning is overrated.

Discipline transfer doesn’t exist. Like literally, at all. Spending 16 hours a day playing LoL doesn’t transfer into financial accumen. Running marathons doesn’t make you a better coder. Brainrot is real in a specific sense, that if you get used to doing novel and highly stimulating things all of the time — video games, tiktok, travelling, and whatnot — it becomes the new norm.

Otherwise, if you want diamonds, dig.

Improvements often look global because of the halo effect: we think better of people who are more aesthetic, smart, and high class; functional people are more likely to be functional in various facets of everyday life. The actual correlations here are weaker than people think, though — dysfunctional rich families and unhappy attractive people exist.

I believe self-improvement, as a movement, originates from the abolition of legal social classes and Enlightenment values. Social class was always mutable, but now its mutability became legal. The soul of the movement: focusing on improving status-related traits, emphasising willpower over circumstances and physiology — comes from this.

“Self”-“improvement” tells us that fixing a a lot of small, socially legible things will change us. They often don’t. It is the wrong answer to a real problem: the need to find solutions to reconciling the present and future.

Try it: live like that guy — weightlift once every other day, make your bed, eat fresh food, never eat out, 50 cold approaches a day, read philosophy, send job applications to manage at KFC, work hard at your job, nofap, nootropics stack, chicken and broccoli, clean your home, quit video games, quit anime, fight a guy so you “know what it’s like to be a man”.

X.

Advice rarely works.

Especially for the young. It’s typically written by people who like how giving advice makes them feel, or are simply out of touch. Even competent people can do this poorly. Take Bill Ackman (billionaire) for example: he said that “may I meet you?” was a good opening line for young men wanting to pick up women.

Good advice is often generic and trite, e.g:

1. Failure is overrated, but rarely catastrophic.

2. Believe in yourself. In a weird way, you can’t really do anything but that. If you doubt your abilities, you are believing in your own doubt.

3. Think independently.

4. Effort is often wasted, but people would not waste it if it wasn’t valuable.

5. You get rich by owning things.

6. Internal > external motivation in the long run.

7. Ask for things you want.

8. Compounding works.

9. Play your own game.

If a piece of advice wasn’t generic, then it would only work for a few people.

If it didn’t work, then people would be less likely to give it (though they still might).

A common reason advice doesn’t work: people do not believe it will work. This is complicated, because people are often wrong or unaware about what they actually believe. Example: Jack hears the advice “Want to get healthier? Start running”. He thinks that’s a great idea. But his mind is thinking about something else: Isn’t running boring and painful? How much better will it make me feel during the day? Will I actually stick to it?

Sometimes the explanation is more simple. The benefit is delayed: weightlifting is painful for a few moments, but translates to a greater reward later. Humans have trouble with that.

Or, more fundamentally, the person cannot achieve the proposed task. If somebody can’t communicate better, then perhaps they need different advice: pay attention to social cues, learn rules of conversation, or attempt to make guesses about other people’s emotions. But then some people can’t do those things. And so the chain goes.

“If you do Y, you will get X”

Sometimes, they don’t want to do Y.

Or their model of how to do Y is wrong.

Or they want to want X, think they want X, but don’t actually want X.

II.

Mimetic desire is real. It’s still overattributed, particularly when it comes to sexual preferences. People like emphasising it because it gives everybody an escape. If women don’t like men with big knuckles, then it gives the women an out because their attitudes are socially influenced; the men escape because their status doesn’t have to do with their real value, whatever that is.

Sexual attraction isn’t innate or genetic either. I don’t think it’s even possible for it to be. Whether it is “genetic” or “environmental” is an absurd question in the first place; all that can be asked is the extent to which genetic variation produces variation in arousal.

Attraction is often based on what indicators mean —whether they show fertility, dominance, and whatnot. This is why culture only has so much room to work with when it comes to manufacturing people’s preferences.

People complain that porn — whether in the form of pornography, video games, media, politics, or self-improvement — trains you to want certain things and molds our preferences. This is evident, especially if we look at sexual fads in the youth like choking. It’s also totalising in the sense that people choose the porn they watch. They aren’t strapped to the chair, clockwork orange style, and forced to look.

If it wasn’t for the Global American Empire, I wouldn’t be attracted to this A10 eyed 21.6 BMI 19.76 year old girl. How tragic! Why have we all been so brutally mutilated?

