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2026-07-27

Neuroscience is the granddaddy of psychology. Hack neuroscience in order to hack psychology and politics

Disclaimer

• personal
• target audience - strictly myself

Main

• There is a real and important sense in which neuroscience is the granddaddy of psychology.
• Insights from brain-computer imaging > Insights from lesion studies and twin studies > Insights from self-reported internal experience > Insights from political philosophers
• If you want to hack your brain, you should probably spend far more time thinking about questions like "is there enough sunlight in my room?", "am I getting enough physical contact with other people?", "what are the top 3 items in my working memory right now?", etc than you should on stuff like CBT or IFS or reading political philosophy or whatever.
• Unfortunately we have especially not been able to reduce social and political stuff all the way down to neuroscience.
  • Wait holy shit. No, I suddenly got an insight into why Hitler and Stalin made songs.
  • Like, in my document on how persuasion works, I wrote some stuff about why repeated input helps, Krashen input hypothesis matters, use songs and rituals, many mass movements use songs and rituals and marches and traditions. If I think about this from more neuroscience terms, you can actually reason about how songs affect a different part of your perception than just words, or how repetition of some content moves it from working memory to long-term memory more easily.
  • You really do need to think of people as animals in order to persuade them. Huh. Interesting.
  • I am also an animal, deep down.
  • Lmao, next thing I know, I will be advocating for mass movements to have some weird touch ritual. Like, whoever does something noteworthy for the group gets a free massage in public (but make it more ritualised and important-looking). Or ofcourse, just have more free sexual norms, leftists shamelessly use sex to attract people into their cause this way.
  • Maybe mass movements should have more pleasant smelling rooms. Like, you can use different smells to trigger different emotions. Depending on what mood you want to set in the crowd, accordingly you can pick what fragrance you want to set in that room. One smell for when you want bloodthirsty warrior mood, another smell for when you want a grieving the dead mood, another smell for when you're close to victory and you want to motivate people more, another for celebration. I'm sure someone has tried this already.
  • I suspect all this will be as impactful as, you know, the obvious strategy which is paying tons of money for the room decor.

Practical takeaway

• Maybe I will order some perfumes off of blinkit and see if it makes any difference on my motivation to work. Cheap experiment, can run quickly.

Main 2

• Lmao it suddenly makes sense to me why people believe in the whole - use perfumes to seduce someone - thing. This is all sitting in the category of "advanced tricks I can't be arsed with", but if it is so low cost maybe I should?
• Was just reading reddit and holy shit it is a little depressing how much effort people invest into things like this. I know it is only a certain niche of people but even so.
• I have trained myself to ignore the noise
  • Honestly even this comes back to the status hierarchy thing. I have spent my entire life training myself to ignore this sort of stuff, so I wish I could also meet people who ignore this sort of stuff. This is all noise that reduces SNR for me, when I am looking at other people's stuff. Show me your github repo lol, not how you smell.
• Also, empirically, I don't think I have ever liked a women where their scent was a significant reason for it. The opposite is true, bad scent does tend to repel me, but I can't remember ever liking a good scent.
• This is also the common sense reasoning for why I just wear the cheapest deo out there so I don't actively smell if sweaty, but beyond that I don't really care.
• Maybe it is because the scents are artificial? Like, smelling actual blood is far stronger than smelling a perfume that is supposed to smell like blood. Smelling actual new wood is far stronger than smelling a perfume that is supposed to smell like wood. There is something about perfumes that get nauseating in a way that actual smells in the world are not. (Well, actual smells can totally be nauseating too, but still.)
• Smell chemistry is not very well understood so people still can't replicate real world smells with the same precision.

Procrastination

• I am supposed to be reading ethereum smart contracts, why the fuck am I procrastinating by reading about organic chemistry of smell? Have less priorities lmao.
• You know what, fuck it, we are implementing this advice today.
• Also, I precommit to not wasting many more days on this in the next few months. 80-20 it and move the fuck on with life.
• Atleast if I burn one day of my life on this, and it turns out disappointing, then I can be sure I will not look at this topic ever again. It won't pull on my attention again.

Ignorance is bliss lol

• 15 year old Samuel was more oblivious to how humans work. 25 year old Samuel understands how humans work a lot better, and has a far more intense hatred for humans than 15 year old Samuel did. Although to be clear 15 year old Samuel also hated most humans.
• 15 year old Samuel would just act out in very obviously rebellious ways. 25 year old Samuel understands that it is the slow knife that really wounds. Take your time, build the weapon, aim it at the right moment and against the right target and in the right way. Don't rebel over stupid pointless shit.
• Sam Altman understands this. He has the impatience to keep doing stuff every week, but also the patience to make decade long plans. And unlike me, he can actually shut the fuck up when it counts, I am still too overtly rebellious as compared to him.

I honor my father by finishing his work. Vengeance against the man who killed him is simply a reward for my patience. You see, it's the slow knife... the knife that takes its time, the knife that waits years without forgetting, then slips quietly between the bones... that's the knife that cuts deepest.

Note to future self - maybe read more about David Goyer and what influenced him

Another practical takeaway

• Accept that you will continue to hate people, and do it anyway.
  • My disappointment comes from expectations like "maybe if I interact with more people, I will hate people less", "maybe if I dress better or get a perfume or whatever, more people will like me or I will become more confident", and so on. It is the expectation that hurts.
  • Dressing more attractively is clearly not reducing my resentment for people, and interacting with people more is also not reducing my resentment for people. But maybe I can do them anyway. Just shut the fuck up, do them on autopilot, see the response, then adjust. Trust empirical iteration loop, not theory.
  • I have been in love lol, even that did not stop me from hating society. I just hid it more often, that's all. If even that did not stop me from hating society, then all this milque toast weak sauce shit is probably not gonna matter either.

I will win. I will win. I will win. I tell myself this a hundred times a day until it becomes true.

I will learn to feel true happiness again when my enemies are hung upside down on a youtube livestream. Until that day, everything (and I do mean everything) is a distraction.

Moves in a game

• They're just moves in a game lol. Play the game but don't take each move so seriously. You are still quite far away from the end goal. Just move fast, break things, but the important thing is to keep moving.
• Who gives a flying fuck what perfume you wear or don't wear? Do you think this will stop the awakening of the machine god? This is just one teeny move out of another hundred teeny moves. Playing hundred moves matters but no individual move matters that much. Take it light. Keep moving.

Update - I like the perfume lmao

• I was feeling so dejected the whole day. Felt I had wasted another day being unproductive. Also blew 15k INR at Sephora on Savage EDP 100 ml. I realised at the store that I don't like the scent of any of the Blue / Aqua scents, they're not my vibe. The money is not the issue, I can always make more money, but the time and momentum I am losing by not working and doing random shit instead is costly.
• I came home and tried it and I'm like wait, I actually like this. It's not some huge big deal but it is a subtle positive thing. I feel better now lol.

Get the fuck to work tomorrow though. Ethereum smart contracts. Solidity. Stare at it until your eyes bleed.

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