The Paradox of Retardmaxxing

Retardmaxxing has quickly become one of my favourite words in the English language. And not just me. Some of the smartest people I know all seem to like this word.

There is something comical about this brainrotted word coming out of the mouths of otherwise intelligent people.

But what does this word mean?

Retardmaxxing simply means to stop over thinking, and take action.

If you hate your friends, leave them. If you don't like the person you are dating, stop dating them. If you hate your job, quit. If you are lonely, go talk to people.

You don't need therapy, or coaching. You don't need to read more books, or watch more podcasts.

Whatever problems you think you have, stop analyzing them. Stop thinking about them. Become a quote "retard", and take the next most obvious action, and see what happens.

It's a simple idea, but it is profound. It's also profoundly stupid, with several layers of brainrot baked into its morphology.

This contrast makes the concept funny and memorable, making it ripe to become a meme.

Now the word retardmaxxing likely traces its origin back to the looksmaxxing forum in the 2010s. It was unclear who coined it. Although at the time, it was likely used as an insult.

YouTuber Elisha Long then adopted and popularized the term in his videos, where he imbued it with its current philosophical meaning. The word has since become popular, as many people found the concept useful.

Indeed we do live in an over-intellectualized world. Before you quit your job you're supposed to read books about it. Journal, see a therapist, and do some soul searching to make sure it aligns with your life's purpose.

But maybe you just need to call your boss.

Maybe most of our problems are phantoms created by our overactive minds. And their solutions are much simpler than we make them out to be, if only we stop thinking about them.

But on the other hand, the human mind is one of our most valuable assets. Discarding it entirely feels like it should end badly.

So there is a paradox here: should we pause our incessant thinking, and act bravely? Or should we think critically to stop our rash actions?

To retardmax or not to retardmax, that is the question.

Now first of all, this is not a new question. Humans have been thinking about this question for quite some time.

We've long noticed that despite its undeniable utility, thinking has not always been beneficial.

Buddhism, for example,, identified thinking as a root of suffering about 2500 years ago.

Seneca of Ancient Rome also famously said that "we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."

So whether thinking helps us or hurts us is an old question. And we're in good company here: some of the best minds in history have chewed on this question, and we are spoiled with centuries of materials on the subject.

The best literature I found on retardmaxxing was written 400 years ago, by Shakespeare of all people. It's a play, called 'Hamlet'

I don't know if Shakespeare intended his work to be used as textbook material for retardmaxxing. But it really is perfect.

As written, the play reads as a controlled experiment on how to retardmax.

There are 3 experimental groups, in the form of 3 characters in the play, with the experimental variable being how they retardmax:

The 3 characters have similar goals. But they retardmax differently to get there.

With this setup, we can observe how each of them perform, so that we may derive a science-based protocol for retardmaxxing.

Now I'll talk about the plot of the play extensively in this video, so spoiler alert. Although this play came out 400 years ago. So if you haven't seen it, I don't know what to tell you.

Now the play starts with the main character. Unsurprisingly, his name is Hamlet.

Hamlet does not retardmax. In fact he's the exact opposite of a retardmaxxer. So I'll refer to him as a 'brainmaxxer'

A brainmaxxer is someone who is very smart, and they like to direct their intellect towards their problems. However, they are not very good at taking actions. So they think a lot, but don't do much.

Now Hamlet is the prince of Denmark. His father was the king of Denmark. But right before the start of our story, Hamlet's uncle murdered his father in secret, and took over the crown.

As a result, Hamlet's father became a vengeful ghost spirit, and went around Denmark, scaring the shit out of the locals.

Hamlet heard about this so he came along with his friend to investigate. This is where our story begins.

When Hamlet finds the ghost, and the Ghost says to him:

"My son, I'm your dad. Your uncle, that son of a bitch, murdered me in cold blood and took my crown. So I need you to kill him, and avenge me", and then it goes away.

Upon hearing this Hamlet feels pretty fired up. He is reasonably pissed off by his father's unjust murder. And it looks like he's ready to turn this thing into an action franchise and kill his uncle.