L.

I adhere to the signalling theory of education, which posits that most of the monetary value of degrees come from the traits they signal, and not what is learned at school. Skill development matters, but it’s developed alone or on the job.

Interesting theory, but its implications should be taken seriously.

For college admissions, only four years of high school influence your odds of getting in, and one retakable test (SAT, ACT) can play into your favour if your GPA is low. In Spain, it was only 2 years of high school and a set of exams (called Selectividad) that where what decided university admissions.

When I went to uni in the USA, I got a scholarship that paid most of my tuition and waived the requirement for generals, due to my SAT score/grades. That definitely was helpful, but the effort that mattered was a fraction of what I actually put in.

When it comes to college, I think some firms do take into account GPA, but care less as you build up your experience and portfolio. Speaking from personal experience, firms will definitely not hire you based on good grades alone. So I would only recommend tryharding for 3.7+ if you plan on getting into academia, law, or medicine; it’s not like those are the only good white collar careers out there.

V.

Aging is important, but multifaceted and individually dependent. People start puberty at different ages and molecularly age at different rates. Categorically, I would say that the biggest age-related changes are living with parents → living independently; prepubescent → fertile → infertile; no children → children; and in school → out of school.

My contrarian take is that the the physiological changes that occur with aging — cognitive decline, reaction time, athletic performance, and personality — are highly overrated. These variables are pretty consistent from 20 to 35, and this type of aging has gotten easier to prevent with time. At elite levels of athleticism these age differences make a massive difference, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 30% of 35 year olds were more athletic than the median 20 yo.

Where physiological aging dominates is appearance, life stage, and fertility — for both sexes. A smart, athletic, wealthy, and good looking 40 year old man… is still a 40 year old man. He might have more success on the dating market than the average guy, but his age still makes dating much more difficult. A 35 year old woman will have a much harder time conceiving children than a 20 yo.

Ageism interacts with hereditarianism, in the sense that if you think that people have genetic abilities, then you should expect the talented to naturally rise up earlier. That said, there are examples of late bloomers everywhere — that guy who made the best-selling film in China? He was unemployed and living with his mom most of his 20s.

Another theory: if you want children, age is something you will be taking into consideration when you are young. If you don’t, then it’s more likely to be something that will catch you off guard.

MLXG.

The gender war and fertility crisis.

It’s weird. Fertility is falling everywhere, so the explanation needs to be globally universal. But pinning everything onto one variable feels reductive and unrealistic, even if it might be a more casually accurate story.

If I had to pick one upstream variable, I would say technology. Particularly contraceptives, entertainment, and maybe social media — and how the technological development caused cultural changes that reduced fertility. Wealth itself is causal for childbirth within individuals; the same is not necessarily true between countries.

It’s become normalised for women to have careers, so they don’t feel as reliant on men for financial support. They’ve also developed their own culture and validation systems through social media, so they don’t feel as dependent on relational success with the opposite gender to fit in.

Because of that, women are now selecting men on other traits besides providing — relational ability, attractiveness, social status, or other tastes. The message is that men need to step up and provide these things, but the problem is that a lot of the things women select for are not easily changesd, genetically influenced, or zero sum. It’s a message people communicate because it makes them feel good about themselves.

The reasons men want relationships: sex, children, validation, or maybe intimacy — are still there. The problem? The women they are pursuing are now more picky and adversarial. The women have also become more undesirable in their eyes; both sexes have become unaesthetic due to obesity and tattoos/piercings, but those changes are more salient for men because they care more about physical appearance.

There’s a certain sensitivity about responsibility here. People either reach for explanations that blame everything on one sex, or ones that are egalitarian — where both genders are equally complicit or devoid of guilt. These instincts are not necessarily bad, but they prioritise social and emotional fit over accuracy. The idea of moral culpability, in this situation, is kind of nonsensical. People born in 1990 and 1910 are basically genetically identical. Even if they were not, you can’t really blame them for the DNA they have.

If I recall correctly, the declines in fertility are most concertrated in the lower classes and youth. When I was a kid in the 00s and 10s, the big message was that you should have children at the right time. Maybe my generation was the first one to take that idea seriously.

