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To what extent am I paranoid? Occasionally wondering if I’m being shadow banned by Substack when in reality my posts just aren’t that great. Can anyone relate?

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"...in reality my posts just aren’t that great."

Most all of us do not have consistently great posts. Myself included.

Your self-introspection here is rare and admirable, causing me to go read several of your recent postings.

In addition to introspection, your comment also exhibits intellectual humility. Your feed exhibits other high notes as well.

One being your ongoing intellectual effort.

Another is that - as a general rule - your strongest posts ask questions. Some (not all) weaker posts instead provide (sometimes questionable) answers, or cling perhaps a bit too strongly to ideologies, such as our U.S. Constitution. A fine document, but one that should also be questioned, not just revered for its accomplishments. What about the three fifths compromise in our Constitution? If a document defined me as 3/5 of a person, I would be inclined to say tear the whole damn thing up! Question human institutions more, worship them less.

Questions can lead us toward ever better understanding, while answers tend to stop intellectual growth, as well as often mirroring our blind spots. And thus our answers are often skewed, wrong, or incomplete.

Several days ago one of your posts notes that "Too much dogma stifles learning. Too little dogma leads to lack of group cohesion." A tough balancing act that seems like thoughtful analysis to me.

I applaud your curiosity and ongoing intellectual efforts. Your posts will likely get ever better with continued reading, practice, questions, intellectual humility, and introspection. There are an enormous amount of facts and principles to learn to get ever closer to truth, reality, discernment and reason. This is a gradual process more than a destination, and requires a lot of time and dedication.

Cheers.

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Thank for reading my posts and notes Mr. Beanbag. I hear you on the Constitution. We try to celebrate it now that my kids are in school learning about it. When they were too young to understand, I pretty much said get rid of it, “my kids don’t have to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance,” but I didn’t want to be that kind of dad anymore. I decided to be more patriotic and give up my Robert-Higgs perspective. Thanks for the feedback. Will think.

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It might be interesting to consider how the "invisibility" of intentions is a learned behavior of becoming self-conscious beings. Infants do not have a gap between their emotional states and their visible expression to others. It becomes a matter of bodily control to, for example, smile while embarrassed, and thus learn the ability to manipulate situations, to feign nonchalance or present as more brave and intimidating than you feel. The need to navigate the social world at the heights of self-consciousness and wonder about other's thoughts occurs in adolescence. Social threat detection sensitivity likely gets tuned (perhaps over-tuned) in that emotional crucible.

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Very interesting idea - thanks

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> Note: this post involves ideas clarified, elaborated, and justified in much greater depth in my forthcoming book on delusions co-authored with Kengo Miyazono and Sam Wilkinson, tentatively titled ‘The social roots of delusions’

I've long thought Vaughn Bell & co were barking up the right tree re:social cognition and psychosis; I look forward to this collaboration.

Unrelatedly, I wonder about pronoia. I find it more plausible that this occurs because "people are secretly trying to help me" is hypothesis space that can bear weight when the elements of paranoid cognition (agent-based explanations, etc) develop alongside a something like a status-inflating delusion than any deep-historical explanation involving the need to detect actual helping conspiracies, but I'm curious what others think.

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Thanks. Seems to be a good deal of overlap between paranoia and social

anxiety. Would a similar psychological makeup more likely lead to paranoia in physically dangerous environments (eg., DRC) and to social anxiety disorder in equally competitive/hierarchical but not physically violent environments (e.g., a US or UK university)?

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V. interesting - I’m not sure. My (completely non-expert) understanding is that whereas paranoia has to do with fear that others will deliberately harm you, social anxiety involves fears that others will judge you negatively, in which case they are tapping into different but related kinds of threats.

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Only issue with this exposition that I have is quite minor - so first, thanks for organizing your well considered thoughts on this topic of universal concern -and human survival - and sharing them here. I’ve often speculated about this, but not so systematically. (I’m a retired public health doc, have an older sister who has survived half a century of ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, and one an older brother with addiction associated paranoia.)

The minor detail is statements of the form ‘we are (/were) designed to’...

It IS cumbersome to say, ‘who we are was seemingly selected over eons via a relative superior survival of traits that’…). But after the first longer form statement, perhaps one can abbreviate a bit to, ‘we were selected to’…without being too misunderstood.

[Or much better: 'evolved to', which you used in your next posting! 'Selected', on reflection, suggests a selector, as well - not normally 'random selection'.]

It indeed IS very natural to anthropomorph-ise!😉 Even the forms of our language resist scientific expression.

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Great post! And not only because I’m doing very similar research right now. 😉

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"First, social threats involve invisible intentions which can only ever be inferred. Unlike, say, predators, sharp objects, or heights, you cannot perceive people’s hostile or exploitative intentions."

Well, I mean, you CAN perceive those things, but usually only when the enemy just doesn't care about hiding anymore.