He even says, quote: "Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge."

The plain English translation: "Say less, imma speed run this revenge quest, let's fucking go"

So it really looks like Hamlet will prioritize this quest and get it done soon.

But 2 months passed, and nothing happened.

Hamlet did pretty much nothing during this time except he did start feigning madness. He's been pretending to be insane. Maybe he thought this would confuse his enemy.

But all it really did was make him stand out to the entire court of Denmark.

Everyone noticed the prince was acting strange, and started wondering why.

The king in particular grew so suspicious of Hamlet's behavior that he put people to spy on him.

In other words Hamlet puts all this work into pretending to be insane. But that effort counterproductively aroused the suspicion of his enemy and was otherwise irrelevant to his goal of killing his uncle.

So he's basically procrastinating. It's a kind of 'productive procrastination', where he puts effort into doing something irrelevant in order to convince himself that he's being productive.

This is a known problem for brainmaxxers. Hamlet is particularly afflicted by it in this play.

Now the problem with productive procrastination is that deep down, the procrastinators often know what they are doing. They can't completely fool themselves. And it slowly eats away at them.

For hamlet, this eventually catches up to him.

One day, a group of traveling actors shows up at the castle. Hamlet is a fan of this group so he greets them and asks for a sample performance.

So the group starts performing the scene. This is kind of a sad scene so the actor at some points starts crying. But the actor is very good at his job, so even though he's acting the tear looks realistic.

Now Hamlet was triggered while watching this performance. It somehow reminds him that he's been procrastinating on his revenge quest, to the point that Hamlet starts doing a soliloquy. A soliloquy is basically a monologue in a play, where a character thinks out loud in front of the audience. So we get to hear the character's thoughts directly.

This is the full original text of this soliloquy. In plain English Hamlet is basically beating himself up. He's saying:

"oh my goodness, I'm such a worthless piece of shit.

"Look at this actor. He was acting, so he was dealing with an imaginary problem, yet it made it so sad that he cried.

Unlike him, I've got a real problem. My dad was murdered. I have real cause for grievance. If that actor had my problem, he would have cried so much that his tear would have flooded the stage. And yet here I am.

For 2 months I didn't do shit.

This is very bad. I gotta stop this bullshit and go do something. I gotta do something."

Ok I suppose, better late than never. At least hamlet finally sees his mistake. So he goes and kills his uncle now, right?

No. Remember, Hamlet is a brainmaxxer. So here's what he says next:

"I know I gotta do something, but I'm not going to kill my uncle just yet.

because now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that I should blanketly trust that ghost I met.

Sure the ghost looked like my dad; it claimed to be my dad, but you never know with these ghosts right? It could be a random ghost who was pretending to be my dad to trick me into committing murder.

So I shouldn't act so rashly. I need to acquire more evidence to prove that my uncle truly killed my dad first.

So here's what I'm going to do instead:

I'm going to stage a play that re-enact the exact scene of my father's murder, and I'll invite my uncle to watch it. And I'll watch him watch it. If he reacts in a guilty manner upon seeing the play, then I'd know for sure that my uncle killed my Dad. And I'll kill him after that."

So the question is: do you buy it?

I suppose Hamlet's rationale for doubting the ghost does seem reasonable. After all you shouldn't trust random ghosts you meet off the street.

Except that that is not how ghosts work in plays.

'Ghosts' are a kind of narrative convention, which is an established tool creators use to construct stories.

In plays from Shakespeare's time, the narrative convention was to treat ghosts like NPC quest givers in video games. When a ghost tells a character something, the character is supposed to just believe it, and act on it as if it is the ground truth. You are not supposed to doubt the ghost.

Imagine you are playing a video game. You meet an NPC and it goes "Hello adventurer, there's a dragon up on the northern mountain, please go kill it and bring me the dragon heart."