There’s also a separate problem of delayed adulthood — teenagers doing everything later, whether it’s driving, working, drinking, or having sex. Some of this is good; people romanticise some times of dysfunctional externalising behaviours, but they often end in pain, jail, or children out of wedlock.

More important: white collar aspiring zoomers are coming out of school in their 20s looking for work, and then have about a decade to start their lives before their fertility starts to hit a wall (in both sexes). Not exactly the most favourable trajectory to start a large family with.

Oh, and there’s a social recession too. That’s surely a big factor.

LXXVI.

Mental illness is present in the majority of people. It’s typically ignored, accepted as immutable, or considered acceptable. It also doesn’t exist in a weird way; health and positivity come from our own interpretations of the world. There are some mechanical mental disorders like narcolepsy T1 with a clear cause (orexin deficiency) and set of symptoms (waking paralysis/hallucinations, poor sleep, fatigue, cataplexy); some of which are unique to the disorder.

Others are… flimsier. Bipolar, ADHD, C-PTSD, Schizoid, and autism disorders can all overlap in weird ways depending on how you define the lines, symptomatically and even philosophically. Depression, as a condition, is experienced by everybody at some point. People who are diagnosed with depression could be creating and selecting environments that they dislike; or reacting with more sensitivity and intensity to them.

You are not the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It just so happens that they will be similar to you because of environmental confounding and selection.

Confidence is generated by results more than confidence generates them. It’s not an innate quality, though things like calibration or under/overconfidence are influenced by personality. It’s overrated when it comes to real-time performance, but underrated when it comes to making large decisions. e.g. confidence will have little effect on how well you program computers, but a confident person is probably more willing to commit to software as a career.

The hedonic treadmill is real, insomuch as human psychology adapts to its environment, but probably not true in terms of lived experience. e.g. if there are two identical lives, and one person has better speakers, they are living a marginally better life, even if they don’t notice it.

‘People are selfish’ is a good heuristic, insomuch as seemingly altruistic behaviour often has gametheoretical mechanics behind it. It’s false when describing how people perceive themselves, or how they function. It’s complicated by the fact that there are multiple types of altruism — evolutionary, psychological, and energetic.

Psychological altruism is impossible — your brain and its reward function is entirely self-contained. You might feel empathy, but that’s through your brains own structure. Evolutionary altruism is possible through group selection, but I wouldn’t count on it. Individuals are selected for their own fertility, but just because they are selected for something, does not mean genes can directly code for that thing. Energetic altruism is possible in the sense that people can (and often do) engage in actions that benefit other people over themselves.

Positive sum games are better than others, but a positive sum mindset isn’t always better. There’s a weird signalling thing going on here, where nobody wants to signal they are zero sum; zero-sum minded people want to signal they are positive sum, and positive sum people are just positive sum.

Identifying as a hard worker or a happy person are traps, because all hardworking people relax, burn out, and quit — just at different thresholds, in different circumstances. Happy people are the same: they can feel negative emotions. If they make happiness a cornerstone of their identity, their identity collapse when they experience depression, failure, or negativity. Productivity and contentment are both processes and states, it’s difficult to make the distinction, especially in the moment.

Personally, I’ve never bullied or been bullied. But I doubt bullying people is helpful or harmful in the long run. Same for plausibly deniable teasing — I’m sure overweight people get told to lose weight plenty of times, it’s not like the 16th time is going to be any different. Genes and the wind of life dominate.

VI.

Red flags in people:

• Litmus tests don’t exist, all red flags are orange flags.

• Asymmetric mindset. Example: blames others but never takes accountability for anything.

• Unkind or emotionally turbulent in low-stakes situations.

• Consistent dishonesty.

• Falling out with parents. Partially because of genetic transmission, but also because people are less likely to unfair towards their own children.

• Intentional ghosting.

• Not respecting default boundaries (e.g. groping genitals).

• ‘Nothing is just a joke’ applies to self-deprication — often they do actually feel that way about themselves, but are only comfortable talking about it with a certain level of plausible deniability. Or they are humblebragging.

• Extremely into gnosticisms (e.g. Red Pill, Christianity, Feminism, Marxism). Otherwise religion is usually benign and overhated.

