Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Jordan B Peterson"
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Andrew Doyle: "Tolkien [is a book where] where bad people look bad and good people look good"
Tolkien: "“At last Frodo spoke with hesitation. 'I believed that you [Strider] were a friend before the letter came,' he said, 'or at least I wished to. You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would - well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand”"
Also, did you miss the bit where the Ring called out to the evil in people, and used it (even if it started with good intention) to twist them into something horrible? Kind of an important point, that. Even the Orcs were elves, once.
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"The more complicated the cognitive activity, the better at it people who have high general cognitive ability are. Now, there isn't anything more complicated than reading other people."
Yes, but there is an instinctive tendency present in most humans to preferentially observe human faces. This is measurable even in pre-verbal babies, as we can track eye movements to determine where their attention is directed. Most babies prefer to look at faces and human forms, as opposed to having their eyes attracted to other things -- motion, for example.
Some babies' eyes are NOT attracted to faces in the same way. These babies can be predicted with significant accuracy to display symptoms on the autistic spectrum, later in life.
Think about it -- if the data your eyes take in during your most formative years, is of facial expressions, you're going to have significantly more well-grounded intuition connecting facial expressions to basically every other stimulus you're taking in at the time. Even people with the most amazing cognitive abilities, are going to have a hard time replacing that well-educated intuition with conscious efforts, at the speed of conversation.
I accept that "EQ" correlates with IQ in general, but I would bet that in people who can be demonstrated to lack the preference for looking at others' faces, the linkage is significantly weaker (although the trend would likely be the same, as their cognitive ability leaves them able to compensate somewhat).
On the other hand, people who are not tied to a preference to observe the faces of others, are more free to observe other things. In some cases, this gives them an extraordinarily different baseline of observations and intuitions on non-human subjects, which can push them towards the tail end of distributions that serve them well at places like CalTech.
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"Some people are making an awful lot of money off of this war"
Eh, not so much. The profit margins on ammunition are pretty low, all things considered. And if you want to sell exquisite weapon systems, your best customers aren't people whose countries are half-wrecked; they have no money. Even if you can force a peace on your terms, reparations famously backfire.
Your best customers are prosperous people in thriving countries who have looming threats on their doorstep. I'm confident that defense contractors could make even more money if we made peace in the Ukraine, even at the expense of several DonBas provinces, and stuffed the rest of the countries bordering Russia with enough defensive armaments to make the Kursk salient look like a nursery school playground. There is no slippery slope when the next step is vastly more dangerous and difficult than the last.
Then, we simply let the Russian demographic crisis age their fighting men into oblivion. Or, we let Putin look as clever as Bismarck, by making peace with us (and even something of an alliance), and turning his armies East to make sure the Chinese are too busy with a land war on their doorstep, to attempt to take over Taiwan. =)
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"Having a system -- government, that's what we've got"
No. We have all of civil society, which includes not only government, but family, private associations, fraternal groups, churches, companies, clubs, and the rest. Without Civil Society, government devolves into totalitarianism.
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@julesjacobs1 I'm afraid I don't have proof of that particular negative, just a sense (after paying bit of attention to the subject) that they didn't have a fixed moralistic objective.
The ever-ironic moral of Peace, maybe? Bringing good things back to Mongolia? Genghis may have believed that everything under the sky was his, although he was somewhat famous for not pushing his religion (aside from the precept, "Don't ever hurt a Mongol. Seriously, just don't") on the people he conquered.
And I'm not sure they were all that unique. The conquests of Tamarlane, the Imperial Japanese, the Imperial Chinese, the conquests of Julius Caesar and other Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Zulus... the farther back you go in time, and the farther from Europe you go, the less justification they seem to have had (or thought they needed).
Almost makes you wonder whether a moral justification for everything, even conquest, is something attributable to Christianity, too.
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The French never quite knew what they were fighting for -- it was a future none of them had ever seen, which never really worked.
The only two successful "Revolutions" in history were of the English.
