I recall you saying you're pretty low in neuroticism, and in this piece, you showcase that you truly, deeply, don't understand what it's like to be high in neuroticism.
Something that's helped me is to accept that I experience quite a lot of emotions that can't be expressed to others, at least in their raw form. A significant source of torment for many, and for me, is precisely the pressure to always be cheerful. It helps with inner peace to discard that as goal.
That said, I agree with the central premise that attaining deep understanding does not necessarily entail being dark, brooding, and neurotic.
Then again, Jesus does not seem to have been cheerful: not once in the Gospels is he described as smiling or laughing, but there is the famous "Jesus wept".
Yes, I think both this comment and the original essay are correct. A lot of us are genuinely miserable (sometimes more, sometimes less) in ways that must seem alien to the non-depressed. I've spent a lot of time trying to articulate the experience in my poetry (talk about cliched...) because, as you say, the feelings can't be expressed in their raw forms.
That said, I understand the point the essay is making. I once read a tweet that said something like, "I wish I had the kind of depression that makes you paint 'The Starry Night' and not the kind of depression that makes you lie in bed eating potato chips." The person was obviously joking a bit, but van Gogh wasn't a genius because he was depressed, he was a genius because he was a painter *despite* being depressed!
I once had to fill out a therapy questionnaire that asked me what I was currently most worried about. I thought for a minute and wrote, "I'm worried my depression is becoming my sole defining trait." The thing is, I wasn't bragging: I was terrified.
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert
(I do think this ignores effects like, being a thoughtful person might make you more likely to notice things like the atrocity of factory farming, wild animal suffering, etc, which can make you a bit gloomy... But I think you're right to emphasize a distinction between having a gloomy *disposition* or *personality* as distinct from, just, being appropriately gloomy when confronted with gloomy things. Also that, though the thoughtful may be more likely to confront gloomy things, they aren't more likely to *seek them out for the sake of seeking them out*)
I too dislike what I consider to be pseudo-profundity and performative cynicism. That being said, this reads very much as coming from a place of zero appreciation for literature and zero curiosity about existential issues. Which, for someone with a worldview as grim as yours, is odd!
I’d venture to say the reason more people know Nietzsche than Kripke is because philosophy of life is more applicable to more people’s daily lives than modal logic. Also, for the record, the best gloomy literature is German and Japanese, not Russian.
More people know about Nietzsche because he's a better and more interesting philosopher who had more insights and a better, more grounded understanding of humanity and the world. Also, his writing isn't nearly as boring.
You don't really engage at all in how knowing too much can make people reasonably miserable. Some truths just make it quite reasonable to brood.
For example, take plea deals. Plea deals sure seem like coerced confessions, you are threatening someone with a harsher sentence if they don't confess. The data shows that many innocent people do confess when given analogous plea deals for confessing to cheating in class. It's also often instrumentally rational to confess, in that your expected net loss from confessing is lower than your expected net loss from going to court to defend yourself, in part because of how costly going to court is and in part because prosecutors are often free to make the alternative to the plea deal very harsh indeed.
About 95% of criminal cases in the U.S. end in plea deals. Why does our court system rely so much on coerced confessions that often make it rational for innocent people to confess? Well, if just 20% of people insisted on a jury trial instead, it would take decades for the court to adjudicate each case. This is fundamentally because we have too many laws and too few lawyers. We have too many laws in large part because the people who get those laws passed (legislators, to some extent bureaucrats. and, yes, voters too) do not take seriously into account the costs of enforcing those laws. We have too few lawyers in large part because the professional organizations in charge of the licensing people to become lawyers are themselves run by lawyers, who have direct monetary incentives to reduce the supply of lawyers.
But notice that the above case only presents coerced confessions as a necessary evil in an unjust world (a world of ignorant political actors and greedy licensing organizations). Yet, if you make the case that our justice system primarily relies on coerced confessions, no normal person responds by saying "Yes, but coerced.confessions are a necessary evil!" They instead try to desperately deny that our justice system could be so blatantly flawed, probably in large part due to status quo bias but also just because of how unbelievably unjust it sounds when you look at the relevant facts above. Yet, in reflexively defending plea deals in principle, they are just selling out their rights to those unbelievable injustices in the world.
About a century ago, almost everyone, even the Supreme Court, agreed that plea deals violated our constitutional right to a jury trial. Their whole purpose was to punish people who insisted on a jury trial (and then lost) in order to disincentivize jury trials (and, in practice, this applies to both the guilty and the innocent). Obviously, if the government can legally punish you for exercising your constitutional rights, you don"t really have those rights. If your government's constitution gives you a right to criticize that government, but then they punish you for doing so, you don't actually have such a right.
Nowadays, the people at large have instinctively decided that it is more important to defend our criminal justice system as it is than it is to defend our (I would imagine, quite important) right to a jury trial, the right to insist on due process rather than coerced confessions. This is why no serious poltician brings up the issue as a significant part of their platform, even though (you might have imagined) that the people would actually care about whether they can be unjustly imprisoned after being coerced to confess. The people care more about the systems we have than the rights those systems are meant to protect.