• Tattoos and piercings can be orange flags, but they’re kind of overrated in that regard. A person with one tattoo on their back is not going to be different from the average person. Somebody with a body full of large and tacky tattoos, on the other hand…

• Extraversion. Not in the sense that it is bad, but in the sense that extraverts are better at self-presentation relative to other people.

• Diagnosed mental disorders: flag-worthy, but contextual. I’d be interested in when, where, and why they got diagnosed — was it for poor school performance? Falling out with classmates? Bad behaviour in the classroom? Seeking prescription drugs?

• People with self-diagnosed mental disorders: might be making it up, but are often people who are legitimately impaired, even if they are wrong about why.

On the subject of red flags, it’s impossible to treat people perfectly fairly because equality is an ideal, not an essence. It’s also impossible to judge people according to what lies inside; the surface is all that can appear — by definition. Concretely: it’s impossible to judge somebody’s real intelligence indepenent of how it manifests: verbal fluidity, competence, credentials, and whatnot. Internal variables are inferred from external signals.

It would be more accurate to say that people should be judged according to the right appearance. An unattractive woman shouldn’t be dismissed at work if she appears to be good at her job.

MLVVXXIM.

It’s much easier to make friendships when you are younger because school essentially hands a set of peers to you. You also get more value out of them, as you lack an established career or relationship.

One issue I had when I was young is that I didn’t think about relationships transactionally enough. Not in a selfish sense, and definitely not in the neurotic sense where you meticulously track everything you do for people and they do for you. My idea is that talking and interacting with people should be a motivated action, even if it’s just learning. Intimacy/affection can build up with repeated contact.

When I was younger I would socialise and think that I was doing the right thing. Privately, I felt anhedonic and confused; I wanted to enjoy it, but couldn’t. As such, I often spiralled into loneliness, which I have been good at dealing with, but it’s not something you should tolerate because you can.

This kind of goes without saying, but I was not a “normal” teenager. I was terminally online by 12 years old and a hardcore weaboo/gamer who wrote fanfiction. Then there is the fact I didn’t share nationality, religion, or ethnicity with any of my classmates — besides one other American student. I had a weird life.

In retrospect, I think most of my classmates did like me, but found me unrelatable; it’s harder to make friends if you are different. I managed to become friends with some other oddballs, and should have focused more on building rapport with them.

I also was insecure about what constituted a “friend”. Part of it was that I didn’t want to think somebody was a friend but then have them not think of me that way. In the real world, if you think somebody is a friend and treat them that way, that will likely end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.

Society wants to impose scripts that aren’t for you.

That jock who studies for a math test that doesn’t affect his final grade — he’s well rounded and “not what he seems”. That nerd who gives up video games and starts playing volleyball? Doing the right thing, even if he doesn’t actually like sports.

There is no real authentic self, but genes and dispositions do exist. There are going to be psychological differences between people who prefer anime over poerty. Trying to fight that or ignore it is futile.

The reality on the ground is that most people don’t care if you like “low status” hobbies like anime, even if they hate it. You can be a wild person with tons of controversial beliefs; most of the time, people don’t ask you about them. If they do, a straight answer should not be expected.

People massively overrate how much they have to conform in that regard. Reframing is more useful; if somebody asks you whether you like anime, instead of saying “I love anime I am a weeb haha”, you can just say “sure, I guess”. Both can be true.

XXXXX.

Book recommendations:

1. The Mind is Flat (the mind does not work the way people think it does, the “inner self” is nonexistent). Excellent book, but uneven and rhetorical.

2. The Bell Curve (genetic differences between people lead to differences in class and behaviour).

3. How to Meet Friends and Influence People (unfashionable book, but timeless).

4. The Elephant in the Brain (status-seeking explains certain human behaviours). Good book, overextends thesis.

5. The Case Against Education (the monetary value of education comes from signalling ability and not learning). Also overextends thesis, ability confounding explains at least half of the education~income correlation, human capital role is also non-negligible.

6. Zero to One (not just a business book, lots of philosophy and life advice).

All of them can be found on anna’s archive. I would also recommend these blogs:

1. Scott Alexander

2. gwern

3. Cremieux

4. Emil Kirkegaard

5. Minor Dissent

6. Paul Graham

7. Minor Dissent

8. Marginal Revolution

9. Baazaa

10. Naval

If you are into philosophy, I recommend Nietzsche and Buddha.

