OK, first I would like to say that I have not downvoted you at all. I have read most of what you wrote and would like to try to explain why I believe you are wrong, in the spirit of friendly discussion. I get that you are not defending him, and just trying to argue semantics. So here is my linguistic argument.

First, the quote: he says he is sorry "if she feels hurt or shocked by my attitude during her interview."

The problem with accepting this as an apology is that you are taking it too literally. You are saying, I believe, that he is sorry "in the case that she is hurt or shocked." Then, since she obviously is, that means he IS sorry. And he has apologized. I hope I have captured your reading of his statement here.

The problem is that there are multiple ways to interpret what he's said, and you are choosing a very literal one without reading between the lines.

First, why would he even bring up "if she is hurt or shocked"? When you've done something very wrong, OF COURSE the person is hurt or shocked. He's mentioned that very deliberately. What he is trying to do is take the focus OFF of his his actions, and onto her reaction. It also brings doubt into whether she is, and should be, hurt or shocked ("if she is" -- he's not sure).

Another thing that is happening is that there is almost an implied "but" after his statement. I'm sorry if you were hurt, but.... And then you are meant to consider his explanation (his actions were awkward).

He chose to say that his actions were awkward to do two things. First, the problem was his "actions," not him -- putting linguistic space between himself and the problem. Second, he used the word "awkward," which has connotations of harmlessness. I mean, we've all been awkward before!! How can you blame someone whose actions were a little awkward? When in reality, no, what he did was very offensive and aggressive.

So to recap, he is sorry IF your reaction is that you were hurt (was it? he's not sure), but his actions were awkward. Do you see how different this is from saying, I've done something very wrong, and I would like to apologize for it? He's shifted the focus to her reaction, blamed awkwardness which downplays the seriousness, and brought doubt into whether she is even offended.

So what I am saying is, it is important to read between the lines and not just take a certain literal meaning to what people say. You can do A LOT more with language than just get literal statements across. Little things like the order of your words, and word choices of course, all come with slight connotations and flavors that affect what you are saying. In his case, he puts emphasis on her reaction, questions it, and downplays his role.

EDIT: Wow thank you for the gold! That is very kind. I wanted to suggest this book by Steven Pinker if you are interested in the topic of language. I'm sure there are many other good books about language I don't know of though.... I'd be happy to hear suggestions from others too!

Historically, you have about a 15% chance of dying due to violence. In the last century, despite two world wars, the chance is 3%. We live in objectively the safest world that has ever existed.

Edit: Source.

The world is way more peaceful and prosperous than it has been at nearly any other point in human history. Take for instance Rwanda. Two decades ago it was engaged in one of the worst genocides in human history. Now it is run by a very efficient government that has banned tribalism and is presiding over some of the fastest gains in human development in the world.

That doesn't mean that there aren't areas where things are getting worse, but the overall trend is generally positive.

Edit: A lot of you are making valid points that there are some important trends moving in a negative direction: climate change, environmental degradation, the fraying of the international liberal order. While it is still true that humanity has never been more peaceful than it has today (this is objectively true across a wide variety of metrics), I agree that these are pressing problems that if not addressed quickly, threaten our survival as a species in the long-term. But, I want to push back against the deep despair that I know many of you feel, because humanity has survived worse.

Around 70,000 years ago, humanity faced the greatest crisis in its history. A volcanic explosion of gargantuan proportions caused global temperatures to drop as much as 20 degrees in many places. This change caused a massive decline in our population to as few as a few hundred or thousand individuals. But we endured, despite having virtually no recognizable technology to aid us. We bounced back and 60,000 years later, we were building cities and had colonized almost the entire planet. We are now facing the second greatest threat our species has ever seen, but now we have something we never had before: we have science. We have technology. And we have governments that can harness the wealth and intelligence of billions of people to serve our collective will, if we choose to use them. I am not saying that will be enough, but it is a much better starting point than that faced by our ancestors. If I were to make a bet, I'd bet on our survival at a minimum, as humanity has already survived worse with less. I'd even say that given all that we have to fight climate change, that we will probably suffer nowhere near as much as we did then.

Edit2: Thanks for the gold!

You are less likely to die by violence today than at any point in human history.

Nice related book by a very readable author:

> The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker
>
> Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/

One final comment that I'm adding as a separate post since I reached the size limit in my post above: for anyone who is looking for additional information concerning backcountry ailments and injuries, I highly recommend the book Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. In addition to drawing from his own experience, the author analyzed countless reports of backcountry injuries in writing the book. One of the biggest takeaways that I got from Deep Survival is the idea that injuries in the backcountry are rarely the result of a single factor, but rather usually the result of multiple factors- and those factors are often seemingly inconsequential when evaluated on an individual basis. If you can learn to recognize and address various factors as they crop up, then you can generally reduce most of the risk of injury.

It has gotten better.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510024329&sr=8-1&keywords=the+better+angels+of+our+nature

The world is getting less violent, it's mostly the media that makes it seem worse. Here's a book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage



The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (and talk on it here)


I haven't got around to reading these books yet, but they seem to say that when you look at the historical archeological evidence, the % of people who die in conflicts has been going down, and societies that killed each other with clubs, poisoned arrows, etc. actually killed a higher % than current societies do with high powered weaponry and bombs. I think the problem is that there's news media reporting everywhere these days so you might get the impression that violence is everywhere/getting worse.



From the video of the talk I linked to, this slide is pretty interesting: http://www.edge.org/images/sp-Slide011.jpg

May I add: maybe read a fucking book.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

The list of categories isn’t limited to those two. Others include disease/disability as in “a pox on you” or “four eyed”, animals such as “bitch” or even species such as “Neanderthal”, ethnic slurs such as “nigger”, etc. Steven Pinker goes into some detail linguistics and neuroscience in his book The Stuff of Thought. He discusses swearing in chapter 7.

Here a couple of nice clips from a talk he did on the book (~10 minutes each) that address swearing: Part 1 and Part 2. Since they are short, easy to understand, Pinker is a greater speaker and available on youtube so I won’t summarize them any further.

> It's just not talked about much.

Good news doesn't sell, and people are sometimes outright hostile to it. Look at the reception to Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. A great number of people have a visceral what-the-hell reaction to that book. Also try bringing up, in a discussion on "rape culture" in the US, that rape has dropped 85% since the 1970s.

For some people, interjecting good news is tantamount to saying that everything is perfect and thus we shouldn't try to improve anything. Good news takes the edge off their outrage, and in an outrage-driven culture it can get mistaken for apathy.

They have actually. Here's a really good book on it. I don't think people 'decide' to freak out or not. Their brain is either able to perform rationally under extreme stress or not.


During a crisis, there is a period of time where your brain freaks out and doesn't functional rationally. People who are more trained to experience high stress levels recover from this period faster, sometimes fast enough to make it appear that they are calm and collected the whole time, while someone else will look like they're freaking out.


On a side note, this is also why people who can smile and laugh while being threatened seem far more dangerous than people who get angry and start screaming or acting tough. Smiling and laughing while in a threatening situation implies that you're brain does not feel threatened enough to override your calm.

How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

Your reading of the testimony (and opening statement) seems to disregard indirect speech.

1. Comey said that he took Trump's request about "I hope you can see to ...letting Flynn go" was an attempt to "change the investigation". That's how indirect speech works. You make commands and threats indirectly. (E.g., "I hope you will be not be late to work again tomorrow.")
   
   
2. "I need loyalty. l expect loyalty." Is a classic loyalty pledge. And it's pretty direct. I don't see how that's open to dispute. If it's indirect, it's barely indirect.
   
   For more on this kind of indirect speech, see chapter 8 of Stephen Pinker's The Stuff Of Thought.

This is the most common criticism of the book, but I found it very realistic, after reading Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

It goes into a bunch of case studies of people in survival situations, from a perspective of psychology and neuroscience. One of the key attributes of the people who survived was exactly the sort of upbeat, can-do attitude that Watney has. The people who get depressed generally don't make it.

Also it's worth keeping in mind that The Martian is Watney's journal entries. You don't have to necessarily think of it as an accurate moment-by-moment portrayal of his mental state; by the time he gets around to writing, he's usually shrugged off the despair. That's what he has to do, to survive.

Are you retarded m8? If there was any investigation, and authorities needed access to the comments, they'd easily be able to just get them from Reddit, you know that, right?

Also, what evidence of any crime was present.

They removed a fucking email address because you mentally ill clowns work yourselves into a delusional feeding frenzy and then harass the shit out of people, or worse you show up to their place of work with a loaded rifle.

Look - I'm going to link you a book, and it's a book that will change your life if you read it, you do not have to be this delusional, please, read the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

Hello and welcome! Here are my recommendations for getting those nasty watchtower cobwebs out of your head, in other words, here is what I did to de-indoctrinate myself:

Take some time to learn about the history of the bible. For example, you can take the Open Yale Courses on Religious Studies for free.

Read Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman

Also read A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Next, learn some actual science. For example - spoiler alert: evolution is true. Visit Berkeley's excellent Understanding Evolution Website.. Or, if you're pressed for time, watch this cartoon.

Read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

Read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Learn about the origin of the universe. For example, you could read works by Stephen Hawking

Read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Learn about critical thinking from people like Michael Shermer, and how to spot logical fallacies.


For good measure, use actual data and facts to learn the we are NOT living in some biblical "last days". Things have gotten remarkably better as man has progressed in knowledge. For example, watch this cartoon explaining how war is on the decline..

Read The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Another great source is the youtube series debunking 1914 being the start of the last days.

I wish you the best. There is a whole world of legitimate information out there based on actual evidence that you can use to become a more knowledgeable person.

You may still wonder how you can be a good human without "the truth." Here is a good discussion on how one can be good without god. --Replace where he talks about hell with armageddon, and heaven with paradise--

Start to help yourself begin to live a life where, as Matt Dillahunty puts it, you'll "believe as many true things, and as few false things as possible."

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152 That's an interesting book on survival situations. Some people just freeze when panic sets in.

Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

The Undercover Economist: Easily the best of those "Economics in everyday life - books"

The Blank Slate: Steven Pinker on the nature/nurture debate. This really opened my eyes on questions like "Why are the same people who fight against abortion for the death penalty", for example.

Complications: This and his second book, Better, gave me an incredible insight into medicine.

Why we get sick: Very good explanation of the defence mechanisms our bodies have and why treating symptoms can be a very bad idea.

How to read a book: An absolute classic. Turns out I've been doing it wrong all those years.

