Peanut

Script theory does a good job of showing how being able to follow certain social scripts does not suggest that the person does not hold a strong delusion that is unchallenged by those scripts.

You can believe you can fly while not needing to contest that until it becomes an active choice you are forced to make. Some might back off from the belief when put to contest, because they are okay believing whatever feels good despite the dissonance they feel. Some might take action believing they can fly. Both exist comfortable in a shared social group of online “flying truthers.”

People are easily deluded, and usually those delusions cover vaguely bounded and varying social groups, where a single person and an LLM can confirm the person into a noticeable delusion that hasn’t been socialized into the surrounding social scripts.

This is also how you can get a genuinely smart person in math or something, which also holds confident deluded beliefs on some other context.

On the whole: Eco-niche specialization, misplaced confidence, and social affirmation, generally can lead to this.

Literally a “protection racket” Where protection is from their own violence.

“give us a billion dollars and bad things won’t happen”

Possible the most classic and uninspired thug tactic of all time.

Id say the distinguishing difference is the function being the thing, where suffering relies on the set of distributed tools being used to measure and process suffering.

Many people excuse animal suffering by denying these parts exist, despite being basal and meadurable even in fish.

While I do think to some degree you are right, and we should be careful where we bound expected suffering, but eating a plant is much more like eating a disembodied part of an animal, or cell culture, rather than the full animal nervous experience.

At the very least, near the bottom of the triage. Its a constant energy balancing act as we progress as intelligent life. Also case by case as different eco-niches are fit. Don’t underestimate life and intelligence.

This is coming from a perspective inspired by Michael levin from tufts university, in the understanding of diverse intelligent systems.

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this is a difficult one.

for people (as well as myself) to understand nuance and the complicated nature of communication and interaction. our brains are good at filling in gaps of information, which is difficult for us to perceive. there is a complexity and sparsity of interpretations and perspective which we are largely incapable of realizing. this is largely due to the excess of knowledge and experiences in the world, which can be combined or perceived in countless different ways. we are especially ignorant to what we are ignorant of.

this means we exist in a high-dimensional battlefield ball of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and unintended inability to convey what was intended.

when we say something to someone, we expect they understand what we mean, but often their interpretations of the words you use can vary highly in ways you could not have predicted from your perspective. as well you may fail to realize the existence of several things that the other party understands or believes, which influences their perspective on countless possible things that have influenced their interpretation of your words in a way that you can’t understand, and wouldn’t know to discover.

at the same time many people are more susceptible to statistically ensured trend setting. this is mostly popular with bad actors who don’t mind saying whatever they know will “work” instead of trying to convince people of what is true or reasonable.

TLDR: we are more confident than we should be for almost everything. we also suck at communicating for reasons that are too complex to fully see or interpret. be patient and reasonable, as we are all missing information. a good mediator helps find gaps in perspective. try not to be controlled by your emotion or instinctual reactions to situations. be critical when interpreting new information.