Doubtingthomas Philosophy Topic

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@doubtingthomas is no longer allowed to post in any topic except this one. He’s also not allowed to use anonymous mode or PMs.

This is due to violating boundaries, such as repeatedly PMing me. He did that again recently after being warned that it would get him banned. And he misquoted yesterday which, at this forum, is a serious rules violation, which he knows. He also isn’t trying to learn CF, writes bad posts and hijacks other people’s topics. A lot of his bad behavior is an attempt to get my attention.

He is allowed to quote from other topics and share his thoughts about them here.

This one topic limit is an alternative to banning or micromanaging him. I’m not willing to keep interacting with him by giving him warnings or other attention when he breaks rules. I also am unwilling to block him because I’m the owner and only active moderator here; me not seeing his disruptive activities won’t fix this. If this doesn’t work well, the next step is I’ll ban him with no further warning.

I don’t see a good way to actually prevent his account from posting elsewhere, so my current plan is to just ban him if he does that. Locking him to trust level 1 should prevent anonymous mode and PMs.

EDIT: I made a new group that can only reply in the Other category. It can’t start new topics in Other and it doesn’t have permissions in other categories. I took DT out of the regular member group and put him in that group instead. That mostly locks his account to following the one topic rule. If he replies to other topics in Other, besides this one, I’ll ban him.

If I ban DT, it will be an indefinite ban pending problem solving. Simply waiting a fixed period of time wouldn’t fix things. Since I don’t want to give him attention, he wouldn’t be welcome to contact me. He’d have to do something like improve dramatically and write a high quality philosophy blog for a few years until someone sends me an article from it without DT asking them to, at which point I could notice he has improved and offer him the opportunity to write one post analyzing what he did wrong, talking about how he has improved and solved the problems, etc., at which point I’d read it and reconsider. I won’t repeat this information later.

As usual, I’m being unconventionally lenient and going way out of my way to be nice to problem users. This helps create a clear differentiation between my forum and other forums which ban people for disagreeing or for breaking unwritten rules.

EDIT 2, 2023-10-24: Rules updates: @doubtingthomas may only write philosophy related posts here. I’ve updated the topic title accordingly. Also, posts must contribute positively to the forum in his judgment and may not tag anyone with @name. More details.

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“including so things” is confusing to me. Is it correct grammar or did you make a mistake?

If I rewrote the sentence like this (below) will it have the same meaning.

This = Knowing how to handle open questions or candidate ideas that one doesn’t yet have a conclusion about is an important skill. That includes knowing how to be open to an idea without it leading to negative emotions.

Edit: The second paragraph is actually a question. I put a full stop there instead of a question mark. It’s a mistake that I make quite often.

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I’ve had related feelings as well but not as extreme. I won’t use any of the words that you used to describe how I felt. I want to give a rough approximation of what I mean by not as extreme. I don’t know how helpful or accurate this will be but if I think it might give some perspective so I’ll put a number to not that extreme. If your feelings are as strong as X then I would say mine are 0.2 to 0.4 of X.

I’ll bring up something related to this. This discussion was on basecamp but I think it got deleted. I might be misrepresenting or misremembering somethings but I think I remember the right gist. I have a bad attitude in life. I generally try to find reasons to declare people as bad or waste in the sense that what they are doing isn’t worth much or they are actually causing harm. In that discussion I asked Elliot about Musk and how his achievement rank compared to all humans in who have ever lived. Elliot is critical of Musk. One one hand I want to believe that Musk isn’t actually accomplishing something great or is causing harm in some ways (because of my bias) on the other hand I think that Elliot doesn’t like Musk because Elliot is jealous of Musk. I think Elliot is jealous of Musk because so many people think Elon is the most important person alive and is solving most important problems facing humanity but Elliot doesn’t get as much appreciation even though he is the greatest philosopher alive. This is an unsettled debate in my mind and this stuff makes me considerably emotional which makes me think that I’m very likely wrong here.

In that same discussion I brought up Eliezer Yudkowsky in context of an article that Elliot wrote on him Curiosity – Eliezer Yudkowsky Is a Fraud. I haven’t read the article, I haven’t read anything by EY. I just used the title of the article to help me with my bias of wanting to reject people and discard them as waste or bad. I don’t remember how the conversation went on but I remember that Elliot said he liked EY’s book and found some things useful. The book is on philosophy which was even more surprising to me. How can Elliot find value in someone on whom he wrote an article titled that someone is a fraud. That further strengthened my realization that Elliot thinks much more in depth than I was assuming. I was projecting my negativity bias onto Elliot.

This is my input on the negativity point. When Elliot points out how irrationality is pervasive and reason for so many problems, it can be hard to know how that makes Elliot feel. I think that if most people were to write an article titled person X is fraud they would have negative feelings towards them and won’t find anything of value in them. Elliot is not like most people.

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Hating on successful people is a pretty common cultural convention. I think this is a bias of mine that I’ve learned from culture. Elliot has shown no signs that he’s jealous of Musk.

This is related to your point about being robotic. I’m just concluding on the basis of my bias that Elliot must be jealous. I have picked up no emotional display from Elliot towards Musk. He’s only given me arguments for why he thinks his projects have engineering and scientific mistakes among others. Does that make Elliot robotic? I don’t think so. I think the right path here is to overcome a bad cultural convention.

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No. You should have done like 20x more work to resolve this on your own before trying to solicit Elliot’s attention, and effort explaining himself.

Try instead:

  • Original:
  • Equivalent (modification in bold):

It’s important how one handles open questions or candidate ideas that one doesn’t yet have a conclusion about. A reason it’s important is so that those things don’t lead to negative emotions.

This is a misquote. You misquoted a quote that was evident directly above your misquote. It says “including so those things”.