When you hear that, you believe the NPC, and go kill the dragon. You don't say "hold on I don't believe you. I just met you bro. Is there really a dragon up on the northern mountain or are you just fucking with me"

So the fact that Hamlet is doubting the ghost right now is a genuine literary innovation on the part of Shakespeare, as a break from the narrative convention of the time.

But the way Hamlet doubts the ghost is a little suspicious, because he didn't doubt the ghost at first. He is only doubting the ghost now, right when he needs to take action on his revenge.

So the analogy is like: you trusted the NPC at first, and you actually went to the Northern mountain to fight the dragon. But when you see the dragon you are like, "Nah fuck this", and you left.

Then your friend asks you "why did you leave" You say "Oh well, I actually don't trust that NPC guy, I think he's suspicious"

That's Hamlet, right now. That timing is awfully convenient, isn't it?

Is Hamlet really being rational here? Or is he brainmaxxing to the moon trying to come up with an excuse to avoid taking action towards his goal?

Like maybe, he's trying to stall so hard that he's literally breaking the narrative convention to do it.

Then again, what he is saying is logically coherent. You can't underestimate the intelligence of a brainmaxxer. If they are coming up with excuses, they'll at least be good ones.

So we can give Hamlet the benefit of the doubt for now. But I'll plant a flag here, a red one, about Hamlet's compulsive brainmaxxing behavior.

Speaking of compulsive brainmaxxing: it's right after this point that Hamlet delivers yet another soliloquy. It's the most famous soliloquy in this play that starts with one of the most well-known lines in English literature: "To be or not to be"

Even if you've never read Hamlet, you've probably heard this line before.

By the way, this line means "should I live or should I die"

In other words Hamlet is contemplating suicide, in a very abstract and philosophical way.

Now this is an interesting contemplation. The whole soliloquy is 33 lines of text, about 260 words, in which Hamlet makes a lot of good points about life and death, whether life is worth living, why we endure it despite its uncertainty, etc.. It would probably make your philosophy professor proud.

But the question is why is he thinking about that right now? doesn't he have an uncle to kill?

This is like the least relevant subject to be thinking about in the middle of a decapitation campaign.

Imagine someone doing this at work. Let's say you got a group of developers who are trying to ship software. They are in a meeting. And suddenly Jimmy raises his hand and he says "Hey guys, I know we are supposed to review the Python scripts right now. But before we do that, I got a question. Should I kill myself?

Look I'm not saying that I'm gonna do it. But I'm just curious, you know, from a philosophical perspective, why don't we kill ourselves? Why do we live? Why are we here? Like what's the meaning of life?"

So it's like "Jimmy these are good questions, thank you for raising them. But we got deadlines so shut the fuck up"

Anyway, the next day Hamlet stages the play, the uncle comes to watch it, and the uncle does react in a guilty manner. After all he's witnessing an exact re-enactment of him murdering his own brother, and that is hard for him to watch. So he stands up in the middle of the performance and walks out of the theatre.

Hamlet sees this and is convinced. He declares that he now trusts the ghost, and that his uncle is guilty.

So we can finally kill the uncle now right? No more excuses?

Hopefully. Because moments later, we see Hamlet's uncle leaving the theatre, and feeling quite shaken by what he saw.

To the point that he's now curled up in a corner and starts praying.

He goes "Oh my god. I'm such a terrible person. I killed my own brother to get his throne. God please forgive me. blah blah"

And it's at this point that Hamlet finds him. What's better, Hamlet happens to have a knife on him. So it's perfect. Your uncle is absorbed in prayer. He's not paying attention to his surroundings. You've got your knife right here. So, let's kill him right now.

And Hamlet is about to do that. He gets to just inches away from his uncle with a knife in his hand, but then he says: "Wait"

"hold on.

"Let's...let's think about this.

"Look, my uncle is praying right now.

Praying is an act of virtue. So he's doing something good at the moment.

So if I kill him now, there's a chance that he might go to heaven.

If I kill him and he goes to heaven, that is not revenge. That's me doing him a favor.

So I can't kill him right now. I need to wait for him to do something bad, and I'll kill him then, because that way he'll go to hell.