The Art of Strategy: Game Theory, applied to everyday situations. Always treats a topic like Nash equilibrium, Brinkmanship etc. theoretically and then goes into many examples.

A Random Walk Down Wall-Street: Made me see the stock market completely differently.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: The shortcomings of democracy.

The White Man's Burden: Fantastic account of the problems faced by the third world today, and why it is so hard to change them.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics. (probably most interesting from a Freudian perspective, deals with many of our unconscious instincts)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces The Shape Our Decisions - Unconscious decision-making, behavioral economics, consumer psychology. Fun read.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Most popular book on the psychology of persuasion, covers all the main principles. Very popular among business crowds.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships - Social neuroscience, mirror neurons, empathy, practical stuff mixed with easy to understand brain science.

Authentic Happiness - Positive Psychology, happiness, increasing life satisfaction.

Feeling Good - A good primer on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Also widely considered one of the best self-help books by mental health practitioners.

The Brain That Changes Itself - Neuroplasticity, how experience shapes our brains. Some really remarkable case studies that get you wondering how powerful our brains really are.

The Buddhist Brain - The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom from a Buddhist perspective.

That should give you more than enough to chew on.

Se está interessado em se aprofundar no assunto de por que violência aumenta ou diminui. Sugiro ler esse livro do Steven Pinker que é referência mundial no assunto.

O livro foca mais no cenário global como um todo. Aonde a violência está diminuindo na média. Mas reconhece que em alguns focos na América latina violência está indo em direção contrária.

O livro é extremamente extenso, a explicação não é simples, são diversos fatores diferentes. Mas uma das teclas que ele bate bastante e nos parece bem familiar no Brasil, é um Estado ineficiente na área de segurança. Apesar de alguns políticos populistas estarem apelando pra sugestão de que deveria ser responsabilidade de cada indivíduo se defender sozinho. O que o livro mostra é que historicamente a evidência é bem forte de que quem faz segurança é a polícia. Os estados brasileiros aonde a polícia está mal paga, com greves, paralisações, é justamente aonde estão os piores focos de violência.

It's a bunch of gobbledygook about the generations and the kingdom and all of that. It's all nonsense. In my humble opinion, you need to de-indoctrinate yourself to fully remove these types of fears. Not sure if I've shared this post with you before, but here's what I did personally:

Take some time to learn about the history of the bible. For example, you can take the Open Yale Courses on Religious Studies for free.

Read Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman

Also read A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Next, learn some actual science. For example - spoiler alert: evolution is true. Visit Berkeley's excellent Understanding Evolution Website.. Or, if you're pressed for time, watch this cartoon.

Read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

Read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Learn about the origin of the universe. For example, you could read works by Stephen Hawking

Read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Learn about critical thinking from people like Michael Shermer, and how to spot logical fallacies.


For good measure, use actual data and facts to learn the we are NOT living in some biblical "last days". Things have gotten remarkably better as man has progressed in knowledge. For example, watch this cartoon explaining how war is on the decline..

Read The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Another great source is the youtube series debunking 1914 being the start of the last days.

Another way to clear out the cobwebs is to read and listen to exiting stories. Here are some resources:

https://leavingjw.org

Here is a post with links to a bunch of podcasts interviewing JWs who've left

Here's another bunch of podcasts about JWs

Here is a great book from Psychotherapist and former JW Bonnie Zieman - Exiting the JW Cult: A Helping Handbook

I wish you the best. There is a whole world of legitimate information out there based on actual evidence that you can use to become a more knowledgeable person.

You may still wonder how you can be a good human without "the truth." Here is a good discussion on how one can be good without god. --Replace where he talks about hell with armageddon, and heaven with paradise--

To go further down the rabbit hole, watch this series.

Here's a nice series debunking most creationist "logic".

Start to help yourself begin to live a life where, as Matt Dillahunty puts it, you'll "believe as many true things, and as few false things as possible."

The book Deep Survival covers a lot of these survival situations and why certain people tend to survive them and others don't.

US vs European police killings is examined and explained very convincingly by Steven Pinker, who is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist. His theory is covered in his book written for us non-scientists, The Better Angels of our Nature - Why violence has declined.

(For the scientists, the book is full of proper references.)

He is very interested in what works to drop murder, crime, genocide and war death rates overall. The book covers pre-history and ancient history right up to the present day. The issue is somewhat complex and multi-faceted so I won't try and explain it.

One strand is that when people trust their governments to administer justice more, and people take justice into their own hands less, violence and murder rates drop. Then of course, what leads to people trusting their governments more is examined.

I have to warn Christians that one of the historical documents that Steven Pinker uses to look at the difference at the rate of violence in the present compared to the rate of violence in the past is the Old Testament. He looks at it from a social science point of view, cataloging from a purely modern viewpoint as to what constitutes a crime according to modern morals and law.

I must say that Pinker challenges both progressive and conservative worldviews. He is strictly trying to get at the facts, and the facts of what leads to long-term dropping violences rates.

Yes there are loads of critiques.... generally from Marxists who can't stand the fact that the research isn't supporting their religious doctrine.

Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature was one of the most well received science books of the past decade and although it's intended for a lay audience, Pinker went to incredible trouble to read and source hundreds of studies.

That doesn't mean that Pinker's infallible. Only that I find him infinitely more credible then the tired old Marxist academics who continually take pot-shots at him.

Edit: Just looked at your links - 'truthout.com' and 'dissidentvoices.com'. I think it's fair to say that both these sites are in the business of writing highly politicized criticism of Western culture.

This slideshow is essentially the same thesis as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. A great book.

As someone left of center and an environmentalist.... Free markets and enlightenment values have lifted humanity out of squalor and superstition into modern day lives of plenty and comfort. Check out Steven Pinker's works if you don't believe me.

As long as we bring both to Mars with us, we'll be fine.

Some of these rules are also from my experience with SAR:

1. When hiking (or other outdoor recreation) always have a whistle on you. So many people who get lost in the woods are actually close enough to other people that they could be heard if they had a whistle. Screaming uses a lot more energy and people might not interpret it as cries for help.
   
   
2. People on day outings/day hikes are less likely to be prepared in the event of an unexpected situation (like bad weather or getting lost) because they assume they can just walk out and go home. Bring enough stuff with you that if you had to spend a night somewhere (even though it would suck), you could survive.
   
   
3. Keep basic survival stuff in your car at all times. There's just no reason not to and if you break down, you'll be glad. Have a blanket, firestarter kit, headlamp/flashlight, paracord, painters tarp, and first aid kit.
   
   
4. Assume your cellphone won't work. People are too reliant on cellphones and forgo basic safety steps because they assume they can use the map on their phone, call for help, use the flashlight, use the compass, look something up, etc.
   
   
5. Don't drive to unknown places without at least half a tank.
   
   
6. Be loud and make eye contact, if possible, when someones giving you the creeps. "Why are you following me?" loudly or "What are you doing?" can throw an attacker off. Many of them instinctively don't want to draw attention to themselves.
   
   
7. If someone tries to get you into a car, fight like hell. I'd rather them find my body in a parking lot then never know what happened to me.
   
   
8. Don't drink and swim.
   
   
9. If there's someone you can trust this with, share your phone location with them in an ongoing way (like find my friends) and give their phone number to one of your family members. If they're worried you are missing, they can call that person and have them check out your phones location. (If you don't feel comfortable just giving that family member access to your location all the time)
   
   
10. Recognize behavioral red flags in the people around you and take them seriously. A significant other that seems paranoid and controlling, a coworker who seems fixated on getting back at your company.. etc. If someone freaks you out, listen to your gut.
    
    
11. Don't engage in road rage, public confrontations, etc. You never know if the stranger you're arguing with is as sane as you are. Call 911, back off, or deescalate the situation as best you can if you find yourself in an angry confrontation with a stranger.
    
    
12. When you're drunk, stay with the group. If your drunk friend insists on going off alone, agree on a time that you'll call them and if they don't pick up you'll call the cops for a welfare check.
    
    
13. If you're having a mental health crisis, do not go off alone. So many disappearences happen after a person in a mental health crisis wanders off or leaves alone. When you're alone and dealing with a mental health crisis, you are more likely to harm/kill yourself, to experience an accident, and to become a victim of someone nefarious. (I know that most people in crisis lack the ability to think rationally... definitely no blame here. It's just something to remember if you have the wherewithal to practice)
    
    I really recommend the book Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. for some interesting survival reading.
    
    Edit: Uh, I'm sorry this is so long. I just started back on my meds for ADHD and sometimes this happens.

I could insult you, because you're worthy of insult, but I'm going to take a different route today.

I'm going to suggest to you a book to read, if you can read this book and still maintain your current worldview, more power to you.

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915631

> The way I see it, people who have children with surrogate mothers are just as naive -using very light terms here- as intentional single mothers.

Interesting analysis. The data does not support it however: children raised by single fathers are roughly twice better off financially (less likely to suffer poverty) and suffer 1/2 the abuse. Those are arguably the most important predictors of the future success of a child. The children of single fathers are better off than those of single mothers. All the more astounding when you consider that most single fathers are actually from the lowest socio-economic background.

>You'd do that to your child?

Yes, yes I would.

> Knowingly denying it a (biological) mother before it is even born?

As opposed to what? A 50% chance that it gets a mother who will then divorce me and take the child away? How much do you care about your child to find those acceptable odds to lose children?

>Hell, only denying breastfeeding will already fuck up its immune system.

No, it won't "fuck up" the child's immune system. It's immune system will probably be weaker, but with modern medicine always available this can be dealt with in the early years until the child catches up. With the number of modern women giving up on breastfeeding anyway to keep their boobs, your theory of "fucked up" immune systems is weak. Men who use surrogate mothers (straight and gay) deal with this effectively.

>do you really think cutting out the mother straight after birth will have any less of an effect?

Yes I do. The children of single mothers are not worse off simply because they don't have a father. There are many other factors such as their mothers being much more poor, low IQ, abusive, compulsive, unable/uninterested to participate in the child's education etc...

Listen, if I ever go the route, I will not be having baby I cannot support with a chad I couldn't close my legs for before he ran away, or a husband I got bored with. I will be starting from a very comfortable position, with enough wealth to provide anything the child could need and much, much more. Not having a mother will be an handicap, but it can be overcome; much more easily than a typical single motherhood.

