Control is not a constant, and ability to effectively control depends on the social context. The state itself has acted as a counterweight to parental control for hundreds of years, and capital also acts as a counterweight -- if you don't want to live the way your parents want you to live or marry who they want you to marry, you can run away to the city and live free, which is easier if there are strong laws preventing you from being hunted down and honor-killed and jobs waiting for you in the urban center. Control was arguably at all-time lows in the late 60s and 70s. But the 80s are a period of reaction against these excesses, and safetyism can be argued to have started in the 80s. The first law mandating car seats is passed in 1979 and the first law mandating seat belts in 1984. More tellingly, the satanic ritual abuse panic kicks off hard in 1983 with the McMartin trial and the next year satanic ritual abuse panic advocates testify before Congress. Stranger danger spreads as a meme, reducing the ability of young people to travel freely via hitchhiking, even though the actual risk remains low.
The Internet disrupts this control process by creating a new space where young people are more able to navigate than parents. I'd argue this is the cause of the decline through the 90s: increased freedom from the nascent Internet. Gradually, this is curtailed as BBSs become forums, and forums become social media. At the same time, censorship is productized and sold to parents, and as early as 2008 schools were having extracurricular brainwashing sessions designed to scare children away from using the Internet as a vehicle of expression because "what's on the Internet is forever." I do not understand how parental and state oversight could be said to be minimal on social media. Schools install spyware on their own devices and recommend parents do the same. "Parental control features" are ubiquitous and you can't crack your mom's password with a l0phtcrack CD because Windows Vista didn't use NTLM hashes. The endpoints are controlled. You live in a panopticon. Even Kindles have parental controls, but paper books don't.
2011 is arguably the death rattle of free speech on the Internet. Wikileaks goes from being the place where you download the Scientology PDFs to being a terrorist group in the eyes of the US government and I think promotes a lot more walling-off of the gardens of the Internet. Reddit shuts down several subreddits in 2011, going from being a free speech social media website to what it is now. SOPA is introduced in October. If the Internet gave young people hope in the 90s, 2011 is the year that hope started dying, amidst the Arab Spring, the Eurozone collapse, and the Occupy movement. The high school first years in the fall of 2011 would graduate the spring of 2016, just in time to see Trump elected.
And finally, conservatives live in the country. The country is inherently less conducive to control than the city. Insurgents hide in the countryside. People go to parties in the fields. You can light huge bonfires and get drunk next to them and nobody will see or hear you. People in cities have to have better coordinating to create spaces like this, which is limited by a censored and surveilled Internet. Conservativism as an ideology is less conducive to paternalistic control. But I think the urban/rural divide is the main driver here.
We have been going through a societal cycle of increasing control since the 80s that was disrupted by the computer and the Internet, but since 2011, smartphones, and social media, the Internet has become another vehicle of control, rather than the liberatory technology it once was that made life literally worth living for so many young people. To me, this explains all of the holes much more parsimoniously than "Socrates was wrong about books, but I'm right about network television tiktok." The falsification for this is if there are any similar studies showing that abstaining from forums or BBS's or other pre-social-media Internet coordination systems improves mental health. I don't expect to see that. I remember the free Internet.
I honestly have no idea. It might be in Expect Resistance somewhere, which if not directly about this topic, is generally about it.
I may have been (edit: was probably) thinking about The Promise of Defeat, by Moxie Marlinspike, anarchist cyrptographer sailor extraordinaire and the author of the Signal protocol (and the original Signal app, though he's no longer with the project).
Imagine what it was like for those of us who were talking about transhumanism, AI alignment, morphological freedom, cryonics, nootropics, keto diets, kettlebells, etc., in 2010, not 2023.
Welcome to the bleeding edge. It's not an easy life.
The most important thing to do is to learn to trust your research and the truth over what the tribe says. This can be very hard. I eventually sold most of my bitcoin after all my friends and family spent the summer of 2012 or so screaming at me that it was a bubble, a scam, etc., which seemed confirmed when the price crashed from $35 down to $5 -- don't make that mistake.
Learn to isolate yourself from people that are reliably harmful. Don't be a crab in the bucket. Get out of the bucket. Deal with helping out the people you care about later.
Read anarchists. Anarchists have had no hope since 1936 and still have never stopped fighting. I'm pretty sure there's a CrimethInc. essay on exactly this topic.
I'm not saying it's bad to do these things.
I'm saying that if you're doing them as a distraction from inner pain, you're basically drunk.
How is this falsifiable?
Can you point to five people who have done this, but still have a different orientation from you?
The problem isn't that access to emotion is ableist. I think that suggestion is itself ableist, neurodiverse people have complete access to their emotions, their emotional reactions to certain things might simply be different.
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still "disembodied." You just need to "do more work." This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. "Embodiment" is not "being in touch with your emotions," it is acting in the manner prescribed.
What is ableist is saying that there is a single state, "embodiment," which coincidentally overlaps entirely with several other things prescribed, and if you are not in that state, there is a psychological problem with you. This is neurotypical supremacy.
As I said in the other post in this thread to which you replied, there are other ways to deal with this. You do not have to do breathwork. You do not have to meditate. You do not have to "listen to your body." These are ideological prescriptions. They poorly emulate cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a much more effective way to process emotions and resolve maladaptive behavior patterns.
This is why the comment parent and myself think that this post is manipulative. It presents a real problem, but frames it in terms such that the only possible solution is the wholesale adoption of the author's ideology. The honest post on this topic would have mentioned other solutions, which maybe the author did not personally experience but understands, through systematizing and integrating their own experiences and the experiences of others, to be also solutions to the same problem.
Lots of ink, but lots to think about. I'm thankful for this post fwiw.
The "no technical meaning" could maybe be an indicator of sarcasm. But you're right that there was no way for you to know I wasn't just misapplying the term in the same way as the OP.
I don't think this relates to group polarization per se but I take your point.
I didn't mean "triggered" to mean extremely so, someone can be mildly triggered and again, I apologize for (in my perception, based on your comment) doing that. I think you did the right thing.
It does strike me as a rather fully general counterargument, written in a deliberately obfuscatory/"woo" style. The focus on "listening to your body" seems like an obfuscation, it's an appeal to something deliberately put beyond measurement. This does seem like it could apply to anything anyone cares about (you're a Red Sox fan? You're addicted to the suffering, your body is telling you to stop, land on Earth and get sober!). If you have any reasons to disagree, that's coming from a place of addiction and you need to stop caring and presumably follow a similar life-path to OP because that is the only thing that works, everything else is a death-cult.
I don't buy it, to say the least, and I think it's only the social connections that people have to the OP that make anyone treat it charitably. People have been saying this since the earliest days of the discussion of this topic on the Internet; this fully general counterargument predates Eliezer Yudkowsky being appropriately pessimistic about AI.
I also think that the characterization that all rationalism comes from "disembodiment" is essentially an ableist slur. Using ableist slurs and appealing to the hierarchy of ableism is always manipulative and is never appropriate. Unfortunately as people have come to the rationalist community more with the intention of using it as a springboard for their own careers, we've had to deal with more and more overt and covert ableism as a rather underhanded way of putting a thumb on the scales. If we're to truly abandon the supremacy of the neurotypical, and truly embrace neurodiversity, we also have to embrace a diversity of "embodiment" (to the extent that is a valid and real concept, which I doubt), which the OP thoroughly does not.
The firearm use is a weird thing to point out. The usual explanation I see here is that social programming directed towards women drives them to value appearance more highly and use methods that are not as disfiguring, which means no firearms, but also no trains, bridges, high buildings, and so on.