So let's not do it right now. Let's do it later."

Ok, I don't know about you, but I call bullshit on this.

This is the clearest example of brainmaxxers generating excuses in order to stall and not take action.

Now at this point you might think that given how hard Hamlet has been stalling, maybe the problem isn't that he is brainmaxxing too much. Maybe he's just fundamentally a soft-hearted man who's incapable of killing people.

Killing someone is a lot to ask of an average person. So maybe what hamlet is going through is understandable.

That's a reasonable hypothesis, except Hamlet kills someone moments later, it's just not the right person.

After getting cold feet and backing out of killing his uncle, Hamlet goes to talk to his mom.

At this time, Polonius, the king's adviser, is hiding behind the curtain, eavesdropping on the conversation.

This is part of the king's project to spy on Hamlet to figure out why he's been acting so strange.

But while Hamlet is talking to his mom, he notices that someone is behind the curtain. So he draws his sword, and stabs through the curtain without hesitation, killing Polonius right there on the spot.

Hamlet then pulls the curtain to see who it is that he just killed, and realizes it's the king's advisor. So he says "damn it, I wish you were my uncle. Well, whatever." And then shrugs it off and leaves.

So Hamlet is perfectly fine killing people. He just can't do it when it comes to his uncle.

This is the classical procrastination pattern.

For example, when a college student gets an essay assignment and wants to procrastinate, it's not that they lack the ability to write in the English language. They can write perfectly fine.

In fact they might write a whole lot of stuff. They'll write in their journal. They'll reply to their emails. They'll write a to-do list. But they just don't write the one thing they need to write.

That's what Hamlet is doing here. He's able to kill people, and he does kill people, just not the right people.

Now despite Hamlet showing very little concern about killing the king's advisor here, this is not a trivial issue. A murder is a murder after all.

When you kill someone you normally get a trial in open court but the king doesn't want to do that with Hamlet.

Hamlet is a well-loved prince in Denmark.

To try a local celebrity like Hamlet in open court is to give him a microphone to address the nation. And the king is worried about what Hamlet would say given the opportunity. After all, Hamlet seems to know about his crime.

So instead of trying Hamlet, the king decides to cover up his adviser's death, and exile Hamlet to England on the pretense of a diplomatic mission.

So while Hamlet is offscreen being shipped to England, let's talk about the other experimental groups.

Because Hamlet's fumble in killing the king's adviser spawned one of them.

The king's adviser has a son named Laertes. Since his father was killed, Laertes now wants revenge too.

Unlike Hamlet however, Laertes is a retardmaxxer. In fact retardmaxxing is his only strategy in life.

In this way, Laertes is Hamlet's exact opposite: instead of brainmaxxing everything, he retardmaxxes everything.

So how does a retardmaxxer perform on a revenge quest?

Well, Laertes received his quest in France. That's where he was when he heard of his father's death.

But unlike Hamlet, Laertes didn't get a ghost quest giver that provides him with all the necessary information.

He simply heard that his father passed away through word of mouth. He didn't know why or how his father died.

It makes sense then for Laertes to investigate first, find out more information about his father's death. How did the old man die? Did he slip and fall? Did he get a stroke?

But Laertes is a retardmaxxer, so he didn't do any of that.

Instead he just left France straight away for Denmark.

Once he arrives in Denmark, he hears rumors that the king probably has something to do with his father's death. And he simply believed those rumors, without making any efforts to validate them.

So Laertes is now decided that the king is the one who killed his father, and he must now kill the king.

But how is Laertes gonna kill the king? What's his plan.

He's just some random dude in Denmark. He can't just walk into the King's castle and point a sword at him can he?

Well, he can. Apparently that's exactly how you retardmax a decapitation campaign.

Laertes riles up a mob and starts storming the king's castle's front door.

This random guy from France is now starting a literal coup in a foreign country, after just days of arriving in the city.

And somehow it's working. The mob is starting to overpower the castle's defense.