One, the American Revolution, simply re-established the rights of Englishmen that were in place during the period of "benign neglect" preceding the imposition of royal interference. The national government grew and changed over the centuries, but never very quickly (despite Wilson and Roosevelt.)
Two, the Glorious Revolution, which simply re-established the primacy of the well-established English Parliament, along with a constitutional monarch who knew that he ultimately served at the pleasure of that parliament, not the other way around.
The French, Russians, Chinese, etc, were always mucking about with completely novel forms of government, none of which had any track record at all.
It's no wonder they were such disasters.
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"Persona - a crafted presentation you use for expedient purposes"
Yes, it's an interface you use, to reduce transaction costs. Personas your culture is familiar with, are a stack of expectations that others have of you, and that you have of yourself. Others don't quite know what to make of you if you don't have one, and you don't quite know what to make of yourself either. (Professor, feel free to challenge any part of this, I'm in declaiming mode and probably sound more than a little pompous. Being taken down a peg by someone obviously smarter and better versed in all this would be a mercy, compared to being taken down a peg by a random passerby. Anyway.)
Personas can be an excess of order, and inhibit the flow (chaos) of conversation.
Personas are also linked to madness, especially archetypal personas like "Messiah". However, more humble personas can also lead you to habitual maladjusted behavior (madness). People fully master a number of personas in their lifetimes, trivial personas like "rider on a bus or subway" or "person going to the dentist". However, your experiences and talents lead you to be more than just these personas. If you tried to operate in the world like your entire identity were just "person going to the dentist", people would (rightly) think you were crazy.
You can also obviously exhibit maladjusted behavior by NOT having mastered a persona that you attempt to take on as your "identity". You can be comically inept as the persona "dentist" (if you don't happen to have any training or education as a dentist), or as the persona "subway driver." (Or "university professor.") Attempting to impersonate a persona (to fail to be equipped to live up to its expectations) is madness as well.
I would argue that much of the problem with Identity Politics is exactly this difficulty with Personas. Even if you adopt the persona of every alleged identity group you supposedly belong to, you do not inhabit them perfectly -- your individual experiences and characteristics both exceed, and fail to meet, the requirements of any given identity category. They also exceed, and fail to meet, the complete intersection of all these personas.
To insist that you are so, is madness. Someone who tried to do so, would habitually exhibit maladjusted behavior, as they left out some of their talents and experiences, and lay claim to characteristics they don't in fact possess.
On the other hand, might be fruitful to have a discussion of the cultural expectations (personas) of masculinity and femininity, and how well those map to actual biology and any given individual. A man who doesn't live up to the ideals of manhood, and a woman who doesn't live up to the ideals of womanhood, are comical figures - but we see ourselves in them as well.
Anyway, that's a brain dump of something I've been thinking about for a few years now. It doesn't compare to the decades Professor Peterson has spent thinking about things, so it could probably use some work.
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"If someone else is dead but your bank account is accruing profits quite nicely..."
Are you sure that's what would happen, though? In this case, peace is better for business.
I mean, to be appallingly cynical, if we fight to the last Ukrainian, isn't that destroying our best potential market? Dead people don't have any money. If we get rid of Russia as a threat, what motive do Poland, the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Romania have to buy weapons to counter that threat? If anyone goes deep into debt to pay for these wars, who's going to pay off that debt? (This was the root of the problem at Versailles -- without reparations, the British and French couldn't pay off the war.) Is America in a position - with even the ability, to say nothing of the popular political will - to sponsor a new Marshall Plan?
I'm not at all convinced that, in the long run, defense contractors (at least some of them) wouldn't be better off pushing for peace, and supplying high-end defense systems to prospering countries that have a lot to lose. Stuff Russia's neighbors with enough weapons to make the Kursk salient look like a preschool playground by comparison. Trade land for time to build up defenses -- Russians understand that that's a winning strategy, and may think twice about re-starting conflict, especially when they take a look at their demographic profile.
