I have spoken already about affordances of the mind, but there is still much ground to explore. “Minimally counterintuitive” is another hook that ideas use to stick in our thoughts. The frogs call it red-pilling but everyone does it https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1022157316529958912

We have a particular weakness for inversions of common sense, for formulations that violate in our expectations in just the right measure. Oscar Wilde quotes, which are insipid, are a perfect example of the form: Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

We love when we learn something counterintuitive—we tell it to all our friends. Inverting a norm gives you power. If others accept your inversion, then you are Moses, leading them into the wilderness. The more foundational the norm, the more power you generate when you blow it up

Robin Hanson loves redpills. With signalling theory, he reveals the unwitting mechanics that underly paradoxical behavior. School isn't about learning, politics isn't about policy, etc. Hanson is right, but his approach would work even if he were wrong. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019567672848076800

Psychotherapists redpill you on yourself; they tell you that the motivations behind your actions are not what you think. "You want help with your addiction, but your real problem is your guilt about your relationship to your husband and you are using your addiction as an excuse”

If you want to know what it feels like to be redpilled, think back to the time before you knew what sex was, and remember that feeling of sudden understanding. It’s transformative knowledge. It cannot be unseen, like dreaming of Cthulhu or holding the zahir

People who take red pills have a habit of looking for more, more, more. You start to crave that feeling of having your intuitions shattered. It starts with “libertarianism doesn’t work because some people are bad and stupid” and soon you’re reading Anatoly Fomenko

Let’s call the tendency to keep looking for redder and redder pills “Fomenko gravity”, a slight variation on memetic gravity. https://twitter.com/gritcult/status/1027351427801403392

Perhaps we should call left-leaning red pills blue, and understand that they work on the same psychology: the left controls the media and the press, so it makes sense that they furnish your mind with intuitions, which red pills then shatter

In some hypothetical dreamworld where all media and press are controlled by rightists, I have no doubt that blue pills (Left-leaning inversions of norms) would seem magical and revelatory. Now they seem banal because they are the actual norms

In the 60s and 70s, blue pills did seem radical, which is where hippies came from and why sex cults proliferated. Against good monogamy norms, unmarried sex is trangsressive, a blue pill. If you take it, Fomenko gravity pulls you ever lefter, maybe all the way to Jim Jones

The chromatic signifiers are getting a little muddy these days. The new sex cults have no leaders, some blue pills are pink, the norm inversion has become physiological. Blue or red, to be compelling, the minimally counterintuitive norm inversion has to épater la bourgeoisie

Often times the memetically virile version of a red/blue pill is an exaggeration or distortion of a benign truth. Lower iq people struggle with nuance and truth is nuanced so low iq people struggle with truth.

HOWEVER, believing lies has a high cost in survivability, and high iq people are better at paying those costs, therefore they are more able to carry a high-contradiction mental model. Smart people can rationalize anything, so they create and spread the most insidious lies

The sign of a weak mind? Inability to grapple with the outside view. When someone challenges your values, you feel anger. Even the existence of competing values is a threat, a danger. This naive universalism is more corrosive than any red or blue pill. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019264243244228608

Now let's look at some blue and red pills. Some of these have become the norm and are no longer an inversion. If you take blue pills, red pills seem reprehensible, and vice versa. I am NOT endorsing the viewpoints in either of the below tweets, only noticing them

Blue pills.
workers control the means of production. Sex is always moral if consensual. Race is an oppressive illusion. gay people are just like you and me. gender is a social construct. racism=prejudice+power. all sex is rape. a man can be a woman.

Red pills.
Climate change is in part a leftist power grab. race is biological/meaningful. women are as sexually immoral as men and rule-breaking men are sexually compelling to women. democracy makes society deteriorate. "white genocide".

understand that there was a time when all of the blue pills were SHOCKING and upsetting. Some of them are still controversial but mostly they are water and we are fish.

Here is my red pill for you: cultivate friendships with people whose beliefs directly contradict yours, and who can stomach the dissonance without fighting about it. Those people are assets; they are Fomenko antigravity, and your disagreements are an asset.