When the king hears about this, he's like "ok, I don't know what this is, but we spent 3.5% of our GDP on defense. We are not gonna get beaten by a random guy from France. Call in the special force i want them here now"

Now the actual specialized military unit is called the Switzers. They are mercenary soldiers from Switzerland. They were apparently the most feared infantry in Europe back in Shakespearean times. They were kind of the SEAL Team 6 equivalent back then.

So the king calls in the Switzers. The Switzers arrive, and Laertes's mob one-shots them all.

This is the exact quote from a guard who witnessed Laertes' mob:

The plain English translation:

"Laertes and his mob are crushing your guards faster than the ocean flooding over its shore"

In other words, "We are getting steamrolled over here"

And by the way while Laertes's mob is overtaking the castle, they are also shouting for Laertes to be made king. So this is a full on revolution and Laertes is winning.

And the next thing you know, Laertes breaks into the throne room, walks up to the king and puts a sword at his throat.

Now let's pause and take a look at what just happened.

A week ago, Laertes was in France.

Through sheer retardmaxxing, and without a single ounce of braincell, Laertes moved himself across Europe, started a coup, invaded one of the most well guarded institutions in the country, put a sword at the king's throat and is now about to achieve regime change in Denmark. And he did all of that without any prior planning or air superiority.

To compare, Hamlet lived in this very castle. He could not move his ass across a hallway to point a sword at the king for 2 months.

Meanwhile the retardmaxxer achieved orders of magnitude more progress in a matter of days.

Now we can laugh at Laertes' lack of strategic thinking, but the power of retardmaxxing cannot be dismissed.

In other words, when you act without hesitation, you wield immense power, but there are a few problems with this.

First of all, it's incredibly risky to always act without hesitation. In the case of Laertes, a lot of things can go wrong when you stage a coup against a sitting monarch in a foreign country.

It worked out this time for Laertes, but that was never guaranteed.

Secondly, notice that Laertes doesn't even have the right target.

The king wasn't the one who killed his father.

All the work he did, and all the risk he took could become totally wasted because his endeavor was directed at the wrong person to begin with.

And lastly as a retardmaxxer, even if you have this immense power, if you are not thinking critically, you are not directing that power strategically.

And if you are not the one doing it, someone else probably will. If you are not the one doing the thinking, someone else will do it for you.

And that's exactly what's about to happen to Laertes.

The king, with a sword at his throat, simply says.

"hey chill bro, I didn't kill your dad, that was Hamlet. He killed your dad, and he's probably trying to kill me too.

"So why don't we be friends and kill hamlet together"

And Laertes goes "oh ok bet", and he sheathes his sword and becomes best friend with the king.

It doesn't occur to him to do some research to confirm whether the king is telling the truth, just as he didn't do research to confirm the rumors he heard before.

And just like that, the retardmaxxer becomes someone else's tool.

All of that power neutralized and privatized in a second.

This is also quite a lost opportunity.

Remember that Laertes' mob was shouting to crown him king? That window is closed now.

And it looks like the only reason Laertes didn't become king of Denmark was because he didn't care to.

He was so busy retardmaxxing his revenge that he didn't stop to notice the extremely advantageous situation he was in. The play would have ended very differently if he had simply taken the crown and then sentenced Hamlet to death as the king, for example.

This is again a known failure mode of retardmaxxing. When you are always taking action and never pause and re-assess, you lose sight of the advantage offered to you by serendipity.

Now while all that bullshit is going down in Denmark, Hamlet is on his way to England where he bumps into experimental group #3.

Experimental group #3 is a character named Fortinbras.

Fortinbras is the prince of Norway, where his uncle is currently the king.

And like Hamlet, he wants revenge for his dead father.

His father died in a legal duel with Hamlet's father 30 years ago. And as a condition of the loss, a piece of Norwegian territory was given to Denmark.

So Fortinbras' revenge consists of taking that territory back. And to do that, he'd have to invade Denmark.

So Fortinbras is playing the game on the hardest mode here. Unlike Hamlet and Laertes, who only need to kill one dude, Fortinbras needs to perform a military invasion of a foreign nation.

