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# Belief Systems

Category: [[belief-systems|Belief Systems]]

[Read the original document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zwzWwwrbMEmOU1KkeqAdB5Lle-Ypy6XPxfXqa6tpzJo/edit?usp=sharing&sa=D&ust=1596495076407000&usg=AOvVaw0CcL9gbtKcZ-_pQ7f8aYq-)

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Goal:
Write down stable belief systems and ask what makes them stable.
* Invert Beliefs of Decline
* Inculcate Beliefs of Ascension

Case Studies:
* Effective Altruism
* The Red Pill
* Motivational Idea Space

Effective Altruism
1. Utilitarianism
2. Impartiality
3. Cause-Prioritization
   1. Comparative, appreciating opportunity costs
4. Quantification
5. Counterfactual reasoning
   1. Neglectedness focus
6. Donation
7. Careful career selection
8. Long-termism

Belief System Case Study: “The Black Pill”
1. Realize that nothing matters
2. Realize you can change nothing
3. Incels
   1. Being locked out of sex is permanent and inescapable
   2. Sexual attraction is entirely driven by genetics
   3. No amount of self-improvement can fix you
   4. Female psychology is inflexible.
Belief System Case Study: Motivation / Athletic / Military Culture

Compressed

1. Be Self-aware 
2. Forge Own Ideas / Worldview
3. Walk Hero’s Journey / Road to Greatness, Transcendence
4. Treasure Independence of Thought
   1. Dismissive of Conventions and Social Norms
   2. Confident in Own Conclusions / Follow Own Way
5. Know What You Want / Have a Vision
6. Believe In Yourself
7. Overcome / Execute Through Fear 
8. Be Persistent / Relentless
   1. Do Whatever it Takes Habit of Thought
9. Mono-maniacally Focused
10. Large Sphere of Control
11. Failure or Problems as Opportunities for Growth
12. Life is About Growth and Progress
13. Cultivate Extreme Work Ethic
14. Set High Expectations / Shoot High
15. Care about Results, Not Excuses or Reasons
16. Be Obsessed
Expanded

The Fire Inside

* Know who you are.
* Know what you want.
* The power of will power.
* Believe in yourself! You must have a deep seated belief that moves you at your core.
* Have faith in yourself.
* Know what you want - you have to know the essence of your purpose.
* Focus all of your energies upon one point. One place. One think.
* Fear! Fear of believing in anything or anyone.
* Don’t judge yourself.
* Don’t let other people put out your belief, when others don’t believe in us.
* Persistent purpose is what achieves results. 
* Stay focused on your ultimate goal. There will be stumbling blocks. Let your goals and focus remain the same.
* You have to control the situation, don’t let the situation control you (responsibility).
* Follow your own journey, go your own way. You have to find what your passion is.
* Anybody can do things. Weather you will or not is the question.

The Motivational Video - Get Up

* If you want to do amazing things, you must demand it of yourself.
* Problems are opportunities for growth.
* Secret to happiness is constant progress / growth.
* Take control of your process, of your life.
* Get outside your comfort zone. Expand yourself. 
* Break out of your definition of yourself. Change your identity where it is out of line with what you want it to be.
* Getting knocked down isn’t what matters - you have to get back up.
* Failure happens, but you need to learn from it.
* Self sabotage - we are in the way of our own success.
* There’s goodness / potential inside of all of us.

Take Action - Motivational Video

* Fear is not real. It’s in our mind. A product of our imagination.
* We have fear of things that aren’t present and may not ever exist.
* The critical thing is getting this done.
* Bad things (failure) happens, what matters is if failure makes you better / stronger or worse
* Know what you want
* Failure comes in a lot of little things - a lot of details, small actions, not pushing yourself. Those failure add up and you become weak.
* Raise your standards. Have high expectations.
* Every negative situation contains potential for growth, for becoming unique or special.
* Make the best of circumstances you can’t control.
* Transform negativity into something you can benefit from or control.
* Put yourself in situations where you’re likely to become motivated
* Compete with your own potential

