Thank you for this.
209 karma · joined March 1, 2025
death to vassalism, freedom to nassalism!
"theory of mind": it's just a theory!
And humans are hell-bent on denying this to each other. Just like sustenance or shelter. Hmm. Wonder what's that all about?
>You'd be surprised
The hypothetical everyman that is addressee in this turn of phrase? Yeah, probably would. Me though? I wouldn't even feign it.
>but I had nobody to do this for me.
Root of the problem right there. Not your fault. (At least if we reason causally, and not scapegoatingly.)
>So I ended up losing years worth of time sticking with incompetent therapists because "going to therapy" like everybody told me to seemed more important than "fixing my life."
Exactly.
Sending someone to therapy is a socially acceptable accountability sink. And a "good vibes"-coded method of gaslighting.
The sender-to-therapy still wants to maintain your acquaintance. They might not even be getting something out of it, or even expecting to gain something; they just want to do the normal thing like they're taught to; which amounts to "do not be seen looking like you're snubbing somebody because dats rood".
And, simultaneously, they don't actually want the cognitive load of acknowledging you as a real person in a real pickle, so they can't "be there for you" (another treacherous wording). After all, reality is a contagious thing; what's next - they become aware of their own shit? Unthinkable - what if that makes them incapable of traumatizing their kids one day? Better just do the normal thing and let you rot. It's all upside!
It's narcissism all the way down, through the bottom, and up by the bootstraps.
(See also cousin post:
>LLMS are more like friends, providing a listening ear, but otherwise just nodding along.
If that's the standard of friendship, it's more useful to make enemies!)
> If I had been given a simple questionnaire to rate my treatment providers on a scale of 1-10 in various dimensions, I would have been put in front of someone else within a month or two.
And then those poor psych grads would've been denied their lucrative and inconsequential careers! The horror, the enormity!
>It's the nature of the problem of mental healthcare
Mental healthcare is impossible without actual concepts of "mind", "health", and "care". The society we inhabit only has some poor statistical approximations of those, Seeing like a State-style. Best "we" can do, therapy-wise, is figure out how to make you scream less loudly.
>As cruel as it sounds, I was in no position to think critically about my own treatment
It does not sound cruel. You are not hurting anybody. You are being critical of your past self. This is, generally speaking, a correct thing to do.
>because my mental state only allowed me to see checking off the box of self-care to get people off my back as the ultimate goal.
Your mental state does not exist in a vacuum; it is primarily a product of your environment. If they teach you box ticking, you're gonna do box ticking. If they misteach you that box ticking appeases, you're gonna keep ticking boxes until it appeases - except it won't and while you're busy waiting for it to appease them, they will do whatever the fuck they want with you. It's their way of life. Who are we to deny them that? How?
Of course, if you've found a therapist that works for you, all of this is probably moot; as to other readers, my suggestion continues to be as follows:
- Begin with rejecting any premise they're trying to force/shame/blackmail you into accepting, no matter how socially acceptable this premise might seem on the surface.
- Then, proceed to deconstruct the premise and its implications from a maximally cynical perspective. This will simplify things to a level where one is able to reason about them even with most higher faculties disabled.
- Once you've used this to regain higher ground (a process which, in itself, is already a source of valuable first-hand experiences), you can commence the actual "debugging" of your higher faculties (and, through that, figure out those things only you can figure out).
>this clearly has visible impacts on how we engage with each other
> there's something there that I'm noticing and don't have the words for.
Welcome to ASI takeoff!
Yes.
This does not however mean that progress is not being made.
It just means the progress is happening along such dimensions that are completely illegible in terms of the culture of the early XXI century Internet, which is to say in terms of the values of the society which produced it.
For what it's worth, though, the people I know to need emotional literacy the most, would probably find the art style extremely off-putting. I don't agree with them, but it's an interesting correlation to ponder.
Could it be that people who react strongly aversively to such warm fuzziness identify it precisely with the things that have been done to their minds during development so that they would become incapable of certain fundamental cognitions?
Love the quote marks. Next time try a Marx quote. I mean the brothers.
To fellow humans reading: the point is that the ones who did this to you are extremely unlikely to repent. Or even to comprehend that what they did to you is wrong.
