Moss_Piglet comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong
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Maybe you can give some common misconceptions about how people recover from / don't recover from their addictions? That's the sort of topic you tend to hear a lot of noise about which makes it tough to tell the good information from the bad.
Do you have any thoughts on wireheading?
Have you tried any 19th/20th century reactionary authors? Everyone should read Nietzsche anyway, and his work is really interesting if a little dense. His conception of Master/slave morality and nihilism is a much more coherent explanation for how history has turned out than the Cathedral, not to mention that the superman (I always translate it as posthuman in my head) as beyond good and evil is interesting from a transhumanist perspective.
I'm not sure if these are misconceptions, but here are some general thoughts on recovery:
Wireheading is somewhat fuzzy as a term.... The extreme form (being converted into "Orgasmium") seems like it would be unappealing to practically everyone who isn't suicidally depressed (and even for them it would presumably not be the best option in a transhuman utopia in which wireheading is possible.)
I think a modest version of wireheading (changing a person's brain to raise their happiness set point) will be necessary if we want to bring everyone up to an acceptable level happiness.
I've read a lot of excerpts and quotes, but not many full books. I read a large part of one of Carlyle's books and one late 19th Century travelogue of the United States which Moldbug approvingly linked to. (I've read a fair amount of Nietzsche's work, but I think calling him a reactionary is a bit like calling the Marquis de Sade a "libertarian.")
The one concept from Nietzsche I see everywhere around me in the world is ressentiment. I think much of the master-slave morality stuff was too specific and now feels dated 130 years later, but ressentiment is the important core that's still true and going to stay with us for a while; it's like a powerful drug that won't let humanity go. Ideological convictions and interactions, myths and movements, all tied up with ressentiment or even entirely based on it. And you're right, I would have everyone read Nietzsche - not for practical advice or predictions, but to be able, hopefully, to understand and detect this illness in others and especially oneself.
It's funny to me that you would say that, because the way I read it was mainly that slave morality is built on resentment whereas master morality was built on self-improvement. The impulse to flee suffering or to inflict it (even on oneself) is the the difference between the lamb and the eagle, and thus the common and the aristocratic virtues. I wouldn't have thought to separate the two ideas.
But again, one of the reasons why he ought to be read more; two people reading it come away with five different opinions on it.