VIII.

There’s lots of secrets out there, especially ones that are hidden by taboos or mental blocks. In many games the optimal way to play evolves slowly, sometimes items or strategies just appear from the ether. Like the Krieg and AUG in CSGO — they used to be meme guns, they got buffed, and then people started using them. Then people complained they were OP, they got nerfed back to their original state, and people still though they were too strong.

XI.

The “right” thing to do is often the right thing to do. Diet and exercise improve health. Socialisation can feel good and help you. Doing recreational drugs is unhealthy and does nothing for you. Extreme sports are unnecessary and can kill you. Being productive can feel good if you are obsessed and focused; even do good things for your life. Conscientiousness is important.

But I’ve found that the moralised aspect of right and wrong is often misleading. Blaming yourself when things go wrong can be accurate, maybe even necessary, but is never helpful on its own. When people don’t do what they should do, it’s rarely because of a character flaw or a lack of knowledge. It’s usually because of a different issue: not assessing what matters, lack of energy, lack of control over circumstances, that you don’t want what you think you want, improper habituation…

Yep, sorry. I wish I could give more helpful advice.

When I started weightlifting at the age of 15, I ended up damaging my joints so badly it became hard to walk. Once I moved to America for uni, I lost weight and the joint pain started improving. I could walk without feeling pain.

It’s rather humbling to be told that the difference between walking without and with pain is a mere 10 kilograms.

I started weightlifting again, being careful not to injure my joints again. Strength training is considered an effective way to manage the condition, since muscles help compensate for weaker and unstable joints. The problem is that being careful and building muscle are inherently antagonistic optimisaton targets when weightlifting. I was getting stronger… slowly, or not at all. And if I tried more intense weightlifting — more weight or reps — the joint pain would return. If I stop lifting, my muscles atrophy and the condition gets worse. A catch 22. A year ago or so, I decided to quit exercise for good. Then I started weightlifting again, using the Mentzer method — less volume, more intensity. Which does seem to have helped, but again, not as much as I hoped.

I also subluxated my shoulder a few weeks ago. I initially thought it was a dislocation, but I don’t remember feeling my shoulder snap back into place when I pushed it back.

So I’m taking KLOW — a combination of GHK-cu, BPC-157, TB-500, and KPV.

I was surprised by how much science and math is involved in doing this — refrigerating peptides, calculating doses, disinfecting, and whatnot. The actual process of doing them doesn’t require that much effort or discomfort. My guess is that a lot of the other guys doing peptides have experience with steroids or experimental drugs — I’ve never tried either, so all of this was new to me.

I just injected my first dose into my upper abdomen a few hours ago — KLOW (0.53mg; 66mcg of BPC-157). The recommended dose online is 2-8mg.

Several minutes after the injecton, I felt an urge to defecate. The causality behind this is opaque — I usually do so in the morning, and I am a big believer in psychosomatic physiology. It might not have been the drug itself that caused the urge, but the stress of injecting or the habituation of doing so. Otherwise, the only notable symptom I feel is a sting around the injection site. Apparently that’s due to the copper in GHK-cu.

Considering taking reta as well. My weight (68kg/1.71m) is fine, but it was easier to manage my condition when I weighed 60kg. Having abs would also be kinda cool.

The science

The big player in the stack is BPC-157, which has been shown to heal damage to ligaments, muscles, bones, skin, brains, and guts in… animals and anecdotes. Some people suspect it, and other angiogenic peptides (including GHK-cu and TB-500) cause cancer. Angiogenesis stimulates the creation of new blood vessels, which could then feed tumours, and then cause them to grow.

Some anti-cancer drugs, like Axitinib, treat cancer by doing the exact opposite of what these peptides do: inhibit angiogenesis through the VEGFR pathway (however that works).

Biotech and peptides are not exactly my field of expertise, but I think it is unlikely KLOW causes cancer. It’s not a dealbreaker for me; I had already ordered everything I needed at a time I thought this side effect was more likely. It’s a risk I am willing to take… for one cycle. My other options are not great: doing nothing, steroids, different peptides, or getting addicted to vicodin — ala Dr. House.

