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The world is full of anglerfish psychofauna that dangle a glowing thing to lure you in and consume you. Please help me complete this bestiary of ideologies that seduce Twitter people like us 👇 https://t.co/0Kmipsu9Zx
Spirituality ideology that guards enlightened people from any feedback because they are enlightened (shiny thing: enlightenment can make you permanently good, you become protected from the opinions [ie delusions] of unenlightened people)
Compassion ideology that punishes you for any shows of thoughtless joy because you should be thinking about/feeling bad about sentient beings that are having a bad time very far away (shiny thing: you are good because you demonstrably care by being upset all the time)
Kindness/love/inclusion ideology that makes you willfully defenseless in the presence of bad actors who about destroying your beautiful scene or your well-being (shiny thing: being nice all the time gets you more connection and acceptance)
No ego ideology that punishes you for selfish desires so you adopt a generic no ego mask that even convinces *you* that you’ve killed your ego. Meanwhile the mask has no eyeholes so you can’t see yourself as you continue doing selfish things in more complex and subtle ways (shiny thing: you get to be good by having no ego. Or, in the case of sociopaths, you get to get away with more) See: https://t.co/bg9QiansIE
Esoteric discipline ideology in which you get to be working on the World's Most Revolutionary Thing in exchange for becoming so hyperspecialized that nobody outside of the discipline can understand you Often involves enormous amounts of math, logic, blockchain, specialized lingo, or occult practices Worst versions of this make you not only incomprehensible to laypeople but also uninterested in anything outside of your hyperspecialization, alienating you from friends, family, and the beautiful web of human culture
Good Simple Life TM ideology in which the best thing to do is to invest in a stable career and partner and settle down somewhere remote where you need to take a car to see your closest friend but in practice never do bc they’re 1hr away and you’re raising a baby with zero support Variant: homesteading ideology where you do this but are 4hrs away from closest friend but at least you get to work the land all day, which gives you a chronic lower back condition
"Growth / authenticity ideology which makes u go 24/7 'authentic; at the cost of scaring normies and old people and cutting yourself off from potential friends Ie “masking is always bad/unfair to the masker” ––@curiousceros
@TylerAlterman I think what so many of these have in common is a sort of innate bias towards coherence that doesn't actually hold as you dig into the complexity of life. All these shiny things are offering "the answer" to some big confusion in some fixed way. https://t.co/f7xIFlESHE
@camino_delsol Yes. I am the locus of experience, and on some level that means that all experience is reconciled within me. The default mode of reconciliation is coherence, especially in post-enlightenment society, but actually there's no reason to believe that all of this coheres.
@TylerAlterman I think of these psychofauna as having a sort of "size" relative to a person's consciousness, along some subset of dimensions. If the predator is bigger than the consciousness, it can consume it. If the consciousness is bigger, it's not a risk. Consciousness in this way...
Exhibit A: all of tpot
@TylerAlterman Meta-ideology that hooks you into obsessively studying meta-frameworks and meta-meta-frameworks until you are incapable of holding object-level beliefs (shiny thing: you are very smart, and 10 levels above the object-level masses) https://t.co/yjGDDzXXpv
Pride in my pathology ideology See in particular, for this crowd: Autism/ADHD pride (Fwiw I think these things are both superpowers and disorders, but by identifying with the whole complex you cement both)
Ppl are possessed by psychofauna ideology Leads to alienation and sometimes false belief that you are above being possessed The Matrix is sort of about this. Neo and co get to kill normies with impunity because Neo and co are free while normies are potential agents
I enjoyed this thread! Also beware of - I have exhaustively catalogued all “anglerfish psychofauna” ideology which may cause you to behave in a judgemental/patronizing way towards the masses of people who are, at the end of the day, sincerely trying to find some beliefs they can hold onto as they navigate a perplexing reality. (Shiny thing: the feeling of “I know all the pitfalls, so I will be safe from existential error.”)
Already covered this one mostly but worth mentioning
the internet complicates this picture by providing many incentives for being mentally ill (sympathy, fitting in with peers, Generating Relatable Content); i think there’s sort of a mentally ill online lifestyle attractor, which provides benefits like avoiding responsibility
@TylerAlterman Respectfully, autism and adhd are not pathologies, and the liberation pursued by those of us who lean deeply into them is specifically and exactly about changing the narrative from "these are pathologies" to simply "this is a valid way to be". I see your point but it's skewed.
@TylerAlterman Close to some of your themes: Narrative addiction. The feeling that you need a couple of startups, a personal brand, a book, a foundation and a podcast to feel that your life has meaning or is 'going somewhere'
@TylerAlterman this is fun! some overlap. could become a thing tm simulation ideology: all of this reality is but only an illusion, controlled by some form higher intelligence. spends time philosophising about the simulation and forgets to play
@TylerAlterman visuals: Doomsday: chicken little Nihilism: a ghost spirituality: Wiz@rds of Roke Success: a pumped donkey chasing a carrot Righteousness: Joan of Arc Kindness: Puppy with a wolf behind it Nonattachment: Centaur No ego: Strawman on fire Esoteric discipline: Monk with walls
@TylerAlterman Meta-ideology that hooks you into obsessively studying meta-frameworks and meta-meta-frameworks until you are incapable of holding object-level beliefs (shiny thing: you are very smart, and 10 levels above the object-level masses) https://t.co/yjGDDzXXpv
I enjoyed this thread! Also beware of - I have exhaustively catalogued all “anglerfish psychofauna” ideology which may cause you to behave in a judgemental/patronizing way towards the masses of people who are, at the end of the day, sincerely trying to find some beliefs they can hold onto as they navigate a perplexing reality. (Shiny thing: the feeling of “I know all the pitfalls, so I will be safe from existential error.”)
@TylerAlterman psychofauna online battles actively recruiting soldiers: - american left vs right - israel vs palestine - vegans vs carnivores - protect mother earth vs e/acc - antivax vs science establishment - lgbtq vs social conservatives - race realists vs antiracists