Conversation

Example: aliens land and you go, “why is everyone surprised? It’s a big universe; we’ve seen it in a hundred movies; law of large numbers; Drake equation; blah blah!” If you aren’t surprised if aliens land on earth tomorrow, your surprised circuits have been fried by cynicism.
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Deep cynicism combined with narrow intelligence makes it hard to tell your own indifference apart from lack of surprisal in events. “I don’t care about this” —> “why is this surprising?” “I must have expected this since I’m not surprised” —> ‘I’m smarter than the surprised ones”
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Are you sure this is "cynicism"? I feel this kind of thing about trump admin buzz, in fact I think I asked about the whole harambe dead weird wacky timeline thing and he said it was more therapeutic/performative than actual surprise...
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gives me the feeling that a lot of public surprisal is really performative and v separate from *actual* surprisal, the emotion. So lack of surprise may not mean broken surprisal circuits at all, just that someone has no reason to signal
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I don’t think it’s easy to hide real surprise. I do think cynicism is one cause (that I have anecdotal evidence of), but there are certain;y others. Depression is another big one. If everything looks like grey, aging shit to you (like Stan in South Park) you can’t be surprised