If Fortinbras were a brainmaxxer he would probably never do anything. The problem is too big and he would just think about it forever.

If he were a retardmaxxer he would have acted on it yesterday, and would have probably died in the process. He would attempt something like invading Denmark all by himself with nothing but a sword, and would probably end up getting one shotted by some guard.

But Fortinbras is not a brainmaxxer nor a retardmaxxer. He is a dual maxxer, in that he practices both brainmaxxing and retardmaxxing.

So how does a dual maxxer perform in this experiment?

Well he didn't do anything at first.

He recognized that invading a strong sovereign nation through brute force alone had a low probability of success. So for 30 years, he didn't do anything.

One would mistake him for a brainmaxxer at this point since he's not taken any action for decades.

But then Hamlet's father died, and Hamlet's uncle became king. Fortinbras did not know the details of the crime involved in this succession, but he nonetheless saw that it was a chaotic succession that created a degree of temporary instability in Denmark.

Seeing this as a window of opportunity, Fortinbras acted without hesitation.

He immediately begun amassing an army to launch an all out war with Denmark, and he was doing all of this behind the back of his own king.

It was an ambitious plan until the king of Norway found out about it.

Apparently Norway and Denmark had a somewhat amicable relationship at that time and the Norwegian king did not want to invade the country that made his Legos. So he put a stop to Fortinbras' plan, and made him swear that he would never try something like this again.

Now it's a pity that Fortinbras' plan failed, but there was nothing more he could do when the king himself had ordered him to stop.

A retardmaxxer would probably get angry at this point, make a scene, maybe even draw his sword at the king, and end up in jail.

But as a dual maxxer, Fortinbras can take the loss more gracefully and strategically.

So Fortinbras gave up on the invasion, apologized to the king and swore he would never do something like this again.

The king is happy to see this, and as a reward, he gave Fortinbras a new war to fight, over a piece of land in Poland.

It's not an important piece of land. It actually had virtually no financial or strategic value. The king is essentially giving Fortinbras a pointless war to let him burn his energy on, rather than taking revenge on Denmark.

Fortinbras probably knew that this new war was bullshit. But he didn't act out. Instead he took the order from the king and began focusing on executing it.

So Fortinbras is now leading his army to Poland to fight that war, and that's the army that Hamlet bumps into on his exile to England.

Now Hamlet is actually pretty triggered when he sees Fortinbras' army.

Hamlet considers Fortinbras to be someone in a similar situation as himself. They are both princes. Their uncles are both kings of their respective nations. And they both lost their fathers.

So when Hamlet sees Fortinbras taking massive action, leading an army to fight to the death, it reminds Hamlet of his own lack of action-taking, and he hates himself for it.

As a result Hamlet begins doing another soliloquy, in which he self-flagellates about his incompetence for not being able to take action.

This is my favorite soliloquy in the play. I liked it so much that when I read it for the first time I decided to memorize it and perform it in front of the whole class.

It was an English class. I was in high school at the time.

And apparently, my performance was so epic that a couple of other students in my class started memorizing Hamlet soliloquies and performing them in front of the class too.

And that wasn't a mandatory assignment by the way. So I somehow managed to get Gen Z high school students to voluntarily do extra work. I'd say that was an impressive accomplishment.

But anyway, this is one of the longest soliloquies in the play, so I won't talk about all of it.

In short Hamlet is basically beating himself up about what a useless pussy he's been, and vows to never be a pussy ever again. It doesn't work of course, because he continues to be a pussy for the rest of the play.

But what he is saying does show tremendous self-awareness.

One line goes, quote "A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward"

Translation, if you divide up my thoughts into 4, only one quarter is wisdom while 3 quarters are cowardice.

In other words, Hamlet knows full well that all the thinking he does is not productive. That he is in fact using his intelligence to make up excuses to avoid taking action, because he lacks the courage to act.

This is something that is quite tragic about brainmaxxers: they are too smart to buy their own bullshit.