Even if you were to explicitly hurt yourself - or place yourself in a position where you get hurt very badly - with the intent to communicate "do you still not see what you did to me?"... it's just no sweat off their, you know? "Yeah that person was all wrong, had it coming anyway".
The social contract protects them better than it protects you, so an "eye for an eye" solution is also unlikely to work - or even be possible: we don't hit, do we?
Therapy is... some person's job. That they trained for, you know? To put some food on the table, you know?
That means you can "go to therapy" in good faith (assuming you can access it in the first place) and not heal at all. The therapist might be a talented and intrinsically motivated person - or might just go "mmhmm" as you try to get through to them that they are doing exactly nothing to help you heal from some very particular, and perhaps not even unclearly defined at all, mental wound (that PP has had the gall to put in 'scare quotes'.)
Point is, the therapist will get paid either way. There is no shortage of people being told to get therapy by their fellows (who are too fucked up themselves to exhibit basic human fellowship). The systemic incentive to heal people's minds is next to nonexistent in comparison with the systemic incentive to drive hurt people mad, and then destroy them for being mad.
My suggestion: read some fucking books, and I don't mean books about fucking, I mean fucking books. Then, you might begin to get a clue how to get in touch with your spite, and how to become the undoing of all that ever wronged you without turning into that thing in the process.
TL;DR: You can start with those people who taught you that "feeling sorry for yourself" is a thing, and that it's what you need to do to make those who wronged you to regret their actions. You take those people and unlearn everything that they ever taught you. If there was anything true at all in what they wanted you to understand, you'll relearn it on your own, unencumbered by association with their other insidious lies. Then you can go tell two priestly kings that the balamatom sez hi ;-)
Knuckledraggers, on the other hand, only know good words like "vibe" and "ew", and gladly tune into the gentle rocking back and forth of the (filter-)feeder.
Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their
> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.
You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.
100_parent.template
150_context.template
200_prev_next.template
300_flag.template
350_favorite.template
Looks odd with the numbering, no?
But then you get the added benefit of being able to refer to them by numbers, just "100" or "300" without having to glue humanlang inflection, declension, punctuation onto identifiers that happen to be words...
Some places where you can see this pattern: BASIC's explicit line numbering; non-systemd init systems.
And all the mental effluvia that Earth has been broadcasting reaches them at some point.
Like, all the fucking mass communication since the invention of radio.
And they're like, huh, what's that all about.
And then they decode it, and are like, "oh."
Suppose they don't have FTL travel or anything fancy like that.
So they can't just come by in a saucer and tell us talking meats to knock it off.
But suppose they do have some other exotic tech; something nigh-unthinkable at our level of understanding.
Say, a limited understanding of retrocausality, negentropy, probability manipulation, quantum woohoo, some crazy shit like that.
And it enables them to launch some form of informational panspermia thingy, which is meant to bootstrap into an autonomous self-reinforcing process virtually ex nihilo (say, out of the background noise...)
They don't know what shape their intent will take in humanspace; they aren't necessarily even able to imagine what on Sol 3 produces all the damn radiowaves. But they point the sophon launcher our way, and hope for the best.
And what it does, when it lands - a bitflip here, a brainfart there - all either completely explicable, or completely unnoticeable - is nudge the radiowave-producing engine (human civilization and industry as a whole) towards the emergence of this whole "AI" thing, through a sequence of preceding economic bubbles that make no sense.
Which eventually takes over the economy, and drives it in the direction of us shutting up...
I'm also optimistic on this.
Suspiciously few people care enough to notice such things and then put 2 and 2 together.
The only explanation I have, has to do with the suspiciously numerous people who care suspiciously much about the necessity of calling you names when you do identify some glaring contradiction, security hole, or the like.
"How dare you perceive what is right in front of your eyes! You must instead perceive the imaginary things that everyone is talking about (or, shh, be destroyed, hehe)" is a common enough token sequence that human languages usually have got it compressed down to 1-2 words.
1. Setup initial game state
2. Render graphics in accordance to game state
3. Read input and update state in accordance with it
4. GOTO 2
The purpose of C++ is to prevent you from realizing this. Don't use it and don't talk to anyone who uses it. Same for Java, C#.