Not that mothers are that important. As research shows (twin studies in particular), parents influence little to nothing of who their child will become. So long as you provide decently for them, show emotional support and do not abuse them, almost everything your child becomes will be genetically inherited. The best you can do is find kickass genes for your child (easier with surrogacy) and the correct peer groups. It is human hubris which makes parents think that their children are pets they need to teach tricks to instead of fully independent human beings with their own natures.

>There are single parents out there who didn't choose for it, and I applaud them for their great efforts at making the best out of this situation. But knowingly, willingly denying your child a parent, just so you can have a mini-me is beyond my comprehension, and I don't have a good word for it.

Do you have a good word for people who throw a coin in the air to find out if they'll get to keep their children? I thought people on this sub would understand this shit: hate the game, not the player. The US family court system changed the rules of the game by denying men guaranteed equal custody (except in the case of the child's refusal or physical abuse);I am just adapting. If you can change the laws, I will change my strategy. But that will never happen so keep your good word for men who gamble their children away, I don't need it.

In "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", Pinker talks a bit about honor culture and how it's persisted in the south and how that effects violence.

If I remember correctly there was one study that showed that southern employers are more forgiving of candidates who murdered someone for retribution than of someone who stole cars, whereas for northern employers it was the opposite. Kinda crazy...

I'm sorry? Wars in the past were way more horrific and casualties were significantly higher than they are now, we are living in one of the most peaceful eras in history.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

Here is a good book that discusses this exact subject.

I read a study a while back that talked about how feelings of moral outrage can be addictive, and that they provide the same cathartic feeling as self-harming behaviours like cutting and anorexia (to a lesser degree).

A lot of SJWs substitute self-harming behaviour with deliberate searching for things to be outraged at. It's the same hit. That's why so many SJWs will literally tell you "I was cutting, anorexic and I hated myself before I found feminism." There's an extremely high prevalence of people who've self-harmed within that community.

It's not surprising given that fact that SJWs are going to be made up of people with low self-esteem who are horrible to be around.

I'll see if I can find a link...

Edit: Here's an article on it. There's also a book called Pathological Altruism that talks about the same phenomenon. It's on my reading list, but I haven't read it yet so I'm afraid I can't give a review.

The idea that this is the least violent time in history comes from a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker, which purports to show that violence has been decreasing over time, and we live in the least violent period in history. That is not to say that our world is not still too violent, but rather that it is not as violent as it once was.

you're so eager to be offended you can't even hear what is being said. A smaller percentage of the population dies violent deaths due to wars and homicide than in the past. Steven Pinker writes extensively on this. The geography of the commenter has nothing to do with this fact.

Hello and welcome! Here are my recommendations for de-indoctrinating yourself:

Take some time to learn about the history of the bible. For example, you can take the Open Yale Courses on Religious Studies for free.

Read Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman

Also read A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Watch this talk from Sam Harris where he explains why "free will" is likely an illusion, which debunks the entire premise of "the fall of man" as presented by most Christian religions.

Watch this video on the Cordial Curiosity channel that teaches how the "Socratic Method" works, which essentially is a way to question why we believe what we believe. Do we have good reasons to believe them? If not, should we believe them?

Watch this video by Theramin Trees that explains why we fall for the beliefs of manipulative groups in the first place.

This video explains why and how childhood indoctrination works, for those of us born-in to a high-control group.

Another great source is this youtube series debunking 1914 being the start of the last days.

Next, learn some science. For example - spoiler alert: evolution is true. Visit Berkeley's excellent Understanding Evolution Website. Or, if you're pressed for time, watch this cartoon.

Read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

Read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.

Watch this series where Aron Ra explains in great detail how all life is connected in a giant family tree.

Learn about the origin of the universe. For example, you could read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Learn about critical thinking from people like [Michael Shermer] (http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things?language=en), and how to spot logical fallacies.

For good measure, use actual data and facts to learn the we are NOT living in some biblical "last days". Things have gotten remarkably better as man has progressed in knowledge. For example, watch this cartoon explaining how war is on the decline.

Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.

Watch this Ted Talk by Hans Rosling, the late Swedish Statistician, where he shows more evidence that the world is indeed becoming a better place, and why we tend to wrongly convince ourselves otherwise.

I wish you the best. There is a whole world of legitimate information out there based on actual evidence that we can use to become more knowledgeable people.

You may still wonder how you can be a good human without "the truth." Here is a good discussion on how one can be good without god. --Replace where he talks about hell with armageddon, and heaven with paradise--

Start to help yourself begin to live a life where, as Matt Dillahunty puts it, you'll "believe as many true things, and as few false things as possible."

I'm not sure about those "poor results"?

Violence is lower than ever. Unless you count exceptions like Baltimore, which we are not allowed to talk about.

I think abortion should be legal and widely available. But it's at an all time low. Birth control is getting better.

It's not a study so much as a thesis that analyzes many different studies, but I would highly recommend Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature as a jumping off point.

Not technically, no, depends on how you want to define "crazy."

Religion is a mechanic of how the human brain works, it's perfectly normal in that context and not at all crazy.



https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

Good book, it's about conspiracies, but the mechanics behind conspiracist views are the same as they are in religion.

That’s a nice fairy tale, isn’t it? The fact that you insult over me saying something completely reasonable doesn’t put you in a very good position.

I didn’t say they were actors or anything was staged. You’re arguing a point I never made. Nice job.

Brooding about our “sick society” doesn’t pass the shit test, unless you’re a C+ college freshman. I have a suggestion for you. Or this one. Why read when you can dismiss arguments with pictures of tin foil hats, though, right? We all know how smart 16 year olds are...

Short answer: You're correct that people don't devolve into evil animals as much or as quickly as many people assume.

There is of course a threshold where things start to fall apart: people stop going out of their way to help others, then they start fighting over resources (like food at the store), nonviolent theft, violent theft, and so on. That threshold tends to happen later than people think.

There's decent research on this. You might like one of the top prepper books, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (Amazon). It has real-world data about how things fell apart and the range of how people reacted.

Sometimes it just comes down to personal values. One family in my personal prepper group says "we'll help others until it hurts", while another says "hell no, when shtf, what's mine is mine." All are very ethical, good people.

Many preppers have a community-minded approach. See the thread from a day ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/9fwsl2/bov_this_retired_marine_is_rescuing_storm_victims/

Please don't take this post from me as aggressive, I just wanted to point out a few things about your post.

You make a few mistakes early in your post. One is you're making the No True Scotsman argument. Essentially you're arguing that the bad Christians you assume we've met or are the cause for us leaving the church, aren't real Christians anyway. I think we need to trust people. If they say they're a Christian, I believe them.

Also, things aren't that bad here on the Earth. We've got some issues, but the things you mention are actually better now than at any point in history. Allow me to point you toward a great, great book about this, Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. It's a great book about this exact topic, I think it may allay some of your fears.

Also, why is this life not enough? Why do you deserve more than this life? You're saying that unless you have the potential at eternity, this life isn't worth living. Why not? I've got an amazing wife, and I choose to spend some of my limited time with her. She's so great, that makes it worthwhile. I've got two great kids, my daughter is going to turn 5 in a few weeks and she's super fun to be around. I've got a 1.5 year-old son. He's crazy, no fear, always wants me to pick him up and throw him around through the air. I like to do woodworking and make really, really nice pieces for my family and friends that I just give away. I love looking at the beauty in the world. There's no intent behind it, but that doesn't make it any less beautiful and awesome. Why is that not enough? Why do you need more?

You also forget that your third option also includes a place of eternal torment for people like me. You sincerely believe that I am going to burn in Hell forever. I try to be a good person, I put a TON of effort into thinking about ethics and philosophy. I like to help people, give away my time, and just generally do what I can. But as I'm sure you know, the Bible says that we aren't saved by works. So in spite of all my efforts, because I am unable to have faith, I have eternal torment to look forward to.

It isn't Christians that made me an ex-Christian. They were largely just people where I grew up. It's the religion that I reject and everything about it. Just food for thought.

I have two books to recommend which might help, although our daughter is only 6 and had many of the explosive/destructive bursts that you describe (they are greatly improved now).


Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child, Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing CLEAR, Firm, and Respectful Boundaries

Reading and implementing the techniques in this book recently stopped almost all of the behaviors that we were going crazy over. Our daughter was getting more and more abusive with name-calling, hitting, breaking things, etc and after reading this book and implementing the techniques, it is 95% gone. When it still happens, we now feel like we have tools to deal with it calmly but firmly.

The Explosive Child

This book focuses on preventing explosions and managing explosions proactively/in the moment. It focuses as well on the type of child that acts out in this way, and how to deal with it. A co-worker recommended this book to me after dealing with his son's explosive outbursts. His son's therapist recommended it to him.

Our daughter also showed little remorse for things like pushing her brother down the stairs, hitting him in the face, breaking doors, etc. One of the biggest realizations to me was that my wife and I were being permissive in our parenting approach, and the lack of firm consequences was causing our daughter to act out more. The Setting Limits book describes the three parenting styles (authoritarian, permissive, mixed) quite articulately.

My late best friend was an INFP male.

In my experience (and also that of A.J. Drenth), INFP males are pretty similar to INTP males, because their Te is pretty more developed / mature than that of an INFP female. However, compared to INTPs, they do tend to be a lot more prone to what I call "manic episodes", which is when they have some feeling that is so strong they need to follow it and they pretty much lose all capacity for reason.

Compared with INTPs, INFPs also have very little impulse control and tend to be more prone to psychotic behavior. My best friend had been to prison on charges of "terrorism", he'd been to a mental institution once or twice because of psychotic episodes and he'd been in rehab for amphetamine addiction. Eventually, he died in a car crash because he's taken too many pain killers to alleviate his back pain, which he got from excessive weightlifting.

I'm not sure if I know any INFP females (maybe one of my INFP friend's ex-wives?), but my current best friend is an INTJ, and the love of his life was an INFP female. He told me this is a good example of an INFP female. He also told me that the love of his live had to go to a mental institution multiple times and had problems with drug addition, just like my male INFP friend.

So when I think of INFP people of either gender, I tend to think of people who are constantly flirting with the border between sanity and insanity, and who are very prone to addiction and impulsive behavior. However, I also think of people who live life to the fullest and who are 100% their own eccentric selves. I think of people who are both very intense and very pure, which IMO makes them very likable in spite (or maybe because?) of all the craziness and impulsivity. As an INTP, I most definitely love to get dragged along by an INFP when he/she is exploring the world.

