Let's Freewrite

Improving the world is hard. At least I've tried tons of stuff. You know a giant book series like The Wheel of Time? I've written way more than that about philosophy in lots of different styles and formats. I've tried tons of different approaches.

Most people won't try much. They aren't good enough to improve the world. You have to know a bunch of stuff before it makes sense to teach others. You need high quality knowledge, well above average, before you should put much effort into spreading it. People get stuck at the part where they need to learn good ideas themselves.

Some people in the TCS/FI community think they know stuff, but still don't do much. Doing they find doing stuff hard? What's hard about it? If you find it hard, there's problems there you don't know how to solve... Learn more!

People can be so passive. They can spend years and years not learning or doing much. It's sad. It makes the world kinda empty. Passivity leaves the memes in control, so all the passive people are kinda the same and sorta aren't really acting entities. They sorta are. They're still people. But it's iffy.

People don't communicate much. Maybe they think no one cares? Why not try anyway? The FI people do stuff. They play games, they date people, they do parenting activities, they make big career decisions, they go on diets, they hang out socially with friends, they watch movies, and so on. They just don't talk about it. They don't think it through or have questions or comments about their life, and they don't try to get criticism and advice to do it better. What the fuck?

I think they talk with their personal friends in private more. Everyone living in their tiny little world when the public internet is right here. But the public is scary because people like me will point out mistakes. Rather than try to improve their mistakes, they hide and live static lives. And they put a lot of their effort into pretending they are pretty rational people learning stuff and making progress and solving problems, rather than actually doing it. They pretend that being able to deal with public criticism is a really high standard, and actually they're doing quite well to the lower-but-high standard of their 5 buddies who think they're quite smart.

And people are so caught up with the standard stuff that fills your life:

• childhood
• school
• career
• dating
• marriage
• parenting/family
• travel
• socializing (IRL events and also Facebook, Instagram, etc)
• food
• exercise
• getting a house and filling it with appropriate stuff
• entertainment (TV shows, movies, watching sports, YouTube)
• the news (there's a kinda standard set of stuff people follow like some politics, some crime, some economic issues, really inaccurate articles reporting on recent "scientific" claims)
• sometimes some Activism for some Cause
• sometimes reading (mostly fiction or popular shallow books)
• retirement

And some of them tried to find good ideas for a bit when they were age 15-25 or so. And they found a lot of disappointment. They read a few books and blogs on philosophy, rationality, improving the world ... and found crap. (Some rejected the crap, others were fooled by it.) They tried talking with people about ideas and it wasn't productive. Some people blame others (sometimes mostly correctly, often very arrogantly) and some know they aren't that great themselves.

Lots of people made some effort to learn about critical thinking, philosophy, etc. And they found bad philosophies. They found Plato and Kant. Quite a few people still kinda liked it and kept trying even though it didn't help them with life. But then they start paying their mortgage and needing to get their car repaired and still get their kid to baseball practice and they can't take a day off work because they were sick for a whole week last month. And so they move on. They finished their education. They finished the phase of their life where they were actively pursuing new ideas (many people never do that, but quite a few do).

Schools really beat the curiosity out of people. Professors are so awful and really discourage anyone from trying to be a good thinker or know much, and point them in the wrong directions for where and what and how to learn.

People under 15 or so don't have much control over their lives and really need to avoid conflict with their parents. So it's hard to interact with them and share ideas. Around 15-30 is when people make some decisions of their own and kinda set up their life and coast from there. But they're already so fucked from 15 years of torture and indoctrination by their parents and teachers.

Lots of people assume someone else knows what they're doing or has it together. Children usually think adults do. Adults sure pretend to and put a lot of work into deceiving children. People aren't very inclined to think they are – or even could be – anyone special or important. That makes it hard to recruit for a community about being exceptional.