Things that have been proven to cause cancer in humans are almost always shown to be carcinogens in animals. So much, that some scientists think that all human carcinogens also cause cancer in animals. The only compound I’ve heard of that causes cancer in humans, but not animals, is arsenic. To date, there is no evidence — not bad evidence BPC-157 causes cancer in animals — though testing that exhaustively requires a specialised environment: animals (e.g. mice) genetically altered to have cancer mutations or the implantation of tumours into animals to see if the cancer grows.

That said, I think a lot of influencers online recommend peptides irresponsibly. The details of these drugs — main effects, side effects, drug interactions, mechanisms of action, dosing — are unknown, based on animal research, or not properly studied. Fortunately, it seems like GLP drugs are safe… as long as you don’t overdose.

Which is a surprisingly easy mistake. It can happen if you don’t properly calculate the dose or calibrate the amount of liquid in the syringe before injecting.

Based on the BPC animal studies I’ve read, the doses people recommend of BPC-157 (250-500mcg per day) are excessive. Studies on mice frequently use doses of either 10 mcg/kg or 10 ng/kg — both tend to have similar efficacy. Scaled to my weight, those would be doses of 680mcg and 0.68 mcg respectively. Beyond that, larger animals have slower metabolism, so they are typically given smaller doses, even when you adjust for body size.

I’ve read through the history of the compound. It sounds like the peptide might not even be something the body actually produces, but an accident of nature, if it works at all. Most of the research on the compound is directed by the Sikiric and his Croatian lab — who discovered it. That muddies the picture a bit.

From what I see, Sikiric does not seem to be motivated by either money or fame — he’s in it for the love of the game. Of course, he could still be full of it. As could the graduate students who do his work for him. So, if his research on the effects of BPC-157 does turn out to be flawed, I find it unlikely it is due to deliberate obfuscation.

Thought of researching this in depth, but decided against it. So here’s a short article on why I am not interested, and why the controversy over the disorder remains.

The problem with these disorders is their symptoms: constant fatigue, pains, waking up tired, depression.

It’s not that they are fake; I’ve heard that 20-50% of the cases are plausibly malingering, drug-seeking behaviour, or extrapolating temporary issues to be permanent — I believe it.

The problem is they are not legible: a doctor can believe you are tired, but can’t really know it. They might not believe certain patients have a medical disorder, and perhaps might be right to in certain cases. This aggrevates the patients who actually do experience pain and can’t always trust their doctors will understand.

The other problem is that the symptoms can be caused by many different issues: IBD, IBS, anorexia, autoimmune disorder, nutritional issues, cancer, hypothyroidism, sleep apnea, lyme, glycogen disorders, mitochondrial disorder, EDS, and AMPD1 deficiency. To properly vet what is the issue, doctors would have to run tons of tests: psych eval, sleep studies, infection tests, thyroid panels, blood work, and genomic tests.

Say you have a doctor trying to diagnose CF in a patient he believes. He tries a blood work — nothing. Genomic analysis — nothing. Then maybe he decides to go with a CF diagnosis — it validates the patient and opens them up to medical treatments that could help them.

If we accept that a lot of patients diagnosed with these disorders either suffer from a different problem, or don’t have any real issues, then how are we supposed to figure out what actually causes fibromyalgia, the disorder — not the excel column or abstract idea — when the symptoms of it cannot be traditionally measured?

You just want to believe you are special because your mom didn’t love you and you need to feel good feelings because that irreparably wounded you

…What if you actually are special and different?

You just don’t care because you are trying to avoid getting hurt

…What if it actually doesn’t matter?

You are just trying to blame systems or other people for your own failures

…What if you aren’t always the cause of your circumstances?

You just hate that guy because he rejected you

…What if you actually hate him for a different reason?

You just hate travelling because your parents forced you to go on trips and you didn’t like them and you are traumatised

…What if you just naturally dislike that type of novelty, and the fact my parents forced you to go on vacations has nothing to do with it?

Everything you do is because you are hurt, traumatised, and broken

…What if that’s not actually true?