If I'm to consider Björk as a good example of INFP females, they do come off as a lot more "floaty" / "dreamy" than male INFPs, which makes sense, I suppose, considering they have a less developed Te than male INFPs, and - like male INFPs - they have Fi as their primary function. Eric Thor refers to INFPs as the "fairy empath" type, and, based on the references that I've got, that description definitely fits, especially for females.

I think that what really happened with that gamergate shit (on meta-level) is that it split social constructivists on one side and geneticists/culturalists on the other in culture war. If you believe that any inequality in outcome is always result of oppression you will inevitably find lots and lots of oppression. If you believe inequality is result of cultural or genetic differences you'll find very little. You can also believe in something in between in which case you'll find something in between.

To continue with gaming as an example, if you look at gender disparity in gaming you can conclude one of two things: Either there is pervasive sexism that repels women from gaming. Or, most AAA games are designed to cater to hunting instincts of 16yr old males - thus sexism is the result of lopsided gender ratio, not the cause. (or, again, it is something in between)

Now, the geneticist side was seen as literally Hitler for a long time. And there is no doubt that it was endorsed by some literal Hitlers. But if you read Blank Slate by Steven Pinker (Harvard psychologist, not a neonazi) then it does seem that there is plenty of evidence that genes influence IQ and personality to a large degree. At least on individual level, he says nothing about differences between groups.

The evidence of genetic differences between groups is far more dubious and uncertain. It obviously doesn't help that the whole argument attracts some terrible people who misinterpret evidence to make differences seem much bigger than they probably are. (Although there are some seemingly convincing arguments for increased Ashkenazi Jews intelligence) Culturalist explanations are more convincing, however.

What I think annoys many people -- not all or even most of them Neonazi -- is that social constructivists are completely dominant in academia, and are thus in position to interpret every power differential as result of oppression.

• Leda Cosmides & John Tooby: Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer - central paradigm
  
• David Buss: Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition) - expensive but comprehensive
  
• Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition - theoretical background, easy to read
  
• Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker - about the problems of cultural determinism
  
  If you're into original research, you should also check out (lots of PDFs)
  
  
• David Buss' Publication list
  
• Leda Cosmides & John Tooby's Publication list

You might want to look at The Better Angles Of Our Nature by Steven Pinker;
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

Any one interested in high altitude survival should check out http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffresearch.html . its dedicated to survivors of immense freefalls.
Examples:
Here's the world record: Vesna Vulovic was a stewardess on a Yugoslav DC 9 jet airliner that blew up in January of 1972 (probably as the result of a terrorist bomb). She fell more than 33,000 feet in the wreckage of the plane, which hit a snow-covered slope. The only survivor, she was badly injured and was paralyzed from the waist down, but later recovered and now can walk.
And here's two of my favorites:
In March of 1944, Nicholas Alkemade was the tail gunner in a British Lancaster bomber on a night mission to Berlin when his plane was attacked by German fighters. When the captain ordered the crew to bail out, Alkemade looked back into the plane and discovered that his parachute was in flames. He chose to jump without a parachute rather than to stay in the burning plane. He fell 18,000 feet, landing in trees, underbrush, and drifted snow. He twisted his knee and had some cuts, but was otherwise alright.
And the father of Deep Survival author Lawrence Gonezeles (an amazing book about the psychology of survival and WTL http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393326152?pc_redir=1397159136&robot_redir=1):
In January of 1945, Federico Gonzales was a pilot of a 398th Bomb Group B-17 whose wing was shot off over Dusseldorf. He was unable to bail out of the spinning plane and fell 27,000 feet. He was pulled alive from the wreckage. Everyone else died . -what's not included are the incredible events that occurred immediately after being pulled from the wreckage... Gonzales had broken most of the bones in his body. The civilian who found him produced a pistol and tried to execute him. The pistol jammed and before the civilian could run the action a nearby German officer stopped him... Talk about fucking luck.

I'm pretty sure that I've read close to 90% of all the books ever written on the psychology of conspiracy theories. While the self esteem element is left out, this is by far the best, and most accessible book on the topic I've read to date. It reads like (and in some ways is) a regular pop-psy book but it's really great. I literally could not out it down and read cover to cover first go (despite the unfortunate slow start with the history component).

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

Have a read, seriously. Every page has frustrating parallels to Trump voters. The worst part if the book is that it unfortunately offers no solutions (sorry for the spoiler). It's actually a complicated combination of factors and as such, has no single solution.

You can't teach self awareness, critical thinking and emotional intelligence to someone who is terrified of what, deep down, they'll know they'll see in the mirror.

The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a great case for this: there's less violence, warfare, etc. The world has never been so peaceable for humans.

How about a whole book on it written by a respected democrat in academia?

You really should just read that book. It's going to answer all your questions and give you things to think about you had never considered.

According to Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of our Nature, violence has been on the decline over the millennia, and we're living in the most peaceful times in human existence.

However, he says:

>The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue.

Pinker presents five forces that favour peacefulness over violence, but there have always been people fighting against them. They are:

• The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force," which "can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent ... self-serving biases."
  
  
• Commerce – the rise of "technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners," so that "other people become more valuable alive than dead" and "are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization."
  
  
• Feminization – increasing respect for "the interests and values of women."
  
  
• Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which "can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them."
  
  
• The Escalator of Reason – an "intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs," which "can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.
  
  We should be very concerned when leaders fight against these forces, because these forces are what make humanity better.
  

I highly disagree, if anything the last 10-20k years of human history has shown our capacity to be extraordinarily kind to each other.

Here is Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature" lecture on this subject. If you don't want to watch hour long lecture, here is a 20 minute segment by him on the same subject.

I highly recommend the book itself though.

What is your opinion on the decline of war in the world? Because iit turns out we live in the most peaceful time in human history.

Here is a video summary of my argument, easier to understand, but I have transcribed the important parts here.

This chart shows deaths in wars by millions since 1950

This chart shows the increase in world population, which is going against the trend in deaths in war

If war was getting worse, these two charts should be in line with each other or at the very least, maintain their respective ratios. Instead what we see is that as population increases, deaths by war go down, meaning the percentage of people dying directly because of a war is declining.

The following maps show conflicts that were ongoing in the years 2013-2014.

This is a map of countries that have had conflicts that led to the death of more than 10,000 people.

This is a map of countries in orange where there were conflicts that killed more than 1,000 people

This is a map of countries in lighter orance where there were conflicts that killed more than 100 people

A lot of conflicts had to do with colonial rule or taking back control from another country who had usurped the rule for an area.

This is a map from 1845 of areas that were under colonial rule

This is a map of today of areas that are under colonial rule today

Having countries govern themselves takes away a lot of tension and potential for conflict. Additionally, most wars of the 19th and 20th century were fought for resources, including land. However, nowadays, it's more profitable for countries to negotiate trade deals instead of entering into wars over resources.

If you still don't believe that we live in the most peaceful period in human history, you can check these non-partisan, non-religious links to studies into the subject.

• http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/st_war_peace.html
  
• https://thinkprogress.org/5-reasons-why-2013-was-the-best-year-in-human-history-392c4888e603#.h9etk6zhn
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
  
• http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp
  
• http://www.historyofwar.org
  
• http://www.warsintheworld.com/?page=static1258254223
  
• http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100312400
  
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/globally-deaths-war-and-murder-are-decline-180950237/?no-ist
  
• http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Report_2013_140226_Web.pdf
  
• https://www.fastcoexist.com/3027220/despite-what-seems-like-a-lot-of-violence-the-world-is-actually-getting-safer-every-day
  
• http://www.hiik.de/en/
  
• http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21589431-bringing-end-conflicts-within-states-vexatious-history-provides-guide
  
• http://www.economist.com/content/inner-turm

> everyone knows america is basically a gun-crazy failed state at this point

Tell me, where have you visited in the US, specifically?

The media has done a fantastic job terrifying everyone. You're something like 100,000 times more likely to witness violence in the media than in real life, according to Dr. Steven Pinker. With a population of 325,000,000 people and news being disseminated at light speed, things are bound to look worse that they are. You know what doesn't make the news - nothing. Nothing, as in mundane life. Violence will make the news, however.

The media has got everyone living in fear and clutching their rosaries, so to speak.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M

I'm not sure if this would work or not, but I would try redirecting people who have conservative or right-wing leaning views at least toward better thinkers than Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and toward optimistic views of the future of society, to cull some of the us-vs-them and zero-sum thinking that plagues these discussions.

Sometimes it feels like men, especially, feel existentially threatened by other modes of thought, so being at least sympathetic to the good bits of their ideas and offering something similar but that promotes openness and liberal ideas may help.

Hans Rosling's Factfulness presents a pretty optimistic view of the world. It's all getting better! Seriously!

Jonathan Haidt (and Greg Lukianoff for the first book)

• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
  
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
  
  I had worried that the first book would be a reiteration of right-wing talking points around safe spaces, but I was surprised to find it a good listen so far. It mentions several cognitive distortions and how cognitive behavioral therapy can overcome them as well. The second book is sympathetic to conservative views and gives a good tour of moral psychology. Really recommend.
  
  Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is also good. Seriously, the world is getting better! Pinker is heavier on the nature side that most lefties, so knowing that may make people more receptive if they won't receive an gender argument without some mention of biology.

Pathological Altruism

They over empathize with the "poor, down-trodden" people of the third-world, and thus think they'll magically become super advanced intelligent economy stimulating people if you just moved them into America/ the West. They LITERALLY get a dopamine spike & high from imagining that and viewing themselves as the "good guys", on the "right side of history". They don't genuinely care about these people, they're just covert narcissist who want to think their nation did the right thing, without having to do anything themselves or face the direct consequences.

As for the tangible importations enacted by bureaucrats, I'm sure they're aware that many of the people they bring in happen to vote democratic.

Christopher Lasch wrote about this in The Culture of Narcissism Amazon | PDF

It doesn't read so well these days, but this is an excellent summary:

• A Taylorism For All Seasons
  
  
• Reinventing the Wheel of Fortune
  
  
• That’s Amore
  
  One of his arguments for why everything is so shitty is that Americans no longer live with any respect to the preceding or forthcoming generations. We have forgone the wisdom and teachings of previous generations in exchange for a culture of experts that adopt the superficial signals of knowledge and wisdom, but often fail to deliver. I think this is one of the appeals of JBP. He is a thinker and he isn't afraid to show it, waiting to think before he speaks, struggling with his words, looking off and holding his chin. These are superficial signals charlatans are often afraid to adopt because they would be overacting, or trying too hard to convince you that they are worth listening to. JBP does it genuinely. He's the real deal.
  