On the other side of it -- if Russia collapses and there's no one to order those nukes to fly (or if they've shot them at us), what's stopping the resource-hungry Chinese from waltzing into resource-rich Eastern Russia? We'll have traded a bogeyman for a real monster.
The wars that would result from a prolonged Russia - Ukraine conflict will envelop the world. Most of the casualties will be from conflicts triggered by fertilizer shortages and the resultant famines in Africa, where they will not be from American weapons, but from second-hand AK-47s, machetes, and whatever they can find around the house.
No, I don't think that it's at all sensible to say that "War is good for business" or "profit is the motive here". Peace is good for business, although in some fields it's easy to get the two confused.
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"President Eisenhower outlined the Military-Industrial Complex as the biggest threat we face"
Well, them, and the Scientific-Technological Elite. Have you ever read his whole Farewell Address? An excerpt (_please read to the end_):
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
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There has been talk for the last several years of a "Greater Idaho" movement. Several of the eastern (conservative) counties of Oregon have voted to split off, to join Idaho.
This is similar to the initiative to form the state of Jefferson, which is also more conservative and includes many of the same counties in Oregon, plus some conservative northern California counties. If Oregon's counties succeed in joining Idaho, it's likely California's northern counties would follow suit.
If you keep heading southwards, you see that if you get very far from the coast, the majority of easterly counties in California go "red" -- conservative. If the northern counties of California join Greater Idaho, it's likely that these counties (which reach down to the Mexican border) would wish to join as well.
Which leads to the interesting question -- I have heard talk of Alberta seceding from Canada, and joining the United States. If it can bring some of the southern mountain regions of British Columbia with it, it would also be contiguous with Idaho.
All it would take is a little bit of a push into the Northwest Territories, and suddenly Greater Idaho goes from the Arctic Circle to the Mexican border.
Greater Idaho is the new Manifest Destiny!
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@aaronazagoth6373 The tricky part here is, most of the chattering classes (such as Ferguson here) have sympathies with the Authoritarian Bureaucrats.
The argument (so far) is literally one-sided, because the people with the most time to sit around and argue (or are even paid to do so), are for the most part on the authoritarian side because they just love to have their ideas implemented.
Now, this isn't the end of the world; there is some value to people sitting around thinking, publishing the results of that thinking, and people generally reading what they publish. I own some of Niall's books, myself.
However, we're going to have to make it crystal clear to them that we, the people, WILL NOT TOLERATE their using state coercion to implement their ideas.
Publish and we'll read, talk and we'll listen.
Then WE will decide what to do. And if they don't like it, tough.
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On empathy -
The birth of my first child was not only new to me (and therefore alarming), but technically difficult, and it is only thanks to medical attention that he is alive today. The birth of my second was alarming because of my experience with the first, but it went comparatively smoothly.
It was only during the birth of my third child that I calmed down a great deal. By then I had internalized, that even if things went terribly wrong, I was not going to be the one suffering the physical effects of that, and that was a good thing. This could be considered a "lack of empathy". However, the fact that this allowed me not to be at loose ends, and to perhaps be a source of calm in a situation where others were going through difficulty, made me more of an asset than I'd been in previous situations.
Similarly, I found myself in a situation where one of my group of friends had betrayed the trust of other members of that group, because he was in a significantly worse position than he had ever let on. He hadn't screwed me over, so I was not personally wronged; this allowed me to be more empathetic and helpful to him, than any of the others could be. They were ready to abandon him to his difficult situation, and understandably so.
Just as there is a thought that cancels thought, there is also empathy that cancels empathy. Whatever degree of empathy you have, can be put to good use.
By the way, you're more likely to be useful at your uncle's funeral, if you're not falling apart yourself.
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"It's not like I have (or any of us, for that matter) have a massive array of arguments at hand to justify cultural norms."