If you look deep enough into your soul you can find hidden trauma, ancestral epigenetics, metacognition, enlightenment, the qualia of how it feels to have irritable bowel syndrome, the bayesian prior that my second cousin wants to have sex with me, a repressed memory of a CEO doing cocaine off my thigh, past-life karma because I am Hitler’s reincarnation, quantum my astrological north node, me microbiome’s opinion on free will, the simulation layer I’m glitching on, the exact timestamp when my nervous system got hijacked by capitalism, the specific flavor of white fragility hiding in my mitochondria, the latent superhero archetype waiting for my ayahuasca ceremony, the Gödel-incompleteness loophole in my moral intuitions, the vibrational colon of my dark feminine/masculine polarity, esoteric racist religions about sacrificing Mexicans to worship the Japanese, the Bayesian update I’m refusing to make about my own irrelevance, the qualia of my imposter syndrome’s imposter syndrome, the Stoic virtue that’s actually just repressed rage, the Zen koan my ego is using to avoid paying taxes, the simulation’s debug menu I access by microdosing, the ancestral curse my therapist says is “just” intergenerational trauma but my sexy tall thin flat chested A10 kind low cortisol unhinged sensitive and in love with me shaman says is literal witchcraft.

…What if I actually have no idea why I do anything, and just know I do it?

II.

A more explicit statement: we should only assume the surface-level read of a situation is wrong when it fails, and then consider different theories. Cynical, incisive interpretations of human behaviour can feel elucidating, but are reductive, dysfunctional, and hard to escape if they are the default interpretation.

Some psychoanalytic theories make sense to me — that human desires are contagious, or sometimes we want things because of what they represent instead of what they are. The problem I see is that the kind of person who likes psychoanalysis is usually somebody who likes seeing through things or being fashionable, rather than seeing things for what they are.

• Autosomal: ~30% English, ~20% Scottsirish, ~10% Jewish, ~24% Spanish, ~14 Amerindian, ~2% Black

• YDNA: R1b1a2a1a2a1b1a

• MDNA: R (HV). Defintiely a surpise, my mom is of British ancestry, but this haplogroup is more common in Mediterranean/MENA/Jewish populations.

My genotype has been decoded by Ancestry, so I decided to do some digging with the help of consumer genomics software. I found out I have:

Kleefestra syndrome

It’s similar to Down’s syndrome. My face looks unremarkable and I don’t have the other symptoms associated with the disorder. It’s almost certainly a false positive or a mosiacism (so only some of my cells have the disorder, but not all of them).

9q34 deletion syndrome, now known as Kleefstra syndrome, is a rare genetic disorder. Terminal deletions of chromosome 9q34 have been associated with childhood hypotonia, distinctive facial appearance and intellectual disability. Most individuals fall within the moderate to severe range of intellectual disability, while a minority shows mild delays and have total IQ scores within the low-normal range

AMPD1 deficiency

I don’t have any AMP deaminimase,so I can’t metabolise AMP, causing worse muscle performance. I believe it.

Adenosine monophosphate deaminase deficiency type 1 or AMPD1, is a human metabolic disorder in which the body consistently lacks the enzyme AMP deaminase,^[1] in sufficient quantities. This may result in exercise intolerance, muscle pain and muscle cramping. The disease was formerly known as myoadenylate deaminase deficiency (MADD).

Many people are “asymptomatic”, but I think that’s an artefact of them adjusting to different pain thresholds for exercise. Everybody feels pain after lots of exercise, just at different times and intensities.

Cone-Rod Dystrophy

This disorder causes people to go blind when they are middle-aged. Fortunately, the variant I have is not a sufficient cause of the disorder:

The p.R713Q variant of the semaphorin-4a-encoding gene, SEMA4a, has been reported to cause autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa. Here we show three families with retinal degeneration in which unaffected family members are either homozygous or heterozygous for the variant. The p.R713Q variant in SEMA4A is insufficient to cause either autosomal recessive or autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa and is unlikely to be pathogenic.

NOD2 Digestive variant

Associated with Yao syndrome, Crohn’s disease, and Irritable Bowel Disease. Embarrassingly enough, not a surprise, but I have developed the disorder.

Studies of Crohn’s disease have consistently implicated NOD2 as the most important gene in disease pathogenesis since first being identified in 2001. Thereafter, genome-wide association, next-generation sequencing and functional analyses have all confirmed a key role for NOD2, but despite this, NOD2 also has significant unresolved complexity. More recent studies have reinvigorated an early hypothesis that NOD2 may be a single-gene cause of disease, and the distinct ileal stricturing phenotype seen with NOD2-related disease presents an opportunity for personalized diagnosis, disease prediction and targeted therapy.