  TED talks would be a perfect example. This phenomena is so obvious, they are self-referentially mocking themselves for it:
  
  How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork
  
  There's no shame in attaching yourself to something external. Just important to have a balance between zealotry and only adopting a superficial identification.

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I really enjoyed this book - https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X/

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/

https://www.amazon.com/Gunfight-Battle-Over-Right-America/dp/0393345831

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Guns-Liberals-Second-Amendment/dp/1610391691/

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660/

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Second-Amendment-Documentary-Commentaries/dp/0962366439

https://www.amazon.com/Armed-America-Remarkable-Became-American/dp/1595552847

https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Bear-Arms-Origins-Anglo-American/dp/0674893077

https://www.amazon.com/Targeting-Guns-Firearms-Control-Institutions/dp/0202305694

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Amendment-Biography-Michael-Waldman/dp/147674744X

> all the worlds religions and ethnicities should stop being jerks to each other. However, that seems unlikely.

It's very likely. It's been happening throughout history. It's happened while wealth inequality increased, as in the Pacification Process, when warring bands of relatively egalitarian foragers unified into larger, more stratified farming states.

> If we look at a lot of wars in the world we can see that its rich people (US Army) killing people with much less money.

I don't think wealth inequality causes that kind of violence at all. Except maybe indirectly, in that USA thinks they can get away with killing Iraqis, because Iraqis are too poor to defend themselves. And if you can force the rich to give away their money to the poor, surely you can just force the rich to not kill the poor.

Anyway, it's not that the rich hate the poor, for being poor, and so go out of their way to hurt the poor. If anything, this is an argument for more free markets. Allow the rich to benefit from "exploiting" (aka employing) the poor, so they won't want to fight the poor.

In the book Deep Survival, there is a section that talks about an individual's age and their likelihood of surviving being lost in the wild. Interestingly enough it was the 4-9 year olds that survive the most often out of any age range, due to the way their brain processes their model of the world. 9-13 year olds are the least likely to survive. I may be off by a year on either side for those age brackets, but that's the gist of it. I don't have my copy of the book on hand for a more detailed retelling.

A one year old would have absolutely no chance. Unless, of course, they were adopted by a pack of wolves and befriended a bear and a black panther.

Deep Survival -- an informative read of when things go wrong in the wilderness and how the survivors make it out alive. It shines upon the personalities and characteristics that tend to have the highest survival rate by analyzing the craziest stories of people that have lived and also sometimes died. Such a good read in fact that it's the only book that could hold my attention for the last 4 years. ^((I don't really like to read))

Brilliant minds have been attempting to answer this question for centuries, and there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut answer yet. It remains to be seen whether there ever will be.

If you'd like to do some research, check out the book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. Pinker has challenged the idea that humans are essentially a blank slate, and in turn, he has been challenged by those who disagree with him. There's a big debate that rages on the subject --- you might find it interesting.

What I would say is that human nature is a mixture of good and evil. We're both a product of our external environment and of our internal choices and characteristics. The dividing line between those two things can be difficult to determine.

We can definitely rule out the Christian (specifically the Calvinist) understanding of human nature, however. The idea that human beings are inherently completely evil, save for the intervention of a deity and the existence of civil governments and laws, is largely at odds with large portions of human history.

Despite what we hear on the evening news, the world today is far better than it ever has been, and it is only continuing to improve in many ways. I think it's safe for you to err on the side of taking a positive view of humanity.

So the first thing to debunk is your title. This does not attempt to show "overall female inferiority". It is explicitly dealing with the role of women in combat. It is trivial to debunk your claim, harder to debunk theirs. No cherry-picked list of statistics remotely proves "overall inferiority."

Ok, now as for their claims: I will agree with one core observation they make: They are right that "gender equality"-- in a purely biological sense-- is a myth. There are very clear and obvious differences between men and women. The physical differences are obvious, and the mental and emotional differences should be clear also. But note: "unequal" does not mean "inferior." Until you cite a specific task, you cannot make broad claims about inferiority.

That said, their conclusion-- "Females are clearly unsuitable for combat"-- completely wrong.

The differences between the genders are statistical, not absolute. To use the first item in their list as an example, sure, the average woman has 35% less muscle mass-- yet there are a shitload of women who can kick the average guys ass. So on any given stat, some women will actually rate higher than some men. Some women are clearly unsuitable for combat, but so are some men.

If this is a topic that interests you, check out Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for an excellent examination of the role biolgical differences have on human behavior. It goes into the topic in detail and shows how both the political right and the political left are almost completely wrong on the topic (which is pretty much to be expected when people try to determine reality by only choosing facts that match up with their ideology).

Edit: "Until you cite a specific task, you cannot make broad claims about inferiority" sounds a bit like I am endorsing the view that one gender is inferior. That is absolutely not the case. It is certainly true that in specific contexts one gender may be better than the other on average, but beyond those specific contexts any claims of superiority are absurd.

At the risk of sounding complacement, maybe India isn't in need of dire saving. After decades of being in the doldrums, it's finally rising at a quite rapid pace. GDP per capita is starting to reach critical mass. India in 2020 will be where China was in the year 2010 according to the IMF(PPP-adjusted).

So its just a decade behind. A big concern is the slowdown in jobs growth. That would cause significant instability if the trend persisted, given that India has about 1 million new entrants into the labor market every single month.

If you look at absolute povery measured by the world bank, the numbers have come down dramatically. India's TFR will also basically converge to replacement rate levels by 2020, something which is necessary to avoid instability and more rapidly increase the wealth of each citizen.

Chidabaram had an interesting talk recently where he talked about India today and its potential. He essentially said neither India nor China could ever reach Western levels of prosperity on a per-capita basis. I wouldn't be so certain. The main constraint today is energy, specifically oil.

That can be overcome(see EVs). Then you have food and whatnot, but that will be possible to bypass by growing your own food in a lab. Water usage can still be streamlined far more than it is today, even in most developed countries. Add to this the general decline in violence over the past several millenia, and you have a decent foundation to build prosperity on. The major risk out there is climate change.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

I gotta say reading evopsych definitely paved the way for my unplugging, so I commend you on that decision.

I have read and recommend:

• "The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology" by Robert Wright.
  
• "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley.
  
• "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker.

Personally I've found there to be few helpful books which directly relate to management consulting / business strategy. The only one that I've found really helpful is:

• Winning - an overall look on business strategies and philosophies used by Jack Welch (former CEO of GE)
  
  But here are some books that are very helpful in developing people / soft skills essential to effective consultants:
  
  
• Getting to Yes - an incredible book on negotating skills.
  
• How to Argue and Win Every Time - not as argumentative as it sounds, this is a great book which is hugely helpful on how to present your positions and how to get the best outcome for everyone in a situation.
  
• Influence - brilliant book on the ways in which we are influenced to do things.
  
• The 48 Laws of Power - a very Machiavellian put pragmatic look on the ways in which personal power is gained / lost.
  
• Vital Lies, Simple Truths - how to recognise self deception that we're all prone to and how to overcome its limitations
  
• The Blank Slate - a mindblowing book on human psychology and what we're naturally predisposed to be. Helps you to better understand people and their motivations in not just business but all aspects of life. Read from Part 2 onwards.

Yeah, but it feels like things are getting apocalyptically scary, and how awesome exciting terrible that it should be happening to us, in our lifetimes!

Unfortunately happily, you're right: violence of all kinds has been on a downward trend for ages.

>I don’t regret having one, just extremely ashamed of being sexual and communicating it to girls and also showing it to the world. Attracting girls’ attention and whatnot isn’t very hard but progressing things to dating, holding hands and eventually sex is impossible. I can’t even call them or message them on Facebook or Whatsapp because I just feel like an idiot for doing so. Making a move in clubs and bars is also difficult although I once got close to leaving with a girl but she didn't want to. I got made fun of a lot growing up for not having a girlfriend and this made me feel like i do not deserve one. It doesn't matter if I've got the green light to go ahead I just feel really ashamed do it. Even something like looking at a fit girl wearing a short skirt makes me feel bad for checking her out and that I shouldn’t be doing it.


I know what you mean. I've been there myself, but even when I was there I was entirely self-aware of my shame and I was skeptical of the validity of my emotional reactions; I realized they were ingrained. Being aware of your emotional reactions allows you to be emotionally proactive. Your sex-negative problem is mostly an emotional issue, and not much else, right? I've been there. I wouldn't doubt that you are also decent looking and have both latent and actualized social skills. Most intelligent introverts have a lot of potential to be who they want to be because they know themselves more deeply than others. You must use your introverted nature to your advantage and recognize the differences in others and yourself. In all honesty, there are an infinite number of unwritten rules; everyone's abstract/emotional logic is different. Many of them are foundational and predictable, however; including yours and mine. Like anything else, being emotionally predictable is not a black/white issue. It is a grey area, and you have to balance your reliability with creativity.


Being made fun of for not having a girlfriend is just as sexist as being made fun of for not having a boyfriend; gender equal too. Were you ever shamed for not having a boyfriend? It's clearly a matter of groupthink and extroverted style; not for everyone. Dating relationships, for extroverts especially, are often attention-getting and showy. They wear their relationships like trophies won. Usually introverts prefer a more private relationship because they have less social desire and are often shamed because of it. Introverts are “themselves” more often in private. Extroverts are “themselves” more often in public. There is no shame deserved either way, regardless of popular opinion. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses, and you should try to introject some of the traits that you enjoy in others; regardless of type. That is how you become balanced.


>I’m receiving counselling from a pastor who advocates the whole “no sex before marriage” thing and believes that people should only date to get married and sex is only for making kids which is stupid IMO because I do not plan on getting married anytime soon.


Counseling from a Catholic pastor? Watch out, that is one of the most notorious sex-negative societies out there. They own the abstinence-only charade while they parade horribles. Marriage is not the answer to anything; it is an institution of the state. Anything else attached is sentimental.


If you haven't already, I recommend doing an in-depth study of animal sexual behaviors; especially the most intelligent animals. All animals have sex for pleasure, but some animals are only driven to have sex at certain times of the year; humans are on a 24/7 system.


>I’ve tried the no fap route and gotten very high days counts but that hasn’t really helped me at all.


Sexual frustration doesn't help anyone. If you are mindful, then you can use your libido to further your goals, but it is not an all-cure.


>Got any sources to help overcome sex-negative perspectives? I’m interested in recreational sex not baby making sex.