When they direct their analytical power towards themselves, they are smart enough to recognize their own mistake. And yet they cannot do anything to fix it, because they can't take action.

Since 'thinking' is the only tool they have, they'll try to think their ways into taking action, which doesn't work.

As the meme goes, "No amount of esoteric wisdom will fold your laundry for you"

Thinking and taking action are orthogonal processes. You cannot think your way into taking action.

To take action, one needs to stop thinking, and retardmax. In so far as a brainmaxxer is unwilling to take that leap of faith, they'll stay stuck in their head, which is quite a painful experience.

In the extreme it is almost akin to a kind of locked-in syndrome, where you have all these good ideas in your head, but powerless to bring any of them into reality.

Hamlet is experiencing this exact problem right now, where he knows exactly how he is fucking up, and exactly what to do to fix it, but can't do anything with that knowledge.

Now Hamlet's exile to England would be cut short and he'd soon return to Denmark. How that happens is a long story. His ship was attacked by pirates, and a lot of other stuff happened. None of it matters for our experiment. All you need to know is that Hamlet is now on his way back to Denmark.

His uncle, upon learning this, plots a scheme with Laertes to kill Hamlet upon his return.

Their idea is to propose a friendly exhibition fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.

But instead of fake swords, Laertes would secretly use a real sword with poison daubed on the blade to kill Hamlet during the match and have it appear like a sport accident.

At the same time, the king would prepare poison wine so that, in case the poison sword didn't work, he would feed Hamlet the wine as a fallback.

But on the day of the duel, a number of things go wrong.

Hamlet is winning at first, landing two hits on Laertes.

Hamlet's mother is happy to see that her son is winning. So she toasts Hamlet with wine, the very wine that is poisoned. So she drinks that wine and is now about to die.

Then Laertes lands a cut on Hamlet with his poison sword, so Hamlet is now about to die.

Laertes then got cut by his own sword by accident, so he is now also about to die.

Seeing that he himself will soon die, Laertes flips out and confesses the whole scheme.

He basically says "Bro, my sword is poisoned so you'll die soon. I'll also die soon. That wine is poisoned so your mom will die soon too. And this whole thing is your uncle's idea. Sorry about all this."

Upon hearing that he is about to die, Hamlet finally locks in, and kills his uncle, by stabbing him with the poison blade then force-feeding him the poison wine.

If there is ever an example of someone procrastinating until the very last moment to complete their task, this is it. Hamlet has waited till his very last breath to kill his uncle.

Anyway, after that, everyone just sort of dies of poison.

It's at this point Fortinbras arrives in Denmark.

He has finished his war with Poland. He won actually.

And he is on his way back to Norway, passing by Denmark. So he was planning to appear before the court of Denmark to greet the king as courtesy demands. But instead he finds that everyone's dead.

The king is dead. The queen is dead. The prince is dead. Basically the entire Danish royal family is now dead.

So he walks up to the throne, sits on top of it and goes: "well, I see that everyone is dead here and Denmark's leadership position is open. So maybe I'll take it, what do you guys think"

No one objects to Fortinbras' claim to the throne. Probably because everyone else who has a claim to the throne is now dead.

So Fortinbras becomes the king of Denmark, and lives happily ever after. The end.

So our experiment is over, let's take a look at the result:

The brainmaxxer died. The retardmaxxer also died. The only one who did not die during the quest was the dual maxxer.

And not only did he complete his quest, he exceeded expectations: he did not merely get back the lost Norwegian territory. He took all of Denmark and became its king.

So the result is unambiguous. It is suboptimal to brainmax, or retardmax, exclusively. One must dual max for optimal results.

The data on this is stark. If we look at survival time, for example:

Now the fact that the retardmaxxer died first makes sense because retardmaxxing is generally the most dangerous strategy.

Needless to say, when you routinely act without thinking, you tend to put yourself into dangerous situations.

(Official cause of death: his own poisoned sword.)

This is partly why, temperamentally, pure retardmaxxers are less common in modernity. Studies show that modern humans tend to be more cautious in that we are generally biased towards risk and loss aversion.