I'm not Pangloss. I can't be cheerful at all that. I can look for other things which bring me joy, but it's perfectly reasonable to be broody about many terrible truths. Thus, if you are disposed to seek truths and end up often discovering quite miserable ones, it is quite reasonable to be disposed to brooding.
I agree with criticizing people for performative engagement with dark, negative, brooding vibes. It may be that some people intentionally craft a self-image of a brooding intellectual, and perhaps this causes some of them to be miserable.
…But some of us are just miserable, and would rather not be. Yet you say “So go out and be cheerful!”
There’s like a degree to which we have some limited control over our ability to do this, but some people suffer chronic pain, clinical depression, awful life circumstances, or other mental or physical conditions, or life circumstances, that make the suggestion that we should go out and be cheerful to be a frustrating and bizarre suggestion. For many of us, being cheerful or happy simply isn’t a feature of our personality. We can’t just choose to be cheerful.
Not everyone has your personality and mindset. Some of us aren’t cheerful because we have little to be cheerful about. I don’t think that makes us deep or better thinkers. Then again, I’m not saying it doesn’t.
I don’t seem to see this. I guess I don’t interact with a lot of people who put on these kinds of performances. Does Bentham’s Bulldog hang out with a large number of performatively broody people?
Could it be that you are misinterpreting people who are actually dark and melancholic by thinking it is all part of an act ?
This is very good. I hate so many of these cliches about “genius “ ! But I think people like Van Gogh are able to push the limit of art because they are able to defy conventional thinking. And sometimes it means having episodes of madness. David Foster Wallace was another brilliant individual who struggled with mental health and killed himself well before his time sadly.
whoa you just did the same pseudo-deep virtue signalling you described but in your non-brooding wizard style. intelligent ppl can do this bewilderingly fluently, but it is nevertheless also a cope and a virtue signal, vying for status, just differently adjusted to your mechanisms.
You can think his opinions are ill informed or whatever, but to say it's just a rehash of the latest econ paper he read shows you don't read him at all. The man is quite versatile in the issues he talks about.
I recall you saying you're pretty low in neuroticism, and in this piece, you showcase that you truly, deeply, don't understand what it's like to be high in neuroticism.
Something that's helped me is to accept that I experience quite a lot of emotions that can't be expressed to others, at least in their raw form. A significant source of torment for many, and for me, is precisely the pressure to always be cheerful. It helps with inner peace to discard that as goal.
That said, I agree with the central premise that attaining deep understanding does not necessarily entail being dark, brooding, and neurotic.
Then again, Jesus does not seem to have been cheerful: not once in the Gospels is he described as smiling or laughing, but there is the famous "Jesus wept".
Yes, I think both this comment and the original essay are correct. A lot of us are genuinely miserable (sometimes more, sometimes less) in ways that must seem alien to the non-depressed. I've spent a lot of time trying to articulate the experience in my poetry (talk about cliched...) because, as you say, the feelings can't be expressed in their raw forms.
That said, I understand the point the essay is making. I once read a tweet that said something like, "I wish I had the kind of depression that makes you paint 'The Starry Night' and not the kind of depression that makes you lie in bed eating potato chips." The person was obviously joking a bit, but van Gogh wasn't a genius because he was depressed, he was a genius because he was a painter *despite* being depressed!
I once had to fill out a therapy questionnaire that asked me what I was currently most worried about. I thought for a minute and wrote, "I'm worried my depression is becoming my sole defining trait." The thing is, I wasn't bragging: I was terrified.
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert
(I do think this ignores effects like, being a thoughtful person might make you more likely to notice things like the atrocity of factory farming, wild animal suffering, etc, which can make you a bit gloomy... But I think you're right to emphasize a distinction between having a gloomy *disposition* or *personality* as distinct from, just, being appropriately gloomy when confronted with gloomy things. Also that, though the thoughtful may be more likely to confront gloomy things, they aren't more likely to *seek them out for the sake of seeking them out*)
> The only philosophy they appreciate is the kind that has enough jargon and rhetorical flourishes to send a troop of leopards into a coma.
This is rhetorical delicate embellishment
I too dislike what I consider to be pseudo-profundity and performative cynicism. That being said, this reads very much as coming from a place of zero appreciation for literature and zero curiosity about existential issues. Which, for someone with a worldview as grim as yours, is odd!
I’d venture to say the reason more people know Nietzsche than Kripke is because philosophy of life is more applicable to more people’s daily lives than modal logic. Also, for the record, the best gloomy literature is German and Japanese, not Russian.
More people know about Nietzsche because he's a better and more interesting philosopher who had more insights and a better, more grounded understanding of humanity and the world. Also, his writing isn't nearly as boring.
You don't really engage at all in how knowing too much can make people reasonably miserable. Some truths just make it quite reasonable to brood.