Churches should be able to do this, and not just with illustrative stories. This is probably something that Bishop Barron could help direct - a basic catechism for basic Christian morals, to answer questions and challenges. This lack, has made the Church seem less credible intellectually than the fashionable idiocies we see the "sexual revolution" passing around.
Although to be honest with you, the Book of Common Prayer does a decent job of it. Here's part of the liturgy, justifying marriage --
First, It was ordained for the blessing of children,
to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise
of his holy Name.
[Step one, present the research on two-parent families. Step two, Professor Peterson can put in his usual content about God being the highest good you can aim at.]
Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin,
and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency
might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
[Step Three -- the Professor can probably point out the problems that sex outside of a committed relationship that might as well be marriage, can cause.]
Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help,
and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity
and adversity.""
[Step four, provide clips of "Jordan Peterson's Commentaries On the Benefits of Intimate Relationships"]
I know it doesn't have the same cachet as Exodus, but the Professor could probably do a sidebar on the Anglican wedding liturgy. Although he'd probably be dodging requests from people to officiate at their weddings for years afterwards.
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@robyn7287 Well, of course, Matt has ambitions of being a Theocratic Dictator. He's very upfront about that. ;)
Matt's "dictator" mode is extremely amusing when he's doing it as a joke, but it's also very inspirational when he's addressing subjects upon which there should really be no debate, like butchering children.
It's good to have bedrock values like that, and it's not surprising that a place like Daily Wire has a commentator that has opinions too strong to be a good interviewer.
Klavan, Shapiro, and Knowles are all flexible enough to conduct a fairly mainstream kind of interview. Peterson too, almost.
When Matt interviews, you get movies like "What is a Woman" and "Am I Racist". The whole point is, that the person he's talking to is just profoundly wrong.
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It might be useful to define what we mean by "an interpretation" of a text.
Words are networks of associations. Some of these associations are explicit denotations (which consciously limit and focus the word enough to make it useful, and are included in a dictionary). Some of these associations are implicit connotations, and these can include "typical" context, famous usages, sense-memory associated with the word, vestigial literal meanings from centuries past, personal / unique associations, and more - whatever contributes to your intuition of what it means. This also holds true of phrases of words.
Your brain keeps track of these physically through the way neurons are networked together, and convolutional neural nets keep track of them (as far as they keep track of anything) by connections between "nodes" in that net.
Sometimes, these networks are congruent with one another in some way; we call these analogies. You can extend these comparisons into allegories, fables, and parables.
Just like tou can "interpret" a word by picking some associations over others, you can "interpret" a text by emphasizing some set of associations over others. You can emphasize the literal associations of an author's writing, for example. Or, you can emphasize whatever your ideology tells you to emphasize, even if every other association is working against you.
And, just like using word associations or abstract images to plumb someone's psychology, you can use someone's interpretation of a text to judge their psychology and character, or whether they're incapable of independent thought because they're in the throes of some overwhelming ideology.
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@jsharp9735 Eh, not compared to the German military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was thinking of when he wrote his speech. Krupp was basically the prince of Essen, bankrolled the Nazi party when it was nearly bankrupt, and sold arms all over the world. He was, for a time, the world's richest man -- and not by any small amount.
US defense contractors, on the other hand, are scattered up and down the Fortune 500, making up no more than 4% of this country's GDP. CEOs tend to receive middling compensation, again compared to other Fortune 500 companies. Compared to Silicon Valley companies, they're bit players on the national stage.
Speaking of those Silicon Valley companies, they are the Scientific-Technological Elite that Eisenhower warned about. As the Twitter Files indicate, they are FAR more of a threat to the freedom and financial security of Americans than the military-industrial complex.
It's Google's world, we're just living in it.
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"The gross idea of the greenhouse does have some value"
Yes. Doing a simple thermal balance calculation for the Earth, including albedo, radiative heat transfer from the Sun, and radiative heat transfer into space, is something any sophomore Thermo student can do. You can see that the Earth is warmer by a number of degrees, than that simple heat balance would imply.