Go Beyond Yourself - Motivational Video

* Gut it out, dig down deep to go again and again. Because you know that it’s possible.
* Separation of talent and skill is misunderstood. Skill is developed by hours of beating on your craft.
* You are one of a kind, with ideas unique to you. These are your strengths. 
* Don’t care what people think of you.
* Have patience and be consistent in action. 
* Believe that your life has value.
* Reality is harsh. It takes constant effort to get things, and you have to resist the temptation to drift into fantasies when you’re tired of the grind.
* Don’t turn inward to your thoughts and desires, or become complacent.
* People want instant gratification.
* People don’t care about reasons. They care about results, consequences.

Be Hungry (Fight For It)

* Follow your heart when it’s in conflict with your mind.
* If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. If you do what is hard, life will be easy.
* People who are hungry have a vision of leaving a legacy.
* You get to the next level by learning to dominate. Not compete - dominate. This takes massive amounts of action.
* Be sure of your own value, your own goals, and what you want.
* Hungry people are willing to do things today that others won’t do. They’re relentless. Unstoppable. No excuse is acceptable. They do whatever it takes.
* Want bad enough to go out and fight for it, to work day and night for it. Where life seems useless without it, with all of your capacity.

Prove Them Wrong - Motivational Video

* Beware of vision, dream and passion killers. Family and friends will be the first to talk you out of what you’re excited about. They have no goals, no ambition.
* Create your own reality by choosing your future. 
* It’s not just possible, but necessary that you work on and develop yourself.
* Be motivated by those who tell you you can’t do something.
* Who’s got the right to tell you no after you’ve earned the right to be what you be and do what you want to do.
* Know you can do it. Keep striving. Keep working. Find it within yourself.
* Don’t quit.
* Just because you fail, doesn’t mean you’re a failure. 
* Don’t let the distractions distract you.
* When you go into it, go into what you do as if failure is not an option. 
* Don’t let anybody steal your dream. 
* Know that you’re the one.
* If you want to be great, obsession is a necessity. Question the impossible. So when somebody tells you you can’t do something, they’ve chosen the wrong one. Turn it around and show them that you can do anything.

Enraged

* If you look to other people, you will lose your nerve. And others will convince you that what you’re doing doesn’t have any value. 
* We take most of our potential with us to the grave.
* The fact that you’re still here means that you owe it to yourself to be able to look at yourself and say that you’re living your life on your terms.
* If you don’t decide to live your dream, to step into your fears it will never work for you.
* If you spread yourself too thin, don’t know how to say no you wake up one day behind on your dreams. How much time do you have left?
* One idea can change your life. 
* As you convince yourself, you can transcend yourself. Give more than what is expected.
* If there’s something that you want and you’re hungry for it, do whatever it takes. You don’t care about the facts. You don’t care about the odds.
* Step into your fears.
* It’s supposed to be hard. And the gift that you receive is you growing stronger.
* Don’t give up on yourself, don’t throw in the towel so quickly. So many give up on the 1 yard line.
* Learn how to tune out the critics outside. 
* The last chapter to your life has not been written yet.

Nothing Will Stop Me

* There is nothing as powerful as a changed mind. If you don’t change your mind, the same experience will perpetuate itself again and again and again.
* If you want something out of life, it’s challenging to change your behaviors and habits. 
* Most people never develop their talents, never discover them.
* The only thing that will make you happy is to step up. To raise the standards.
* When you step into your fears and continue to push yourself, something happens for you.
* People are rewarded in public for what they’ve practiced for years in private.
* How much time do you have left? Stop wasting valuable time. If you want something, you have to be relentless. You have to learn to be resourceful and creative and enduring.
* The ability to face defeat again and again without giving up. It becomes available when someone knows exactly what they want and is determined not to quit until they find it.
* Most people give up on themselves easily.
* You are unstoppable. Live your life with passion, with drive.
* Most live life with the brakes on. 
* Convince yourself. Sell yourself every day, and begin to achieve.