Absolutely. I recommend starting with actual sex science and learning about male and female psychology and neurology. Then work your way into reading about sex culture. You should also study developmental psychology as you will probably need the clinical context in order to objectively self-evaluate your childhood influences; it is necessary for self-therapy. The best therapy will always be self-therapy; no one will ever know you better than yourself.


Evolutionary Science and Morals Philosophy:

The Selfish Gene

The Moral Landscape

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do?


Sex Psychology, Science, and Neurology:

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

The Female Brain

The Male Brain

Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love

What Do Women Want

Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)

Sex: The world's favorite pastime fully revealed


Behavioral Psychology and Abstract Economics:

How Pleasure Works

Freakonomics

Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking

Thinking Fast And Slow

We Are All Weird


Developmental Psychology:

Nurture Shock

Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts That Run Our Lives


Empathy Building:


Half The Sky

The House On Mango Street

Me Before You

The Fault In Our Stars

Also check out James Hollis' Understanding The Psychology of Men lecture if you can find it.



Movies: XXY, Tom Boy, Dogtooth, Shame, Secretary, Nymphomaniac, Juno, Beautiful Creatures, and The Man From Earth.



All of these things are related, but it is up to you to make the connections; pick and choose which material suits your interests best. These are the things that came to mind first, and they have all influenced my perspectives.

> E, observando o longo prazo, o mundo nunca foi tão pacífico quanto é agora.

Passando só pra linkar o livro do Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined que fala exatamente sobre isso. Conheci via um amigo, e já está na minha lista de leituras faz algum tempo.

Thanks! I'll check these out... and maybe I'll reread the Dark Tower series, so friggin' great.

<>

Edit:

Amazon links:

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley


Abundance Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler


Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Stephen King's Dark Tower Series

Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles)

Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series

(yeah, these are smile.amazon.com links... if you aren't already supporting some organization with your Amazon purchases, how about my kid's school's PTA?)

Read this book, full of hard research that shows we are living through the most peaceful period in human history.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348249865&sr=8-1&keywords=steven+pinker

Most Redditors are morons who, because they can see people beneath them in intelligence, conclude that Redditors are smart.

The greater problem it seems to me is narcissism, which one person points out here.

I KNOW! I KNOW!

I was thinking the exact same fucking thing.

If you hear the man-stewardess in the video say, "oh don't worry, it's only the fuel burning", I was going out of my mind.
Read 'Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why' then tell me you wouldn't have pulled the emergency exit and got the hell out of there.

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152

Amazing. Glad I wasn't in that situation.

From:
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/05/25/toughest-days-my-life-eller-filled-with-emotion-after-intense-community-search/

quoting Amanda Eller's mother, Julia Eller;

> “She sat down and rested on a fallen log, just kinda meditated and took a little nap. When she got up she was disoriented about where she was and just followed her instincts trying to get back to her car,”

And there you have it - disconnection from the real world into a altered mental state, followed by a flawed instinctive reaction;

> 'I wanted to go back the way I'd come, but my gut was leading me another way — and I have a very strong gut instinct.

One can list all the useful things one might or might not carry, wonder why some runners and casual hikers don't prepare for the worst, but key here (actually the keys were left at the car too ...!) was that the brain wasn't given a chance to do its job, orient back into the real world again, and make appropriate decisions.

Laurence Gonzales-Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Looks like you've got a SWC (strong willed child) on your hands. Do you want a weak willed child? There are books on how to handle a strong willed child. Here is what we do for my daughter. (She is 4.5)

When we are presented with inappropriate behavior from her. We tell her "this behavior is inappropriate and unacceptable and you will not get anything from it. Go sit on the steps, this is a time out for your inappropriate behavior" if she won't go to time out, she goes directly to her room. If she won't go to her room we take her to her room. We put her in her room and tell her to count to 50 to calm down. (It usually stops here, if it escalates) If she tries to come out of her room, the door gets locked. If she hangs on the door and bangs on the door, she gets threatened with a spanking, if she continues to bang on the door we go ahead with spanking. (Spanking is four swats on the bottom) she is told if she continues to bang on the door she will get another spanking. She usually doesn't go this far. She usually gets spanked about 2-3 times a year. We have been very consistent and most unacceptable behavior stops with a time out.

She needs to learn how to cope with her emotions on her own. You can help her do this. Counting works great for this.

I suggest reading: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0770436595/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HM9P1BV18AG37RQERGBV&dpPl=1&dpID=51URtF9fnSL

It's difficult to begin implementing a discipline plan, but children need discipline. Otherwise your daughter will end up like this: https://youtu.be/bIyW_-6IILk

As for food and meals, we give our children 3-4 options for dinner and we try to get them to help cook. We usually don't have issues with eating. Good Luck.

Oh the down votes I shall get for spanking my child. I can just feel my karma go negative. I'm just no good at Reddit. In fact I bet my comment will be removed.

And there is no such thing like disregarding the effects that biology have on the gender role.

No, they are not vague statements.

read this if you want to learn more:

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/1501264338

I would recommend buying Benebell Wen’s book Holistic Tarot. It’s a great intro to Tarot & western esotericism that covers’s everything from beginner to advanced.

> I would argue that our value structures aren’t hard wired in to us, they are learned.

There are certainly value structures embedded into our biology by evolution.

The idea you are expressing is called "The blank slate" or "la tabula rasa", and it's a completely untenable position to hold taking evolution, biology, neuroscience, and psychology into account. The idea that the human mind is a mere "blank slate" and that, subsequently, all our behaviours, and more generally, our plagues, come from our environment, ie, family, "society" or "culture" is nonsense.

Steven Pinker rips this idea to shreds from too may angles to count in his book "the blank slate - The modern denial of human nature". It's worth a read.

What helps for me is understanding why they believe what they believe. In most (but not all) cases, the religious are as much victim as perpetrator, and that's the nature of how religion as a system works.

Before I go further, I'd like to recommend a couple of books. I don't know about you, but I'm not an avid non-fiction reader so take it as granted that these books aren't your average dull non-fiction. I would recommend at least checking them out.

The first book has the benefit of being available freely online, as the retired professor that wrote it wanted it to be generally accessible. The book is "The Authoritarians" and it is possibly one of the best books for understanding a lot of the most frustrating aspects of religious behavior. If you are like me, you'll particularly enjoy his role-playing simulations of world leaders that mix authoritarian and non-authoritarian people to different degrees. There's a whole lot of parallels we can draw from those results to what is happening in the world today. Professor Altemeyer purposefully has made the book easy to read for non-psychologists, and it's not a long read.

The second book is a bit heftier but I think is valuable for putting things in perspective as it deals extensively with historical trends and I think helps people like me be hopeful for our future. The book is "Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". The author Steven Pinker doesn't pull punches regarding religion, but he does show very convincingly that a lot of what atheists typically blame on religion in terms of violence actually rests on human nature itself. He also convincingly shows that things are so very much better than the used to be. Most of us have no idea just how horrifyingly callous the past was, and this understanding of human progression often takes a bit of the edge off the rage I do feel about modern trends. Things could be so much worse, and they were.

With that out of the way, I think it's also useful to understand how humans learn. There are multiple models for human learning, but many people that deal with this agree that the Bayesian model of learning is a large component. In the Bayesian model people evaluate new information based on how well it conforms to previously accepted information. In the Bayesian nomenclature, these previously accepted pieces of information are called "priors". Things that agree with priors are more likely to be accepted and things that contradict priors are more likely to be rejected. The upshot being that all humans are innately biased to believe things that confirm what they think they know, and disbelieve things that contradict what they know. Understanding the nature of evaluating your assumptions is in fact a large part of the training that underscores experimental research and it's necessary because of that Bayesian bias.

Where this is relevant to religion is in childhood indoctrination. Children have no priors. Thus children usually acquire their "base" priors from trusted caregivers. Often people notice that children will accept absurd claims uncritically, and we tend to think of this as gullibility. However that's not quite correct in the sense that we use the term with adults. An adult should have a world view that does recognize and reject absurd claims, however a child literally cannot know better as they have no understanding of what makes a claim absurd or not.

Thus children indoctrinated into a religion can have their entire system for accepting claims corrupted by religious systems that ensures that they will reject claims that contradict those faulty religious ones. Obviously efficacy in indoctrination depends on both the environment around that indoctrination and the individual in question, but most people that are very religious are that way because they were trained from the very start of their ability to reason to reason poorly.

Because I know this, I don't typically feel religious people I debate with are stupid, even if what they are arguing seems ridiculously stupid. I understand that they have had their ability to reason sabotaged, and that doesn't effect any innate intelligence they may have, but rather forces that intelligence to work against itself.

I still think religion is a horrible thing, and I still think many religious people should be thwarted from many religiously motivated actions that will cause harm, but I usually don't think they're a pack of morons bent on evil (even if it seems that they are acting that way). There are exceptions of course, and there are some evil motherfuckers out there that know they are evil and cover that evil with a thin veneer of religiousness to appear legitimate, but they tend to be a minority.

Never. Violence has been observed in every human society throughout history, and the few societies still extant that live in hunter-gatherer conditions tend to be more violent than modern societies.

To turn you question on its head: we actually probably live in the safest period ever for avoiding humanity's violence against other one another. There's a really excellent book about this phenomenon: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker.

The idea that before government and civilization, humanity lived in peace and harmony (Rousseau's "state of nature") is appealing, but is several eras out of date and is out step with what we now know about prehistoric history and observable primitive societies.

> is that what people say now when they dont have a real response

If someone walks up to you and says "lizards control the moon" and you don't respond, is that the same thing as having no response, or is it realizing the person in question is so far gone, so detached from reality it isn't worth even attempting to reason them back into the real world?

> usually youre pretty logical but believing the most convenient thing ever from cnn is a dumb move man

Funny how every single right-wing attempted terror attack, or foiled terror attack is totally a false flag and "convenient."

> dont you think its weird how alex soros had an op ed ready to go like half an hour after it supposedly happened

[citation needed]

> or how all the reports said the things went to the obama and clinton households when you literally cant post things to people under secret service protection

[citation needed]

> or how the postal service moved at 100 times its usual pace to return packages

[citation needed]

> or how the stamps show objectively that the packages were never posted

[citation needed]

> or how the timer on the "bombs" doesnt have an alarm

[citation needed]

Even if this were true, it doesn't disprove anything.

People mail "fake" stuff like this fairly often. Was the fake anthrax mailed to Trump and his retarded friends also a false flag?

> but no totally believable youd have to be insane not to take that dumb shit at face value amirite

See above.

