What it is Like to Start Seeing the Progressive Left for What it is.

Fascinating video. This woman recently started seeing the DNC and progressive left for what they are. She describes the experience of scales falling from her eyes.

I created a transcript of her 3-minute video:

I feel like I have a unique perspective with this whole election thing. Because I used to be very, very far left, like I was one of the people having a fucking mental breakdown in 2016 when he won, right? And I didn't even like him up until six months ago, when it became very obvious that they were staging a coup and tried to assassinate him. And then some shit started clicking. So I'm still very new to this whole side of things. But the thing is, when I was very far left, like, radically far left, I thought I knew what was going on. I genuinely believed I was informed. I thought I knew better than everybody else, and that's what these people think, too. And the thing is I would get so triggered and so angry when people would question me because I didn't actually know what the hell I was talking about. I thought I did, but really I didn't actually know any policies. I didn't actually know any politics. All I actually knew was what I had seen online, in mainstream media, and because everybody was saying, I just assumed it had to be right, right. And I think where a lot of this comes from is like, people just don't want to be wrong. Like, it's humbling and it's embarrassing to acknowledge that you were wrong or that you didn't know as much as you thought you did, but I would get so defensive and fly off the handle when and whenever somebody would question me, because I didn't actually have any talking points, and the talking points I did have were inaccurate.

But I didn't want to be wrong so I just kept fucking regurgitating. I just kept echoing the same shit that I was hearing over and over again, and that's what people are still doing. And I I don't blame them. I'm not mad at them, because really, I mean, if you're only exposed to that, then that's what you're gonna believe.

But it's crazy to be on the other side of it for this election and see just how misinformed people are, and they will argue with you, and I won't have a card, because they will argue with you till they're blue in the face because they are just so convinced that they're right, and I was one of those people, and the fear they're feeling is very real. I'm not invalidating the fear. I'm just it's just that the fear is not founded in anything factualbecause it's not the things that they're scared about. It's not going to happen. It didn't happen last time, it's not going to happen this time.

And it's just it's so crazy. It's like being the sober person at a party full of drunk people.

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About Our Societal Death Spiral . . .

Gad Saad writes:

A fundamental question that I ask people when I'm gauging their intellectual honesty is to describe for me what the evidence would need to look like in order for them to alter a given position that they hold. With that in mind, is there any reality that would cause the West to snap out of its parasitic ideological rapture and implement the necessary cataclysmic auto-corrective measures? If yes, we must still have some hope to hold on to. If not, it is going to be a painful death spiral.

Let's start by trying to convince people to use basic induction to convince them that A = A. That would be a good start. It's the basis for the Rule of Law.

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Asch Conformity Experiments Confirmed

STEVE STEWART-WILLIAMS:

Not everything you were taught in intro psych was false! Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments have once again successfully replicated. For the classic length-of-line experiment, participants conformed 33% of the time: very close to the original rate. For political opinions, they conformed 38% of the time. Link.

Other related articles on this website:

Why you need to be the one to speak up

Brett Weinstein Discusses the Importance of Speaking Up

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Video Synopsis of Jonathan Haidt’s Newest Book: “The Anxious Generation”

Jonathan Haidt's newest book, The Anxious Generation, is out. I bought a copy but haven't read it (though I've watched several interview of Haidt and he makes a compelling case). The statistics are sobering:

Here's a 7-minute video synopsis of Haidt's book to whet your appetite:

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Intelligent People Excel at Fooling Themselves

This is an excellent 15-min video by After Sokol. Psychologist have found that highly intelligent people are great at fooling themselves, especially when they form tribes.

Here is an excerpt from the video:

Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as relating to a polarizing subject, gun control, those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias. The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies … These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle.

And since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can't be a result of greater understanding. So what is it about intelligent people that makes them so prone to bias? To understand we must consider what intelligence actually is. In AI research, there's a concept called the orthogonality thesis. This is the idea that an intelligent agent can't just be intelligent, it must be intelligent at something because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth. But intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued. The intelligence with which an agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.

As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex. And this often required the adoption of what I call fashionably irrational beliefs and fibs which the brain has come to accept that. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior, identity protective cognition, or IPC, by engaging in IPC people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions, but to justify them. Or, as the novelist Saul Bellow put it a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. What this means is that while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

See also, the work of Dan Sperber, discussed here.

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