It's supposed to read like "this idea is highly unpolished"
Here's an idea: we hold the Ideological Turing Test (ITT) world championship. Candidates compete to pass an as broad range of views as possible.
Points awarded for passing a test are commensurate with the amount of people that subscribe to the view. You can subscribe to a bunch of them at once.
The awarding of failures and passes is done anonymously. Points can be awarded partially, according to what % of judges give a pass.
The winner is made president (or something)
It might be hard to take a normative stance, but if culture 1 makes you feel better AND leads to better results AND helps people individuate and makes adults out of them, then maybe it's just, y'know, better. Not "better" in the naive mistake-theorist assumption that there is such a thing as a moral truth, but "better" in the correct conflict-theorist assumption that it just suits you and me and we will exert our power to make it more widely adopted, for the sake of us and our enlightened ideals.
Case study: A simple algorithm for fixing motivation
So here I was, trying to read through an online course to learn about cloud computing, but I wasn't really absorbing any of it. No motivation.
Motives are a chain, ending in a terminal goal. Lack of motivation meant that my System 1 did not believe what I was doing would lead to achieving any terminal goal. The chain was broken.
So I traversed the chain to see which link was broken.
And motivation was restored. Suddenly, I feel invigorated. To do the course, and to write this post.
Question for the Kegan levels folks: I've noticed that I tend to regress to level 3 if I enter new environments that I don't fully understand yet, and that this tends to cause mental issues because I don't always have the affirmative social environment that level 3 needs. Do you relate? How do you deal with this?
As someone who never came across religion before adulthood, I've been trying to figure it out. Some of it's claims seem pretty damn nonsensical, and yet some of it's adherents seem pretty damn well-adjusted and happy. The latter means there's gotta be some value in there.
The most important takeaway so far is that religious claims make much more sense if you interpret them as phenomenological claims. Claims about the mind. When buddhists talk about the 6 worlds, they talk about 6 states of mood. When christians talk about a covenant with god, they talk about sticking to some kind of mindset no matter what.
Back when this stuff was written, people didn't seem to distinguish between objective reality and subjective experience. The former is a modern invention. Either that, or this nuance has been lost in translation over the centuries.
As for being on ibogaine, a high dose isn't fun for sure, but microdoses are close to neutral and their therapeutic value makes them net positive
Have you tried opiates? You don't need to be in pain for it to make you feel great
Ibogaine seems to reset opiate withdrawal. There are many stories of people with 20 year old heroin addictions that are cured within one session.
If this is true, and there are no drawbacks, then we basically have access to wireheading. A happiness silver bullet. It would be the hack of the century. Distributing ibogaine + opiates would be the best known mental health intervention by orders of magnitude.
Of course, that's only if there are no unforeseen caveats. Still, why isn't everybody talking about this?
Look, if you can't appreciate the idea because you don't like it's delivery, you're throwing away a lot of information