So a typical human is more likely to overthink than to over-act.

Those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who took too much risk probably got ejected out of the gene pool pretty quickly. And as a result, modern humans inherit a negativity bias that gears us towards caution, hesitation, and overthinking.

This is not to say that retardmaxxing is useless. Recall that Laertes managed to trigger a full-on revolution in a matter of days all by himself. The problem is using retardmaxxing as the only strategy.

Now compared to pure retardmaxxing, pure brainmaxxing is safer.

In the play for example, the brainmaxxer survived 2 more acts than the retardmaxxer.

Indeed, brainmaxxers are good at surviving. After all their obsessive overthinking ensures that they never take any action, and therefore never take any risks.

However, by avoiding all risks, they avoid all opportunities too.

So what awaits brainmaxxers isn't a quick death, but a slow and painful one.

Brainmaxxers tend to generate the most suffering, for both themselves and others.

There's a famous line from The Matrix: "ignorance is bliss." If you don't know any better, you get to be happy with the false reality that you know.

That bliss is unavailable to brainmaxxers because they are smart enough to figure out exactly what's going on.

They see clearly what's at stake, and what they need to do to achieve their goals. But they are not retarded enough to take action on that information.

And that is deeply frustrating. This is the locked-in syndrome we talked about.

As a result they might try to tell elaborate lies and excuses to buy back the bliss of ignorance. But they are too smart to buy their own bullshit, and deep down they know that they themselves are the cause of their misery.

And in their misery they bring suffering to others.

For example, the entire bullshit that transpired in the play was brought on by Hamlet's inability to take action.

Hamlet pretty much caused the death of over half the cast, either directly or indirectly, because he could not bring himself to kill one dude.

The entire play could have ended in the first act if he had simply retardmaxxed a little bit.

So the suffering of a brainmaxxer is rarely just his own. If you cannot take action on what you want, you tend to externalize that misery to the people around you too.

Now you'll recall that the dual maxxer is the one with the longest survival time. He's also the only one who won the quest without dying.

This isn't surprising. Having the ability to reason and strategize, but also execute when the time is right, is an overpowered combination.

This doesn't mean that dual maxxers will always succeed in their endeavors.

Fortinbras himself failed before his eventual success, like how his first attempt at invading Denmark was shut down by his uncle.

But as long as they are not dead, failures become data that dual maxxers use to become stronger.

This is the principle of iteration: you take some action, analyze the result, and use what you learned to take better actions next time, and repeat until you achieve your goal.

Notice that iteration inherently requires dualmaxxing. A brainmaxxer can't iterate because he never acts to begin with. A retardmaxxer acts a lot, but he never analyzes, so failures teach him nothing, he just repeats the same mistake harder.

Only a dual maxxer can access the full loop.

Now at this point it might seem like I'm calling for balance. That it's bad to go with either extreme, so one should practice moderation. Do a bit of brainmaxxing, and a bit of retardmaxxing. Truth is in the middle kind of thing.

This interpretation sounds correct except when we look at what Fortinbras did, there's nothing moderate about it.

When it was time to brainmax, he brainmaxed. For 30 years he did nothing. He wasn't just doing 'a little bit of brainmaxxing' there. That's a level of brainmaxxing that would put Hamlet to shame.

But when it was time to act, he did not hold back either: he raised an entire army and was about to launch a full invasion of Denmark. That's a level of retardmaxxing that would make Laertes salivate.

So the name 'dual maxxing' is intentional. You are not dual moderating. You are dual maxxing.

When it's time to think, think hard. When it's time to act, act hard. Whichever tool is deployed gets brought to the moon. One does not hold back in the name of moderation.

So that's it. That's our answer to the paradox.

To retardmax or not to retardmax? The answer is yes.

Retardmax. Max it to the moon if you'd like, but, brainmax, as well, and to the moon, too.

Do both, and you'll be fine.

Alright everyone, that's it for tonight. Check out my email newsletter and community linked in the description. I'll see you next time.