Further, you can use the differential between the opaqueness / transparency of CO2 over the spectrum of sunlight, and its opaqueness / transparency over the spectrum of the Earth as a blackbody radiator, to calculate how much warming different partial pressures of CO2 would cause. Dr. Lindzen's favorite word, "minuscule", is perfectly applicable here.
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"When you start talking about family you start talking about the normative point of view, you must have children"
You do realize, don't you, that the trade-off for not having children is the collapse of your society? Since I have a stake in that, I'm perfectly comfortable establishing that as a norm.
What we do about those who do not follow the norm, is an interesting question. There's a huge spectrum, from the absurd extreme of e**cution, to coercive participation, to justified disincentives like depriving the childless of old age benefits, to taxing them at the level of expense of 2.1 children, to portraying them as villains in popular media, to denying them any socially acceptable access to s*x, to merely lecturing them about duty, to neglecting to represent them at all in popular constructive media.
The distance up that spectrum we should embrace, should depend on the degree to which we've fallen below a 2.1 replacement rate. The idea that we're not enforcing this norm at all, is a predictable disaster that future societies will see as one of this era's most foolish ideas.
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"The Christian apocalypse is a spiritual reality that occurs in some heavenly place" - You need to read CS Lewis' "Doctrine of the World's Last Night"
"For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came."
Also, from Lewis' "Living in an Atomic Age"
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
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Looking at mid 20th century science fiction (Asimov, Herbert, Niven and Pournelle, etc) you see two themes: one, the cynical creation of religion(s), and two, the idea of civilizational collapse and recovery. Asimov's Foundation, Niven and Pournelle's Mote Prime, they deal with this theme.
What if at some point, some influential people in the world decided that to recover after a global collapse, fossil fuels were essential, and we must maintain some reserves that are to be set aside as sacred, so that we could re-emerge into industrial civilization?
Wind and hydro can't be used at industrial scale without existing industrial power. Nuclear and solar can't be used at all, without an industrial base. (Nuclear has the additional complication of region-destroying disaster in the event of a collapse.) That leaves fossil fuels as the key to civilization recovering from any Dark Age.
As far as I can see, this explains some very strange aspects of today's environmentalism. The first is the abovementioned aversion to Nuclear. Then there is the tolerance of 3rd world countries' continued use of fossil fuels, to industrialize in the first place. Then, there is is the tendency of supposedly Green politicians, to import petrochemicals from other countries (like Venezuela) to power the United States.
And finally, it explains why all of this is being pushed with the trappings of a religion.
Aside from the fact that it seems to wander off into conspiracy-land, I'm having trouble finding problems with this theory.
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@l.w.paradis2108 You wouldn't know it to hear her talk about him,. She spoke as if she viewed him as more of a son than a husband. As if he was less (than she), and had a long way to go.
So yeah, narcissistic, just what you'd expect from someone whose conversation involves paranoid delusions about thinking she'd be killed by an elderly college professor, just to make sure she was getting a properly shocked response out of her listeners.
After all, it's that shocked response that gives her the undeserved political power (based on lies) she's been smugly wielding all her adult life, to the destruction of men and society.
From his career as a therapist, I don't think very much shocks Peterson anymore, aside from perhaps how far our society (especially the Left) has fallen thanks in large part to activists like Wolf.
I think he's going to get more honesty out of her, taking the empathic route. This isn't the time to push back against the lies her life has been built on, but he can probably get enough context for them that he can start pulling on some of the threads that can eventually unravel them.
If "all she ever wanted was to teach Ruskin, but she couldn't get away from Bloom" then she could have taught Ruskin at any state or community college west of the Rockies (or probably anywhere more than a day's drive from New York). One of the least credible lies here in a sea of incredible lies, is the idea that her life hasn't gone the way she's wanted it to -- and the fact that she's lying about that, is the most revealing of all.
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"You find the proper words and you put them into phrases"
Wot?