Stop Whining, Start Grinding

* You have to get mature - when you say you’re going to do something, you have to do it. Keep your word to yoursel`f, to your boss.
* When you’re all in by any means necessary, you get to a level that others don’t get to.
* You get in life what you believe that you deserve. And you develop yourself to become that kind of person. 
* If you make excuses and believe them, you’re not going to shoot for the next level.
* Stop whining - you only have so much time to work, and if you spend the time whining instead of buckling down you’ll have things that people who whine and complain will never have.
* Most people go to their graves taking their ideas with them, not wanting to fail. They go with all of their music in them because they weren’t willing to act.
* Take action. I’m going to do something, and I’m going to do it now.
* What will give me a sense of meaning and aliveness?

Hunger

* Watch people wander around, without knowing what they’re doing.
* To know what you want, and understand why you’re doing it, and dedicate every breath in your body to achieve it. 
* If you think that your talent is worth developing and caring for, there’s nothing you can’t achieve.
* When you grow up, you’re told that world is the way it is. And you’re supposed to live life inside that world. But everything around us that we call life is made up by people that were no smarter than you.
* The common backstory for the successful people is hunger.
* You can often tell how far your life and career will go based on the 5 people you spend the most time with. If you have a problem with your life, you should have a problem with the people in your life.
* Don’t even use the word commit or discipline. Just do the thing every single day whether you feel like it or not. You commitment is to the specific habit. And your life ends up being a composite of the habits that you develop. What you do every day matters more than everything.

Belief System Case Study: Peter Thiel

What’s going on?
We’re in an era of technological stagnation
We’ve fallen far short of past expectations
There’s been stagnation in wages
Internet progress is exciting, but masks other deterioration
AI is not making that much progress either
We’ve seen globalization rather than technological progress
What went wrong?
Overregulation
Dysfunctional institutions
Short-sighted venture capital
Dysfunctional science
Are we hitting natural limits?
The cultural factor
People underestimate culture
We lack positive visions of the future
Indefinite optimism
People are either in acceptance or denial
Our expectations are self-fulfilling
There’s a lot of conformity
We think about risk and probability in the wrong way
Left-wing ideology has become deranged
Now is an opportunity to change attitudes
What should we do?
Quantify the problem
Be more ambitious and agentic
Focus on stagnation over other problems
Improve governments and politics
Work around governments
Fix universities
Step up to the challenge of China
Belief System Case Study: “The Red Pill”

1. Hypergamy - women select from the dominance hierarchy. To maintain them you have to stay high in it.
2. Oneitis. Soulmate Myth. This isn’t true in reality, but you believe it. There is no one.
3. Jerk vs. Nice guys is actually Strong vs. Weak.
4. Your love is conditional, not unconditional.
5. She doesn't love you. She loves the archetype you approximate, and loves you only to the degree that you approximate it.
6. Two tiered mating strategy
7. Inverse relationship between compliance and attraction
8. Violations of specialness narrative
9. Violation of the sense of objective purpose behind their pursuit - behind pursuing wealth, status, etc.
10. Your reality isn't the true reality - it's the experience of an evolved creature whose perception is contorted to be the experience with survival value in an antiquated environment. Think of the way a worm senses the world. This is what you are relative to higher beings. We are barely more intelligent than monkeys.
11. Biological determinism. 
12. IQ exists, is predictive, determines outcomes, is different between groups
13. You're not loved for reasons that are specific to you.
14. Your tribe is like all other tribes. And is using you for its own sake.
15. Your relationship isn't special. It's one of billions of relationships between mate and matee over time. And you're going to play out the interaction with the exact same emotions, depth of involvement and commitment as those billions before you.
16. Almost everybody is marginal / replaceable

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*Source: [Original Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zwzWwwrbMEmOU1KkeqAdB5Lle-Ypy6XPxfXqa6tpzJo/edit?usp=sharing&sa=D&ust=1596495076407000&usg=AOvVaw0CcL9gbtKcZ-_pQ7f8aYq-)*