(Image and title generated by Grok, content created by Luke’s meat cap)
A lot of people seem confused about what’s going on. They have trouble predicting future trends like the rise in value of bitcoin over the last decade or so. They get easily distracted by the media they consume, and their emotions are all over the place, each day with a new enemy they are supposed to be mad at. They can’t focus or make sense of the world and each day feels like a struggle.
It’s exhausting.
How is this happening?
In part because many people are not very intelligent. If 100 IQ is average, half the world is below that. When someone is not using reason, logic, evidence, and their prefrontal cortex, they are likely using animalistic feelings, emotions, “signs from the universe” that are just apophenia or specifically pareidolia, and such which means they have an inconsistent and poor epistemology which is the mechanism we use for justified belief.
What can be done about it?
I’m not sure there’s much that can be currently done to help low IQ people raise their IQ. Maybe Neuralink will help? Maybe a carnivore diet and adopting some helpful maxims a smart person created and sticking to them religiously? I don’t know. For others, I do think there are some key things that can be done to help navigate this crazy world more effectively.
1. Memorize logical fallacies and don’t fall for them. Get them into what Daniel Kahneman calls your System 1 brain where the response is automatic. This will help tremendously in preventing these logic traps from tricking you into believing something that isn’t logically well supported.
I made a game years ago to help with this. Just check the logical fallacies and play every day. Add in Sean’s maxims also. They are really good. https://wisdomnuggets.lukestokes.info/
2. Stay humble and align with “what is” no matter how it makes you feel in regard to your identity attachments. If you grew up with a religious convinction that evolution isn’t real, for example, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the world around you and the various motivational forces driving the causes and effects that impact your life. For example, men have a lot of cheap sperm and an evolutionary strategy to spread it around as much as possible at very little cost. Visual stimulation is all that’s needed and they are off to the races! Women have very precious, scarce, valuable eggs where reproduction is very expensive and dangerous. They not only need a high quality man who can provide resources for them, they also need a powerful, dangerous man who can protect them in their vulnerability as they produce children. Thus we have hypergamy. Modern society has tried to pretend these primal evolutionary forces aren’t driving the whole show. If you look around you at cities and sky scrapers and bridges and such, you’ll see plenty of evidence of men taking risks to build things in order to win a woman. Denying what is keeps you confused and if you’re smart enough to realize the avoidance, the cognitive dissonance will mess you up.
Get up to speed on evolution.
As it relates to male / female dynamics (let’s be honest, you want to get laid), watch all of hoe_math’s videos https://youtube.com/@hoe_math?si=r4dIWbyvsZDVlhMw (seriously, all of them are good)
3. Understand game theory. As much as evolution runs the show, it does so through strategies we call game theory. Understand the players, strategies, and payoffs are all around you. In order to comprehend why this or that is happening, you have to be familiar with the motivational psychology involved (both intrinsic and extrinsic) and how that plays out repeatedly. Study the Prisoners Dilemma, Nash Equilibrium, tit-for-tat with forgiveness, zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum, praxeology, economics, and various moral frameworks and what drives them such as cooperation and trust. If you don’t get this stuff, you will constantly be asking why something is happening and those who profit off creating media will line up to tell you why which often has their own agenda included.
Use Grok or Google or YouTube to find great content out there on game theory using the terms I mentioned. This is a fun interactive tool which is helpful also: https://ncase.me/trust/
4. Get yourself up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, self-actualization needs, and (most importantly) self-transcendent needs. That last one is often not included, but before Maslow died he updated his life’s work to include it. One way to think of this is the Sadhguru quote: “You are not your body. You are not even your mind.” Until you get your basic needs met, you’ll not even begin to play the real game of “What’s even going on here? Who am I? What am I? Knowing this, what do I want?” The way I personally think of this is: I want to be less wrong about my true nature and the nature of reality and by living a life full of the Fruit of the Spirit, inspire others to improve themselves which shifts us to a world we all want to live in.
Buy bitcoin and hold it long term. Yes, get a job and get out of debt and then ideally build your own business, but holding a deflationary asset that is only at 5% adoption that will inevitably go to 100% adoption is a really great plan. When you get settled, check out nonsymbolic.org and their 45 day course. Learn which meditation practice can transition you into fundamental well-being.
5. Never forget, the world is like a ride, a choice between fear and love.
This 2 minute and 23 second Bill Hicks standup routine may contain the secrets of the universe:
It can all be boiled down to well-being. So much of what we do is because we want to experience well-being. That may look a little different from one person to the next, but ultimately everything we engage with is in one way or another a proxy towards the well-being it can bring us. The true well-being we all seek is created within.