Start with a thought, then start in on the bites it will take to get through that whale. Figure out if the whale is actually bigger than you thought, and chomp through the other parts you find in their turn. Not sure I've ever started with words, those come after the thoughts. Maybe that's my problem, who knows?
If you're analyzing something, read through it. Read other things that suggest themselves, on the same topic. Think about it all. Come to some interesting conclusion, then re-read the supporting material (you can skim a little this time) to pick out supporting evidence and check to see if your conclusion was actually right. Group the supporting evidence into similar clusters. If something fits into more than one cluster, you can use it to segue from one cluster to another for bonus points.
If you're trying to persuade, it might be a good idea to put the easiest to grasp (or easiest to stomach) ideas up front, if those are necessary to understand the subsequent ideas.
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47:36 - The idea of human rights springing from humans as divinely touched, starts from David's respect for old king Saul as God's anointed. By the late middle ages these gradually extended to the aristocracy as well, Chivalry took hold, and by 1600s, these rights are extended to the nobility at large. (The assassination or other mistreatment of the Elector of the Palatinate could have taken one major causus belli out of the 30 Year's War, but somehow the only major figure of the time who suffered assassination was Wallenstein, a commoner.)
Radial egalitarianism took hold as well, founded on Judeo-Christian religious imagery -- "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" was a question introduced in the 14th century, in Europe -- but not the rest of the world.
So yeah, Pinker's perspective is severely truncated by a dogmatic refusal to allow any possibility that Christian thinking had any role in anything he considers good. This is bias, which can fairly be described as bigotry.
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"It's all corrupt, we should just start over"
I think that new universities (as well as new media companies) are essential to break the Left's monopoly on these institutions. That said, there are four strategies that the Left has used that we need to break:
1- Get activists onto platforms of influence (journalism, entertainment, academia) - Niall Ferguson observed this happening in universities
2- Extract funding for activism (blackmailing companies like Disney into donating to causes, convincing rich men's wives to spend their money on activists, funnel student loan money into Leftist bureaucracies, convince companies like PayPal to fine their users to fund Leftist censorship)
3- Get activists into positions where they control personnel appointments, and peoples' livelihoods (HR, licensing organizations)
4- Get activists into positions of discretionary power over legal, financial, and even physical forms of force (District Attorneys' offices, the IRS, police, the military
This is basically the strategic plan for the Long March through the Institutions. We need to fight back against each and every one of these points. We're still the majority and always will be, so we will win, we just have to stand up and DO IT.
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"We face a horizon of genuinely unpredictable political change"
Well, mostly. But then, so did anyone looking around at the decade following 1912, only moreso (War!) Or 1922 (Crash!) Or 1932 (More War!) Or 1942 (Boom, Boom!) Or 1952 (More booms?) Or 1962 (Bangs, more than booms) Maybe by 1972, things were leveling off, even if the uncertainty was new. The decade after 1982 had some surprises, with the Wall coming down. After 1992, there were signs that the World Trade Centers were a target and the Internet was going to be huge, though. After 2012, the rise of populism surprised everyone except the population at large. The rise of China has been advertising itself since they got MFN status, the decline of Europe has been the story of most of a century.
Tell me again, why is the newest near-identical release of the iPhone the herald of some revolution?
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Eisenhower's Farewell Address should be remembered more for its warning about the Scientific-Technological Elite than anything else.
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
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A certain amount of familiarity with stressful situations can be good for an artist, if their art is about exploring ways to resolve those situations.
As far as I can tell, Dostoevsky drew inspiration from a question: "Was it possible to develop a love so pure that you could carry on a love affair with two women at the same time?" The book that resulted was "The Idiot" (whose title fits at that level, I suppose.) According to the front material in my edition, Dostoevsky started the character as a reformed cad, but developed the idea into "What Would Jesus Do, 19th century Russia edition", which had some appeal to his readers as well as being a compelling reason for him to continue exploring various side issues.