The misquote could be a source of your confusion. But instead of doing a super-minor double check to see if you’d read and re-written correctly, you chose to spread that confusion to others.

What is the purpose of saying “It’s a mistake that I make quite often.”? Are you trying to get someone to pursue that line of thought with you, to explain what the root cause of the mistake is/could be, how it ties into general issues in your thinking, and so on? If you are, you should say so. You should open up a separate topic, and be clear about your asks.

What I think the purpose of “It’s a mistake that I make quite often.” is, is that you are trying to make others witness to your self-deprecation. You’re conveying I can’t even get question marks right. You are trying to signal how weak and pitiful you are. You are presenting a complex that is seriously problematic. This judgement is formed partially based your posting history.

Disclaimer: Although I’m replying to something in Unbounded, I have not addressed this recent curi article; and really, actually, genuinely, I’m not ready for strictly unbounded discussion. This is a one-off reply that fails to be better-placed elsewhere.

1 Like
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Starting a topic in the Unbounded category and replying in Unbounded are different things. Replying doesn’t mean you want Unbounded discussion. I don’t want people to be blocked from replying to Unbounded topics just because they don’t want to initiate Unbounded discussions.

Also, lmf doesn’t want to have an Unbounded discussion anyway, so I just moved this topic to Other. (He said “I am unwilling to put in such an effort” to debate now.)

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I think so too that wrongly reading what was written is one source of my confusion.

How do you feel about me that I did not try to do a super-minor double check and instead chose to spread the confusion to others?

Edit: I ask this question because you pointing out that I made this mistake made me feel bad. I felt bad because to me it looks like that you think that I’m a bad person for not choosing to do such a minor error correction and then choosing on top of that to spread that confusion. The other thing is that I didn’t even make this choice. I did read through the post once again but missed that I misquoted.

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Thank you for clarifying. Now I am able to much better understand that paragraph.

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You are posting emotional and derailing stuff in someone else’s thread about Quitting CF. You have said multiple baiting and insulting things to try to get Elliot’s attention. This is a very inappropriate place for you to be doing that.

I have some replies to @lmf about his original post. But it is actually harder to write them with your posts in the thread. I can just ignore your posts. But they have so many problems that it is hard to just ignore them and post in the thread after them: by not challenging the things that you said, it could look like I agree or think they were fine. Posting my own replies while ignoring yours could be misleading about how egregiously bad and wrong I think some of the things you said were.

The rule is that you are supposed to copy/paste quotes if possible, not hand-type them. I believe you have also been told this directly.

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I’m sorry.

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I didn’t come away thinking that. I haven’t been able to overcome the lack of motivation problem. I came away thinking that @Lebowski too haven’t been able to overcome the lack of motivation, energy, drive etc. problem. The lack of drive problem has been discussed on this forum before as well. Here’s one example.

I don’t remember what I took away from that discussion. My goal was to find out the reason for why I’m not driven and I was hoping that that discussion will have to answer to that question somewhere in it. Relooking at that discussion now I think one of the point made there was that the reason I’m not motivated to learn philosophy or do other improvement projects is because I truly do not understand how learning philosophy can improve my life. I might pay lip service to the idea that becoming better at philosophy would improve my life a lot of ways but I do not truly understand it.

I think @Lebowski was agreeing with you that they haven’t actually ever wanted to try to improve. And they were giving a reason for why they haven’t done things to improve. In this article Curiosity – Energy, Drive, Life Elliot also said something related about how people lack energy and drive.

You need some energy – some caring about life and taking opportunities and running with them (and caring about reason not just “fun”) – or you should not expect to get very far with philosophy or much of anything worthwhile.

When people find something fun it is much easier to find motivation to continue doing that activity. I think when @Lebowski said they don’t find it fun I think this is what they meant.

PS: I have only barely skimmed the above discussion and have not been able to draw any conclusions from it so I’m aware of the fact that I’m missing the context about @Lebowski. Within the context your interpretation of what Lebowski was doing might seem obvious. But I wanted to share an alternate explanation of how I saw things.

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They come from e.g. starting to lose an argument and needing to find a way to disagree with some threatening idea.

What is a threatening idea? Is it an idea that makes my anti-rational memes feel challenged? I believe that most bad feelings are due to anti-rational memes so if an idea is making me feel bad, is it because anti-rational memes are being challenged and thus the anti-rational memes are producing bad feelings so that I don’t further think and adopt that new idea?

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You can even just say that you’re not interested in something and why.

Not finding some article/idea interesting is me problem not a you problem right? How does it provide value to you? Isn’t it the same as asking you to provide more direct value to me?

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@doubtingthomas have you been in contact with Rami, any of his friends, or any Crit Rats?

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No

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How do I know this? I regard is as the best available theory given current knowledge. I don’t know a refutation of it and I don’t know of any viable alternative.

In the second sentence of this paragraph I think you meant to write I regard this or I regard it.

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Is this your advice in general or was it applicable for this specific confusion?

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Can I get access to old PMs I’ve sent people before?

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Hi @lmf. Do you still check this? I would like to connect with you if you’re interested.

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Continuing the discussion from Is The World Good?:

Can you do a comprehensive analysis and share a more complete picture? To me it looks like you’re cherry picking bad stuff. Can you also share examples of elites trying to do good stuff and making things better?

Here are some examples I know off the top of my head of elites doing good stuff:

  1. Cost Plus Drugs - Wikipedia
  2. Breakthrough Energy - Wikipedia
  3. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - Wikipedia

I think it’s an error to make such a generalized statement like it would be bad to help the elites. It’s not like elites is one uniform thing and all of them are same and helping one of them would result in same bad things as working for the worst ones.

You like Apple right but not Coca Cola or Google? So you’d recommend working for Apple right? Can you list some other companies you think are good?