> some of you are so easy to trick sometimes its kind of alarming

I'm going to suggest a book to you, because this is common with conspiratards. They're some of the most gullible, profoundly misinformed people on earth.

But they've convinced themselves the opposite is true, it's a vicious cycle.

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915631

The psychology behind this is very interesting. For example, this is why people such as yourself tend to be the most gullible to authoritarians or fake news.

You get that that's an incredibly good thing, right?

Humans are becoming less brutal and more civilized. Go back a few hundred years and ISIS wouldn't be considered particularly brutal, let alone the most brutal government in the world by a wide margin.

You should read this book.

Yep baloney. They have it set up so either way they can claim " the end is near!" Governments proclaim we are in the most peaceful period in human history? The end must be close!

Reports of more and more wars? This means the end is near too! It's just more doublethink.

By the way statistically we are living in the most peaceful, non violent time period in human history, see the Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Just a reminder that a post shouldn't be downvoted if you merely disagree with the point of view, but only if it doesn't contribute to the discussion.

I'm politically Left (for the US), and I'm often frustrated by my camp's love for social scientists and thinkers who still insist on a tabula rasa model for human nature, in which the mind is a blank slate, decoupled from biology.

Stephen Pinker has written a popular book - The Blank Slate on the topic, in which he traces this model's roots to fears of inequality, imperfectibility, determinism, and nihilism.

I think the fear of inequality, in particular, influences current discussions. Talk of innate (or un-fixable) differences in mental ability is still tainted in most people's minds with the scientific racism of the Eugenics movement, and accusations of racism can be a career-killer, so scholars seem to avoid the topic, despite the solid research describing the heritability of IQ.

Man, you've called me ignorant a few times now. I've got the statisticians on my side, at least.

Maybe you are just within your ideological bubble within google? it has been know to happen... unless maybe they only hire progressives now? you know the memo did claim conservatives didin't feel confortable coming out, neither did classical liberals, and im sure libertarians neither... anyways.. here is a recompilation of people who claim other sciences disagree on social constructionism of gender, or at least that is more defined by Biology that they claim.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Gender-Matters-Teachers-Differences/dp/0767916255

https://econjwatch.org/articles/undoing-insularity-a-small-study-of-gender-sociology-s-big-problem

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://youtu.be/cQNaT52QYYA

https://youtu.be/rBNtOCCSSRc

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Nicholas Wade

On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration by Frank Salter

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements by Kevin MacDonald

On Sparta by Plutarch

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Beyond Good and Evil and The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche

Confessions of a Reluctant Hater and New Right vs. Old Right by Greg Johnson

Got a few days? LOL!

Start with the source material for The Better Angels Of Our Nature by Steve Pinker.

This is from a large group of data sets from many many sources compiled.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

I read books 4-6 of the Dresden Files. I blame Patrick Rothfuss for getting me started and duckie for keeping me going. Coupla assholes. After I finish the other 8 books, I have some nice, solid non-fiction lined up.

In no particular order, I'm going to read:

The Information by James Gleick

The Better Angels Of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

The Math Book by Clifford A. Pickover

The Know-It-All by A.J. Coastie Jacobs

And others. I'm gonna nerd out so hard that I'll regrow my virginity.

FANTASTIC book on this topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

1. The press environment in the US is very free. That does not mean that there are no serious challenges to press freedom here, especially on specific national security issues. However, several indices on the subject tend to fairly seriously under-represent important elements bolstering US press freedom. Some of these are: strong underlying freedom of information law at state/local as well as federal level, very aggressive judicial protection in First Amendment cases, and an effective and still-burgeoning system of recourse to counter strategic lawsuits against public participation. The three isolated examples you gave are not even good ones. With regard to the Snowden saga, the actual journalists working on the story have actually enjoyed much more legal leeway and suffered much less harassment in the US than in the UK and some other places. And while a better statutory defense should be available for Snowden with regard to presenting justification for the crimes he committed, the lack of one is not any kind of distinguishing feature of the US system. Similarly, Chelsea Manning and Barrett Brown's actions would have been considered serious crimes in every country on the planet. The idea of Barrett Brown being a press hero is laughable, and it's especially ironic given that the Stratfor hack was essentially an attack on the privacy of an independent media company and its readership. [Full disclosure, I worked at Stratfor for a bit in the mid-2000s and still know people there, and the paranoia people have about that company never ceases to amaze].
   
   
2. Your point about lobbying has some technical merit, but it's really just another version of the same misconception. There are really separate ideas here: bribery, campaign donations, and persuasive lobbying. Straight-up bribery involves a politician getting personal, pecuniary benefit in exchange for policy. Bribery renders people less free, since they are no longer able to effectively control government through voting. It happens, and it's a problem in all governments, but America doesn't especially stand out from its peers in this area. Campaign donations are of course problematic and also often discussed as a form of "bribery". But, as I pointed out above, this muddles an important difference. When the campaign money is just being spent on dumb ads, it does not really reduce the voters' freedom. Your reply is that a ton of money is also spent on lobbyists. However, (1) much of this is the same money -- lobbyists do a lot of work sourcing campaign donations; and (2) to the extent that lobbyists are actually lobbying, this is just putting politicians in the same shoes as voters. And, frankly, many of those conversations are also about how much campaign money could be raised to unseat them if they do the "wrong" thing. Access can be important to the forming of impressions, but politicians have a ton of tools at their disposal to manage to whom they listen and for how long. Politicians that are stuck in the culture of lobbying-cash-fear are guilty of cowardice, but they aren't "not free" and neither are their constituents.
   
   
3. The way you make this argument, your point of view is never falsifiable. If a poor person votes Republican, you can just say it's because their society must be so "not free" that they were mind-controlled / brainwashed into voting against their interests. If only they were better educated, they would be "free" to vote for the things that you think are in their interests rather than the things that they think are in their interests. This perspective just dehumanizes the very people that you are trying to claim are being robbed of their agency by American society. Of course I think it should be made even easier for Americans to be better-informed and even easier to participate in political life. But surely freedom has to be recognized for what it is regardless. Nobody can force voters with stupid ideas to go out and correct them. But the practical barriers to any voter doing so -- even a voter with low education and no personal wealth -- are remarkably low in the US.
   
   
4. (5) The GPI is not a good measure at all of "how safe the streets are", which was your original point. It includes lots of variables that have nothing to do with that. The US homicide rate is on par with the Baltics; the US assault rate compares pretty well to many of its peers. But the larger point is lost in these snapshot comparisons. Pretty much all current OECD societies are on the sharp tip of a very dramatic decline in violence. Yes, there are some places in America that are blighted and dangerous. And we still have more violent crime than we should have. But in general, I absolutely stand by the statement that America is a very safe place by any rational standard. Having double the murder rate of 2012 Finland is like doubling your risk of being struck by lightning or exposing yourself to double the normal level of background radiation. It's more dangerous, but it isn't not safe.
   
   To your last point: there are significant threats to important freedoms in the US. Personally, I am especially concerned about not only surveillance in particular but the general attitude in successive federal administrations about the rule of law in general. And I am not alone in that at all. But, especially when it comes to essential political liberties and the freedom of conscience, our underlying legal and social protections remain very strong. And they are just now being given the opportunity to more directly confront the latest threats. We have a long way to fall before it would start to make sense to talk about being "not free".

This book is a great read on this topic to help gain perspective.

I don't think we're going to cure aging for another couple of centuries. The human body is an unnecessarily complicated piece of hardware just for supplying nutrients and input/outputs for a 2 pound chunk of grey matter.

I do think that we'll be downloading our consciousness to a digital medium within the next 100 years, though. Or otherwise keeping brains alive in vats, with the ability to communicate digitally.

Then things get weird. You can either live forever in a VR world, or you need a robotic body to travel in.

The poor will never be "euthanized" as such, although it will take money to live forever.

And if that sounds like some kind of horrible world with inequality you couldn't possibly abide, well... yeah. Super fucked up, but we're already in that world.

And things have never been as great as they currently are, and continue to get better.

So yeah, there will be an awkward period where some rich folks are chillin in VR heaven and tons of poor children are still dying of starvation. But the long-term trend should be for the best.

I feel like the #1 thing that isn't talked about is the rate of change we've had for 50+ years, and which has been accelerating, has absolutely no precedence in history. Shit is nuts.

Hmm... Absolutely none of these represent any kind of scientific fact.


I"m going to ignore the prophesies for the future because they cannot be verified. So, from your list from the present, that you believe have already been fulfilled:

> Naked, destitute, barefoot shepherds will compete in building tall buildings.

Can you provide an example of this?

> The slave-woman will give birth to her master or mistress.

Who or what is this supposed to represent?

> A trial (fitnah) which will enter every Arab household.

I can't possibly check on this.

> Knowledge will be taken away (by the death of people of knowledge), and ignorance will prevail.

We learn more year by year. So, no.

> Wine (intoxicants, alcohol) will be drunk in great quantities.

A prediction that was true then and now. So, not much of a prediction, IMHO.

> Illegal sexual intercourse will become widespread.

I'll refrain from a discussion of what this might mean to a follower of Islam. I honestly don't want to know.

> Earthquakes will increase.

I'm not sure there is any evidence that they have.

> Time will pass more quickly.

I don't believe this to be true. For each of us, as we age, time appears to speed up. But, objectively clocks on the surface of the earth tick at the same speed now as they did in the time of Mohammad.

> Tribulations (fitan) will prevail.

I have no idea how this could be measured.

> Bloodshed will increase.

Surprisingly, even with the holocaust and Stalin in the 20th century, an individual's risk of dying a violent death has been decreasing century over century since the evolution of humanity.

I promise I'm more surprised by this than you are. Check my username. But, Steve Pinker did a very exhaustive study on the subject.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - Steven Pinker

> A man will pass by the grave of another and wish he was in the latter’s place.

This has happened for a long time. Depression is nothing new.

> Trustworthiness will be lost, i.e. when authority is given to those who do not deserve it.

This is also nothing new and has happened for as long as there have been humans.

> People will gather for prayer, but will be unable to find an imam to lead them.

OK.

Anyway, as I said, not a scientific claim in the bunch. I was looking for something more than this.

Da es nicht mit im Text steht: Pinkers Buch zum Thema ist The Better Angels of Our Nature. (oder als Übersetzung)

Sehr umfangreich und sorgfältig recherchiert, sehr empfehlenswert aus meiner Sicht.

He wrote a book about it.
www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143122010/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0143122010

This doesn't necessarily validate altruism. The more grey matter you have, the more neurotic you are, too.

