said (3mo ago #2165 ):
Should You Hide Your Power Level?
It's common in radical chan-derived internet circles to speak of "hiding your power level", meaning not letting the normies know just how much anime you watch, or just how nuanced your opinions of Hitler are. Its a sort of necessity to keep the tradition alive without immediately facing the social equivalent of martyrdom for your waifu at the hands of people who don't even have a waifu. But is it proper praxis?
The early Christians won because they were willing to be martyred. Sure the cost to the individual was high, but eventually the message people actually get is "wow these people must have something really special". Thus thanks to the sacrifice of the early weebs, we enjoy hard-won freedom to watch anime without fear.
But there's also something to be said for tactical ambiguity, not constantly broadcasting your existence and position to the enemy. Sometimes you actually are just behind enemy lines and you have to, for lack of a better term, hide your power level. The difference between courage and foolishness, cowardice and strategic prudence, is subtle and sometimes not knowable in advance of the outcome. It's a leap of faith.
There's a related idea often discussed in circles that are what I'll call the rational traditionalists. As rationalists or close enough to that, they don't believe in resurrection, incarnation of god-men, miracles and such. But as traditionalists they see and respect the immense social value of religion, which almost always seems to involve claims of supernatural authority. So a question arises: should they personally "convert" to a religion (especially latin mass catholicism, which has nearly cornered this market) and say the creed despite it being a lie for them, or should they not do so and forgoe the social benefits of membership in a religion? In other words, is it a good idea to fake belief for social expedience?
Someone pointed out that less rationalistically scrupulous people often actually do change their belief to match social expedience, as it makes the lie more seamless. Normies mostly do this seamlessly and unconsciously. But note that they are just that: normies. By being sloppy with instrumetality and belief, they lose the ability to maintain a high integrity independent worldview at all. I can expand on why I think that is if you're interested. Live players meanwhile tend to be notable for how weird and divergent their private beliefs actually are. I think this is not an accident: maintaining an independent high integrity worldview is a superpower.
I don't think the psychological danger from hiding your power level is quite as high as nerfing your internal ideological integrity, but when you hide your power level your public persona at least becomes something of a normie, and loses the intoxicating charisma of boldly independent belief that your "true" self could have. Living a psychological double life is a weakness. But maybe it's necessary in many cases.
The balance I strike is this: internal compromise is utterly unacceptable. You should never allow your beliefs to be influenced by anything but truth, never expedience. But then external compromise of some kind is necessary, if you don't want to end up like Socrates or Jesus (maybe you should?). But to ever lie or even to be too much of a normie publicly destroys your relationship to truth (thanks Kant) so in practice you probably want to have as much as possible of your power level bared openly, while retaining some tactical silence on the really hot button trigger issues. For me this means I'm not about to convert to a religion I can't honestly believe, but I'm also not going to tell you what I actually believe, though I often hint at it.
But a wise friend challenges me that this is contradictory. Maybe it is. A great someone came to me in a dream and asked me why I'm still hiding my power level. A wealthy friend demands that I go all out and lay my true philosophy down in public. What do you guys think is right here?
The early Christians won because they were willing to be martyred. Sure the cost to the individual was high, but eventually the message people actually get is "wow these people must have something really special". Thus thanks to the sacrifice of the early weebs, we enjoy hard-won freedom to watch anime without fear.
But there's also something to be said for tactical ambiguity, not constantly broadcasting your existence and position to the enemy. Sometimes you actually are just behind enemy lines and you have to, for lack of a better term, hide your power level. The difference between courage and foolishness, cowardice and strategic prudence, is subtle and sometimes not knowable in advance of the outcome. It's a leap of faith.
There's a related idea often discussed in circles that are what I'll call the rational traditionalists. As rationalists or close enough to that, they don't believe in resurrection, incarnation of god-men, miracles and such. But as traditionalists they see and respect the immense social value of religion, which almost always seems to involve claims of supernatural authority. So a question arises: should they personally "convert" to a religion (especially latin mass catholicism, which has nearly cornered this market) and say the creed despite it being a lie for them, or should they not do so and forgoe the social benefits of membership in a religion? In other words, is it a good idea to fake belief for social expedience?
Someone pointed out that less rationalistically scrupulous people often actually do change their belief to match social expedience, as it makes the lie more seamless. Normies mostly do this seamlessly and unconsciously. But note that they are just that: normies. By being sloppy with instrumetality and belief, they lose the ability to maintain a high integrity independent worldview at all. I can expand on why I think that is if you're interested. Live players meanwhile tend to be notable for how weird and divergent their private beliefs actually are. I think this is not an accident: maintaining an independent high integrity worldview is a superpower.
I don't think the psychological danger from hiding your power level is quite as high as nerfing your internal ideological integrity, but when you hide your power level your public persona at least becomes something of a normie, and loses the intoxicating charisma of boldly independent belief that your "true" self could have. Living a psychological double life is a weakness. But maybe it's necessary in many cases.
The balance I strike is this: internal compromise is utterly unacceptable. You should never allow your beliefs to be influenced by anything but truth, never expedience. But then external compromise of some kind is necessary, if you don't want to end up like Socrates or Jesus (maybe you should?). But to ever lie or even to be too much of a normie publicly destroys your relationship to truth (thanks Kant) so in practice you probably want to have as much as possible of your power level bared openly, while retaining some tactical silence on the really hot button trigger issues. For me this means I'm not about to convert to a religion I can't honestly believe, but I'm also not going to tell you what I actually believe, though I often hint at it.
But a wise friend challenges me that this is contradictory. Maybe it is. A great someone came to me in a dream and asked me why I'm still hiding my power level. A wealthy friend demands that I go all out and lay my true philosophy down in public. What do you guys think is right here?