Loftus attributes Firehouse's far-right politics to Mensa's toxic belief in a fixed intellectual hierarchy. "There is no overstating what community can do for someone who, as many members described to me, feel like misfits in their everyday lives and want to belong somewhere. A society with murky goals whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to find it."
Related: Beware of Being Right:
Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong in some respect.
Reddit thread, What is something that's considered normal today but is actually a successful propaganda made by corporations? And a comment on why targeted advertising is bad.
A critique of efficiency, which in practice is making our lives worse so that money can concentrate itself better.
The abstract of a paper, The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration. You guessed it, the more expensive the wedding, the shorter the marriage.
Finally, a dark reddit thread, What the fastest way you've seen someone ruin their life?
]]>The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.
There is only one reality. Heaven, Hell, and mortal life are not three different things. They are one single thing.... This one single reality is connection to all things, if you are ready for it you experience this as Heaven. If you are not ready for it you experience this as Hell.
A short comment thread, Most of us have been told 1000 times that the stove is hot, but psychedelics let you touch the stove.
A long comment thread, When you're on acid, things happen that would otherwise never have happened. What are your examples of this phenomenon?
And an article, Mainstreaming Psychedelics: Secularizing spirituality with the aid of Eastern religion. The main idea is that we can put psychedelic experiences on a spectrum, where at one pole is the Eastern unitive-mystical state, being one with everything, and at the other pole is the Western interactive-relational state, where you can get specific practical insights.