[FRIAM] A million year old driving assistant

Thu Apr 28 18:03:01 EDT 2022

My reasoning goes like this. 1)  I know there is a difference between the things I feel and the behaviors I have that could reveal them.    It is not a perfectly controlled thing, of course, but I have a degree of control.   This control leads to some control of the feelings themselves.   As you say, one can whip themselves up, but one can also calm themselves.    2) I would never pull one of these vehicular stunts unless it was a theatrical motivation for a third party to observe or I was artificially influenced by a high dose of testosterone, adrenaline, meth, etc.   A common situation like low blood sugar or high caffeine wouldn't be enough.   I just wouldn't even think about it if someone flipped me off.   I might feel bad if I thought I had made a mistake and deserved criticism/shaming, but I wouldn't then thrust my car in front of another leading to who knows what outcome for no reason at all.  

I don't think thresholding is the right way to model it.  It is more like can one estimate how cool or agitated they are and modulate the situations to avoid unproductive conflict.   Some people I have found can't recognize their own degree of agitation.  The flooding is going outside the abilities of the control system.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 2:44 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A million year old driving assistant

Well, I purposefully chose to use sociopathy in this example to indicate the complete competency spectrum. A flood-prone sociopath *needs* to get good at suppressing their freak-outs. A psychopath doesn't need to suppress anything. There's no such thing as an ideal psychopath, of course. We're all a little psycho to some extent.

But if you're asserting there's a difference between freak-out behavior and a freaked-out mental state, then we might expect the monists to come flying out of the woodwork with their loops on repeat. It's a social skill, a competence, to be able to *whip* oneself up into a state of enthusiasm ... or even a state of Flow. When you enter the MMA ring, you don't calm yourself, meditate, and relax. You whip yourself into a [controlled] freak-out. Explosive athletics require freaked-out mentality *and* often quite a bit of bit of freak-out behavior.

This conception of flooding and freaking out as some sort of over-the-threshhold loss of control is idealistic nonsense. That's the heart of my claim that freak-outs aren't the problem.

On 4/28/22 14:32, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Sure, it depends whether we define a state-of-mind as the freak out, or the observed behavior of the freak out.   The former could happen, and no one would know.  And I think you are confusing sociopathy with psychopathy in this example.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 2:24 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A million year old driving assistant
> 
> But by keeping it together, you *weaken* your plausible deniability. Keeping it together would give the prosecutor the ammunition to accuse you of [pre]mediated murder (with [pre] in brackets because it's not technically pre-mediated murder). The more cold-blooded you are, the more likely we'll interpret your killing as cold-blooded murder.
> 
> So a competent sociopath gets good at *simulating* freak-outs. Again, the freak-out isn't the problem, here. Freaking out is a tool just like any other. And it's rational and intelligent to use the tool deliberately.
> 
> On 4/28/22 14:17, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Just to clarify, I wouldn't shoot the guy because I was emotional.  He was the one that experienced the freak out.   In some potential circumstance, I would potentially do it for protection of my passenger, and to a lesser extent as a sort of public service, because the opportunity was given to me in the context of (plausible) self-defense.   The subtler reason that excuse would be appealing would be due to the basic injustice that I was basically keeping it together and he was not, and keeping it together is work.    So why should I take on the burden for adapting to lazy people?   Just because I can?   If we go around making special accommodations for people that don't try to keep it together, one can expect a lot more of it.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 1:49 PM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A million year old driving assistant
>>
>> Well, OK. So we can partition freak-outs into (at least) 2 types: angry vs joyous ... or whatever other false binary you choose (pro- vs anti-social perhaps). Then we argue for suppression of one but not suppression of the other? Pffft. That doesn't work. E.g. https://youtu.be/etK7e7iBJVQ You'd just end up living in a world of dead-eyed automatons.
>>
>> What you seem to be targeting, here, is *material* cause. Those of us who tend to flood more than others need less access to powerful tools like cars and guns. Again, it's not the freak-out that's the problem. It's the network in which the freak-out exists.
>>
>> On 4/28/22 13:40, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> It's not about the manners, it's about learning to distance from discomfort.   Like continuing to press a climb up a hill on a bicycle while the lactic acid burns your legs.
>>>
>>> Spend some time around someone with borderline personality disorder for a while, you will change your mind.
>>>
>>> Road rage is a common example.   The other day there was a bicycle that I was approaching who wasn't going very fast, even for a bicyclist.  She did have every right to be there, and so I was also going slow to wait for her to get around a parked car before I passed.   Meanwhile, some lunatic comes up behind us laying on his horn, oscillating from the left side of the lane to the right trying to find a way around.  Because he went so far right, there was no way he couldn't see the bicyclist.   I don't have a lot of patience for this kind of behavior, so I indicated my displeasure with a middle finger.  This individual then roars in front of us both and puts his car horizontally in front of mine.   He gets out and starts banging on my window to get his "catharsis".  Had I determined he was an actual threat to us, I might have pushed his car out the way with mine (which was much larger), or had I a weapon, shot him.     F*ck his catharsis, he can share the minor frustration of daily life with the rest of us, and in silence please.   There is no benefit in his freak out, it was basically a criminal act as far as I was concerned.
>>>
>>> There are situations which a rant is truly righteous, but I have found mostly no one cares about that.   Usually this discovery comes at some personal or professional cost.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 1:20 PM
>>> To: friam at redfish.co
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A million year old driving assistant
>>>
>>> "This is your last free article." [baaaaahhhhhhhh] Now what am I 
>>> gonna read this weekend!?!? Damn you! [stomp][stomp][stomp]
>>>
>>> Of course, I disagree completely with the point being made, there. The freak-out improves relationships and rationality, smooths over difficulties in the real world, and has all sorts of narrative-breaking, cathartic benefits. In the same way that convictions to ideologies foster conservatism and hamper progress, the suppression of one's freak-outs amounts to rejecting a large array of measures and indicators one might ordinarily use to understand the world. The problem isn't the freak-out. The problem is a lack of tolerance *for* freak-outs. It's the repressed Victorians running around complaining about the lack of manners and decorum around them.
>>>
>>> Please. Don't repress your freak-outs. We're tough. We can withstand your freak-out and use it to better plan for the future. The last thing we need is to turn into a bunch of dead-affect emotionless, freak-out-free psychopaths. Where would stand-up comedy be without freak-outs? Where would we get our qualia-laden *rants* from? What even is laughing if *not* a kind of freak-out?
>>>
>>> I haven't had the giggles in decades. But for some reason, a group of us were eating lunch a few weeks ago. Someone told a joke. Another someone kept laughing. I mean, even after the topic had changed and everyone'd moved on. This dude kept laughing. I tried to take a sip of beer and I ended up snorting it ... just because that other dude kept laughing. I'm allergic to barley. So when I snort beer it seriously messes me up for about an hour or 2. Fvcking laughing. Stupid freak-out. I should have suppressed it.
>>>
>>> On 4/28/22 12:53, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> “Emotional flooding might have helped your Pleistocene ancestors survive, but it is maladapted to most modern interactions.”
>>>>
>>>> https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/how-to-manage-em
>>>> o
>>>> t
>>>> ions-and-reactions/629692/
>>>> <https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/how-to-manage-e
>>>> m
>>>> o
>>>> tions-and-reactions/629692/>
>>>
>
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