For example, take plea deals. Plea deals sure seem like coerced confessions, you are threatening someone with a harsher sentence if they don't confess. The data shows that many innocent people do confess when given analogous plea deals for confessing to cheating in class. It's also often instrumentally rational to confess, in that your expected net loss from confessing is lower than your expected net loss from going to court to defend yourself, in part because of how costly going to court is and in part because prosecutors are often free to make the alternative to the plea deal very harsh indeed.
About 95% of criminal cases in the U.S. end in plea deals. Why does our court system rely so much on coerced confessions that often make it rational for innocent people to confess? Well, if just 20% of people insisted on a jury trial instead, it would take decades for the court to adjudicate each case. This is fundamentally because we have too many laws and too few lawyers. We have too many laws in large part because the people who get those laws passed (legislators, to some extent bureaucrats. and, yes, voters too) do not take seriously into account the costs of enforcing those laws. We have too few lawyers in large part because the professional organizations in charge of the licensing people to become lawyers are themselves run by lawyers, who have direct monetary incentives to reduce the supply of lawyers.
But notice that the above case only presents coerced confessions as a necessary evil in an unjust world (a world of ignorant political actors and greedy licensing organizations). Yet, if you make the case that our justice system primarily relies on coerced confessions, no normal person responds by saying "Yes, but coerced.confessions are a necessary evil!" They instead try to desperately deny that our justice system could be so blatantly flawed, probably in large part due to status quo bias but also just because of how unbelievably unjust it sounds when you look at the relevant facts above. Yet, in reflexively defending plea deals in principle, they are just selling out their rights to those unbelievable injustices in the world.
About a century ago, almost everyone, even the Supreme Court, agreed that plea deals violated our constitutional right to a jury trial. Their whole purpose was to punish people who insisted on a jury trial (and then lost) in order to disincentivize jury trials (and, in practice, this applies to both the guilty and the innocent). Obviously, if the government can legally punish you for exercising your constitutional rights, you don"t really have those rights. If your government's constitution gives you a right to criticize that government, but then they punish you for doing so, you don't actually have such a right.
Nowadays, the people at large have instinctively decided that it is more important to defend our criminal justice system as it is than it is to defend our (I would imagine, quite important) right to a jury trial, the right to insist on due process rather than coerced confessions. This is why no serious poltician brings up the issue as a significant part of their platform, even though (you might have imagined) that the people would actually care about whether they can be unjustly imprisoned after being coerced to confess. The people care more about the systems we have than the rights those systems are meant to protect.
I'm not Pangloss. I can't be cheerful at all that. I can look for other things which bring me joy, but it's perfectly reasonable to be broody about many terrible truths. Thus, if you are disposed to seek truths and end up often discovering quite miserable ones, it is quite reasonable to be disposed to brooding.
I wasn't expecting a random comment on plea deals but I very much appreciated this comment.
Had to say I appreciate the Bartimaeus reference!
You unironically just wrote about performative people and 90% of the discord debate space
I agree with criticizing people for performative engagement with dark, negative, brooding vibes. It may be that some people intentionally craft a self-image of a brooding intellectual, and perhaps this causes some of them to be miserable.
…But some of us are just miserable, and would rather not be. Yet you say “So go out and be cheerful!”
There’s like a degree to which we have some limited control over our ability to do this, but some people suffer chronic pain, clinical depression, awful life circumstances, or other mental or physical conditions, or life circumstances, that make the suggestion that we should go out and be cheerful to be a frustrating and bizarre suggestion. For many of us, being cheerful or happy simply isn’t a feature of our personality. We can’t just choose to be cheerful.
Not everyone has your personality and mindset. Some of us aren’t cheerful because we have little to be cheerful about. I don’t think that makes us deep or better thinkers. Then again, I’m not saying it doesn’t.
I agree and didn't mean to suggest otherwise!
I don’t seem to see this. I guess I don’t interact with a lot of people who put on these kinds of performances. Does Bentham’s Bulldog hang out with a large number of performatively broody people?
Could it be that you are misinterpreting people who are actually dark and melancholic by thinking it is all part of an act ?
This is very good. I hate so many of these cliches about “genius “ ! But I think people like Van Gogh are able to push the limit of art because they are able to defy conventional thinking. And sometimes it means having episodes of madness. David Foster Wallace was another brilliant individual who struggled with mental health and killed himself well before his time sadly.
The love of dark brooding people is neurologically, not logically, related to our tendency to focus on threats.
To quote Van Wilder, "You shouldn't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive."
whoa you just did the same pseudo-deep virtue signalling you described but in your non-brooding wizard style. intelligent ppl can do this bewilderingly fluently, but it is nevertheless also a cope and a virtue signal, vying for status, just differently adjusted to your mechanisms.
Exactly who says I'm not an Eldrazi?
Brian Caplan is not a good counter example of an intelligent, happy person.
Why not?
All the guy does is write very midwit takes based on the latest econ paper that already supports his worldview. Almost zero insight.
You can think his opinions are ill informed or whatever, but to say it's just a rehash of the latest econ paper he read shows you don't read him at all. The man is quite versatile in the issues he talks about.