People frequently notice that the narrative completely falls apart (changes pace, drops its attention to detail) not long after the two women meet... and simply can't get along with each other. So I guess the answer to his question was, "No". Once he arrived there, he lost the motivation to continue exploring.
That all is just a guess based on circumstantial evidence, of course, but it seems worth considering.
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@petercullen1624 LOL, you can't come out and say it.
Say how many actual Canadian voters voted for Trudeau -- say how many votes he actually got. I'll give you a hint: It's less than one-tenth the population of Bakersfield, California. You're probably ignorant of Bakersfield, California, which is like being ignorant of Canadian politics (fixable by a quick duckduckgo search). Or maybe you do know about Bakersfield, California, which makes it absolutely hilarious. =)
The only thing keeping all of Canada from being unequivocally the world's laughingstock right now, is the danger that Trudeau represents. Canada is like the mother of a toddler dribbling the contents of his full diaper everywhere, who happened to get his little hands on an Uzi. How you let this happen is a comedy of errors far, far beyond parody.
Trudeau will go down in history as a lightweight so far out of his depth that he hit the nuke button as he ran away from his constituents.
Depending on how this plays out, his supporters will be remembered (at best) as befuddled naifs, or at worst enablers of a regime straight out of the darkest recesses of 20th century totalitarianism.
Why would you want to be associated with any of that? You already know who the good guys are going to be in this one. Why don't you join us? There's still time. =)
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"If you're a master of numbers, there's almost nothing that is beyond your grasp" Only, ultimate mastery of numbers is not possible. Even augmented by computers, the complete reduction of everything the numerical calculation is not possible. To believe otherwise is hubris.
Two classes of problem spring to mind, one of which you mention - the quantum realm. Uncertainty teaches us that there is a scale at which mechanistic calculations give way to probabilistic calculation. This is related to the mystery of human consciousness, by the way, as our brains operate at this scale.
Another class of insoluble problem (though more may remain) is chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not determine the approximate future. Any small error in initial conditions, input measurements, or tertiary calculation, will lead to a prediction that can radically diverge from reality. Chaotic pendulums, three-body celestial dynamics, and the behavior of convection cells fall into this category.
(Michael Knowles, of all people gave a good talk on this subject a little while back, with the incendiary title "I'm fine with being called anti-science". I recommend it.)
The most critical of these chaotic (and therefore bunk) prediction models these days, are our Climate models. They are built on hundreds (sometimes, thousands) of convection cells. If these will accurately predict the future, it can only be by accident. This fact bears repeating, until it gets greater play in our cultural conversation.
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This hymn was written in 1845 -- Malice is off by 50-70 years.
1 Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
2 Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied.
3 By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever
With the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.
4 Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.
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There is a distinction between climate and weather, fair enough. But there is a critical similarity between climate MODELS and weather MODELS. As it turns out, the same issue that makes it impossible to predict the weather long-term, also makes it impossible to predict the climate long-term.
You may have heard of the "butterfly effect". That applies to both types of model.
Weather models rely on computers calculating and predicting the behavior of fluids within convection cells. This is impossible, because the behavior of those convection cells is (formally speaking) chaotic. It is sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, making long-term prediction utterly impossible without infinitely precise variables, and infinitely precise and accurate measurements to feed it. Not only that, both the boundary values and the interior of these convection cells contain every tree, leaf, building, power line, flag, car, rock, bird, plane, insect, and animal under the open sky. Determining where each of these items may be and where they may be going, is not possible over a single second, much less over days, years, or centuries.
Climate models are ALSO built on convection cells -- hundreds or thousands of them, depending on the model. This means that they have inherited all the problems, inaccuracies, and unreliability of weather models. Further, any hypotheses that the modelers make as to how sensitive the model may be to any given element in the model (CO2, water vapor, etc) is UNTESTABLE by these models, because their predictions are by nature inaccurate.
Climate change isn't a hoax, for what that's worth. Every single climate change PREDICTION, on the other hand, IS -- advocates are wildly overstating the applicability of their approach, to the salient problem.
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