An entire roman legion marching straight toward you, in full kit, while chanting "ale, slaves, and whores", when you know perfectly well that Rome is your enemy and this isn't (wasn't) a roman city..... is kind of hard to miss in terms of their hostile and exploitative intentions.

But if you're a civilian in a city during a sack, and got within shouting range of a roman legion before you figured out what was about to happen, that's kind of on you at that point. Everyone knew what was going to happen if your city lost that fight.

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Very thoughtful and stimulating piece. Thank you.

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Your analysis is even more rewarding to read while listening to former bandleader for Stephen Colbert's The Tonight Show, pianist Jon Batiste, tickling the ivories on his just released album *Beethoven Blues*. Highly recommended two-for-one.

Paranoia can be a rewarding alternative to accepting the fact nobody cares about you.

- unknown

The study of causality is a subset of the study of paranoia.

- Thomas Pynchon in his 1973 novel *Gravity’s Rainbow*

I'm genuinely tired of new facts supporting my paranoia.

- @Goosehonkings on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Pacific Time 14:26, 12 February, 2024

After our recent election here States' side of the Atlantic, I am going to reread your 21 September, 2024 blog post, "America's epistemological crisis". I could not agree more, so I will likely conclude your title and analysis both politely understate that concern. Cheers.

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I found this issue really fascinating, thanks Dan for sharing it. Not only for the way you explained in detail the concept, the causes and the related phenomena, but also for the way you expressed it, which is very inspiring on how to try to write in relation to the research results.

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What are your thoughts on Rutger Bregman's thesis of the book you linked? Tit for tat has probably driven a lot of our social evolution, other than that how accurate are his conclusions

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This is excellent...clear, comprehensive, simple, and explains it all in a way that makes so much sense the reader is left thinking to themselves "how did I not figure this out myself?! It seems so obvious now."

The question I'm left with, is what if anything can be done when dealing with someone with paranoia? Of either the mild or serious but sub-clinical variety? It would seem, based on your explanation, that helping them feel safe might have something to do with it, but that's a tall order.

I also wonder if the excess of social information that we're all receiving now, because of the internet, is leading to increasingly worse mistakes of this variety...both in quantity and quality. I can't help but notice that paranoid and conspiratorial thinking and errors seems to be increasing. It seems likely that that's because we're just all now bombarded with way too much information about way too many people...many of who we don't know and will never meet, and much of it negative, and our brains are just not adapted for it or able to handle it.

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I think that's mostly right but this has some big implications for psychiatric medication -- in particular it suggests that we shouldn't expect effective medications not to also work for those who aren't paranoid/sad/anxious and we might need to accept that treating these conditions means using drugs that everyone might like.

I take the short version of the thesis to be something like: it's useful to be afraid of shit because sometimes something is out to get you so it would be surprising if that system was never miscalibrated to be oversensitive. And presumably the same kind of reasoning applies to other systems like anxiety, negative affect (expecting things to go badly) and so forth. Sometimes these systems will be overactive and that will push people into depression [1] or crippling anxiety.

But that means that treatment should look more like treating a hormone deficiency than treating a disease. Looking for drugs that only make depressed people happier or anxious people calmer may be a mistake. I mean sure SSRIs and related drugs are given for both depression and anxiety but they are hit or miss and they might just be just randomly perturbing the system in a safish way and having an effect via regression to the mean.

In other words, if this is true we need to accept that really serious treatment breakthroughs are going to mean drugs that make everyone happier/less anxious/less paranoid (last one is already true with antipsychotics). That doesn't mean we need to give everyone cocaine or heroin. Those have too many side effects but everyone does fine with caffeine and maybe something in between.

--

1: Yes, I agree depression tends to be a complex of symptoms but that doesn't mean that something like an unusually low happiness set point isn't the major or even primary cause. Especially if you are worried about people just being unhappy even if they are high functioning.

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One problem with the present thesis is that paranoia cannot be empirically/medically proven, because intentions (subjective mental states) of other people cannot be proven; at the clinical level, it is just a judgment that reflects the empirical biases of those who diagnose it. Nevertheless, it is possible to PROVE paranoia, not as medical condition but as an error of reasoning: in assuming the certainty/knowledge about the intentions of others we violate the principle of sufficient reason and therefore the law of non-contradiction (this does not apply to mere suspicions). But there is a massive implication to this kind of proof: all humans make this error 100s of times per day, in various contexts, including medical experts, which renders this kind of logical inconsistency socially ‘normal’. The stigma of paranoia is rather about the type of irrational convictions that paranoiacs have; it makes other people (often powerful people) feel bad that they are accused by some commoner of having bad intentions, so they retaliate by socially stigmatising and medicating the irrationality that makes them feel vulnerable.

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Maybe the article suffers from overthinking.

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Being accused of thinking too much is a great compliment in a species that does far too little of it.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6f/66/9b/6f669be34f012d0a4492d6d72fcef9f4.jpg

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What is the opposite of paranoia? A false belief in your own narrative! Which is worse????

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