IL4 receptor variant

Not a surprise, I have awful allergies and had two asthma attacks.

Mannose-binding protein deficiency

Makes you more prone to pumponary infections. I do remember having awful lung (?) infections in high school, where I was constantly coughing up mucus, thirsty, and unable to speak. Most people are asymptomatic.

Mannose-binding lectin deficiency is a condition that affects the immune system. People with this condition have low levels (deficiency) of an immune system protein called mannose-binding lectin in their blood. Whether this deficiency makes affected individuals prone to recurrent infections is not clear.

ITPase deficiency

Rare but otherwise boring disorder, just means I can’t take thiopurine drugs.

Mutations at COL11A2 and COL4A4

I was actually looking for evidence of Ehlers Danlos syndrome, since I have an extremely flexible body, and the hypermobility runs in the family. I did not find it, but I did find those two mutations.

The C4 mutation is linked to keratoconus but is otherwise benign. The C11 mutation is more controversial because it is rare, but most think it is benign.

Squamous cell lung carcinoma

Found in 2 of 28 patients with lung cancer.

I am a carrier of:

• Arylsulfatase A pseudodeficiency (rs6151429). Messes up medical tests.

• TAR Syndrome (rs139428292). No forearm bone (as in none, deadass), low platelet count. Extremely rare (1 in 100k)

• Metaphyseal chondrodysplasia, McKusick type (rs727502777). Dwarfism. Also extremely rare (1 in 200k).

• Pancreatitis (rs1800076). Controversial variant.

• Stargardt disease (rs1801466). Acquired blindness disorder, also highly controversial variant. Probably real though, based on p-value.

I also found out that if I had a baby with my little sister, there is a 25% chance it would have dwarfism, and a 25% chance it would have no forearms. Glad the incest taboo exists!

So, a better question: should people’s spatial and ontological distance away from you influence whether you care about their thoughts? Extrapolating from this example, I’d say no. Then, the question is, what makes somebody’s judgement worth anything?

Let us assume you and your perfect clone no longer share sensory input, and have now separated and lived lives for three years, and meet up again. Should you care about what they think about you? Inevitably, due to the separatation in experience and knowledge, both of you will have taken on different paths in life and have different knowledge.

Imagine the same thought experiment but with an identical twin, then a sibling, then a cousin, a random person, and then a rock. What we see here is that the extent to which we trust a thing’s judgement depends on their proximity to us, particularly their proximity in values.

If two things have different values, then naturally they will make different judgements. Even if you acknowledge that values and perspective are relative, it’s impossible to believe anything different from what you believe. Your perspective will always dominate.

Now, imagine the same thought experiment, but the subjects — the copy, identical twin, and so on — are reasonably more intelligent than you and know 2x as much about the world than you do. You might not privilege their judgement more than yours, but you will inevitably take their higher levels of competence into account when evaluating it.

Now, imagine all of the judging subjects have guns pointed at your head. They will shoot you if you do not care about what they think about you. Unless your death drive dominates, you will probably end up caring, or at least pretending to care about what they think about you.

So

What I am trying to communicate is that the importance of a subject’s judgement to another subject depends on the following factors:

1. How similar their values are to yours.

2. How much they know about you.

3. How competent they are.

4. How much leverage they have over you.

When we meet people we do not know in real life, it doesn’t make sense to care about what they think — there’s no guarantee they share your values, have any leverage over you, are competent, and it is very unlikely they know anything about you. However, it is sensible to care about people’s opinions of you if they possess some of those factors — leverage is sufficient, otherwise, the other three are necessary and only sufficient when together.

Caring about what other people think of you is stigmatised as a result — it signals that other people have leverage over you. Or, that you are not properly recognising which people actually matter, which is quite common, sometimes I commit this error myself.

There's nothing inherently insecure about caring about other people’s opinions. In fact, I would argue that feeling insecure when somebody you care about negatively judges you is healthy — it leads you to confront the cause: is it value misalignment? Incomplete information? Poor cognition? Something else?

People don’t always have the best judgement regarding themselves, due to the inherent limitations of self-knowledge. Other people’s opinions can be grounding in that regard, but I generally think they are more misleading than guiding. As such, I would recommend trusting your own judgement by default.