• Pathological Altruism, by Barbara Oakley

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why? by Laurence Gonzales

Swimming to Antarctica : Tales of Long Distance Swimming by Lynne Cox

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

I was home for a holiday, and found these laying around my mother's book stash. She recommended all of them and I thoroughly enjoy each one. Although, usually I read fiction. All of these books are intriguing, well-written, and educational. If you never read non-fiction a good place to start is reading Mary Roach. Here is her TED talk about orgasms.

There are two books I recommend to everyone who is frustrated and/or saddened by the state of the world and has lost hope for a better future.

The first is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker. It lays out how violence in human societies has been decreasing for centuries and is still declining.

Despite the prevalence of war and crime in our media, human beings are less likely to suffer violence today than at any point in our prior history. The west suffered an upswing in social violence from the 1970s -1990s, which has since been linked to lead levels, but violence in the west has been declining since the early 90s.

Put simply the world is a better place than most media coverage would have you believe and it's getting better year by year.

The second book I recomend is The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It explains how technology has been improving at an accelerating rate.

Technological advances have already had major positive impacts on society, and those effects will become increasingly powerful over the next few decades. Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing our economy. The average human life span is increasing every year. Advances in medicine are offering hope for previously untreatable diseases.

Basically, there is a lot of good tech coming which will significantly improve our quality of life, if we can just hang on long enough.

Between those two forces, decreasing violence and rapidly advancing technology, the future looks pretty bright for humanity. We just don't hear that message often, because doom-saying gets better ratings.

I don't know what disability you're struggling with but most people have some marketable skills, i.e. they aren't "worthless". Based on your post, you clearly have good writing/communicating skills. That's a rare and valuable trait. You could look into a career leveraging those skills (e.g. as a technical writer or transcriptionist) which your disability wouldn't interfere with to badly (or which an employer would be willing to accommodate).

As for being powerless to change the world, many people feel that way because most of us are fairly powerless on an individual level. We are all in the grip of powerful forces (social, political, historical, environmental, etc.) which exert far more influence over our lives than our own desires and dreams.

The books I recommended post convincing arguments that those forces have us on a positive trend line, so a little optimism is not unreasonable. We may just be dust on the wind, but the wind is blowing in the right direction. That means the best move may simply be to relax and enjoy the ride as best we can.

I am starting to feel like a shill for this book because it's the third time I've mentioned it on reddit in as many days. There is a wonderful book by the cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature. It talks about, in great detail (maybe too much), all of the overwhelming evidence that we live in a more peaceful and harmonious time than ever before in civilization. I read it last year when I was pregnant and having some of the same thoughts you are and it did help to put my mind at ease.

Every organism is always dealing with some kind of threat and the possibility of an imminent catastrophe. All we can do is work with the environment we're in and do our best. So far, so good :)

It is referring only to the levels of violence in the US. Of course, your questions are excellent. It is often argued that violence worldwide overall is decreasing as well (including wars, etc.). The most prominent piece on this is probably "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/

I highly recommend you read Pinker's book "The Better Angels of our Nature."

​

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

That's a pretty dire view of the future.
There is a constant march towards equality and a more moral and just human race; it's just a slow process. Just look at the history of violence, slavery, and gay tolerance (and thousands of other examples) for proof of that progress.

I'd recommend reading The Better Angels of Our Nature.

кому интересна история насилия, есть отличная книга про этот случай там тоже есть. книга серьезная, с ссылками на документы и графиками

There is a great book on this subject, Called Better Angels of our Nature, which actually discusses this in depth.

We read this book for an international relations class recently, I think it is appropriate for this conversation. It's a great read with lots of data and explanation for this hypotheses [Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker] (http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1422579828&sr=8-3&keywords=Steven+pinker)

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but the summation of your argument is that the current structure of human society produces more harm than it prevents. If you really want a detailed and largely data-driven answer to this, read the book "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker. It will give you a better answer to this question than anything else you'll find.

But to surmise the arguments in the book, the answer is a resounding NO. History has shown, time and again, that as society has become less structured by norms, rules, and laws, it becomes significantly more brutal. A big part of this is that, as you have more and more people competing with each other for limited resources, you get this never ending cycle of what are called Hobbesian traps ("I must strike at my enemy first and annihilate him or else he'll do the same to me") that creates these perpetual cycles of violence between groups. This violence then hinders or even reverts technological developments that could then lead to increasing these resources via increased production or more efficient use (who has time to produce pesticide when you've gotta constantly be keeping an eye on the village 2 miles away?).

Railing against globalism is kind of a fad nowadays, but few people realize just how much it has helped reduce overall violence in the world. As much as I hate what trade agreements have done to the American middle class, I can't deny that it's made major power war much less likely by creating huge economic incentives against, while at the same time significantly improving the living standards in many countries (China especially).

OK.

The single best evo-psych book I can think of is

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. It's extremely readable as well as very informative.

Where you'd want to go next depends on what you'd like to learn more about, and whether you liked Stephen Pinker as an author.

If you'd like to know more about the genetics that underlying the evo-psych then you want.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

If you're interested specifically in what evo-psych has to say about human sexuality you want

The Evolution of Desire by David Buss

And if you really like Stephen Pinker and want to know what evo psych means for human societies I'd recommend

The Angels of our Better Nature by Stephen Pinker

or (if you don't like Pinker)

Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley.

I've given you US Amazon links, and no. I don't get a cut :(

> There appears to be an innate drive in humans towards something that is moral, existential, and transcendent

And that would be because we've evolved as a social species, and rather than acting selfishly, we act as a community to better propagate our genes. (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Steven Pinker [again] The Better Angels of Our Nature)

> the lack of a clear universal and very specific "sensus divinitatis" doesn't inform us either way about the divine existence.

It does, when you start positing specific deities. If your deity punishes non-belief, your deity is positively immoral without instilling a natural sense of sensus divinitatis. See another comment of mine on this thread for more on that.

Stephen Pinker actually wrote a great book on how violence has declined and this is by far the safest time to live in.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was an eye-opening, profound book when it was written 30 years ago. I'd say the ideas are ten times as pertinent today, read it.

I'll refer you to Christoper Lasch here.

But also, when you can get agreement between the likes of Nietzsche and Francis Fukuyama that the end-effect of a democratic culture is "men without chests" - people who only care about their own luxuries and pleasure to the exclusion of all else - we should probably pay attention. And that's a rather narcissistic kind of person they describe.

Can be a bit depressing at times, but I enjoyed "Deep Survival" by Laurence Gonzales. The most surreal part about reading this book while backpacking near Cathedral Peak in Yosemite was the chapter about two climbers that were struck by lightening while summiting Cathedral Peak. It was weird to be sitting at the base, reading the intense situation and being able to look up and see the rock faces that the author was describing.

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152

It's a well-documented phenomenon that catastrophic events are simply the last occurrence on a long chain of small, otherwise trivial mistakes. I really enjoyed this book on the topic if anyone wants to further their knowledge.

Annnnd jzc pointed out the 'Swiss Cheese Model' below. Such a great analogy.

Read "Emotional Intelligence" and "Deep Survival". Seriously. Go google them right now. If you like the human brain - get those. Absolutely fascinating books. Trust me.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

Here: Links for you

Emotional Intelligence

Deep Survival

Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzalez, perhaps?

Edit: the other one I know of which is along those lines is "The Unthinkable" by Amanda Ripley

I think you are simply not thinking about consciousness correctly. There is no such thing as a single consciousness that could be called "you." You are correct that the subconscious motivations driving your actions could be considered "consciousness" from another area of your brain that you are not aware of, but this simply demonstrates the uselessness of the term for anything other than differentiating between autonomic/metabolic functions and "conscious" decisions. Your behaviors are governed by a complex series of systems/modules/programs/whatever you want to call them, and each of these provides a different amount of input depending on circumstances. There is no conscious "pilot" controlling your actions.

Behavioral science and evolutionary psychology have a lot to say about the conscious mind, if you are interested in learning more, Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban has some good basic information about this.

This is another excellent one : https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

I've about 50 books on the psychology of conspiracy theorists and thus is the one that explains things in the easiest to understand way. I read it cover to cover in a night, it was incredibly interesting. Author has a blog but it's rarely posted to unfortunately.

You can't reason with these people. It's like convincing the pope that there's no God. They go through a logical fallacy loop, literally ticking off each and every possible fallacy, until they reach the end and start again.

It's not caused by a lack of facts, it's caused by a lack of reason and self awareness, a fear if losing agency and low self esteem. These people are literally wired differently and gave below average emotional intelligence. It's why it's so frustrating trying to talk sense into them.

I couldn't agree with this more, I often see conspiratorial thinking when larger concepts or ideas are expressed in exaggeration and over-simplification (like this video). The belief that there is a complete consensus among academia fits that framing.

For those of you actually interested in Social Engineering with a focus on Conspiracy theorists, I high recommend reading Suspicious Minds. It breaks down why people fall for conspiracies and posits that most of the general population buys into them to one degree or the other. A particularly enterprising/amoral individual could test these theories in really life.

steve pinker: the better angels of our nature

After reading The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, I have been touting the gospel of Steven Pinker in church at every opportunity. A fantastic meta study of the reduction of violence, and commentary on how much better things are now than ever before.

You should read "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker.

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/1501264338

I'm currently reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. I wish I had not bought it on audible, as I often have to re-listen to sections to fully understand them. I will pick this up next.

"If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.

With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress."

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

"Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society."

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

I guess the bar I'm setting for not being awful is a fair bit lower. E.g. I think most people, at least in modern society, won't kill (or torture or rip off) someone just because they could probably get away with it.

Then again, I don't discount the effect of having accountability via a mostly working criminal justice system. Groups that have been mostly immune to accountability, like some bankers, CIA interrogators, cops, gang members in neighborhoods with "no snitching" codes, have been some of the worst.

Steven Pinker wrote a book on a related topic that might help you be more optimistic:
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

I don't think it's real, but Steven Pinker has written two books with basically the same message:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Enlightenment Now

Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature writes in great detail how the world keeps getting more and more peaceful since the enlightenment.

see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

That's correct. I'm reading an anthropology book about violence.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

It talks about this, only it refers to something it dubs 'the leviathan'–which is a third party of authority (i.e., the police and the government)–and how poor communities that do not trust 'the leviathan' to resolve their issues are forced to resort to 'street justice'. And, at that point, if 'street justice' isn't respected, what's left?

'Disrespecting' someone is taken as a direct affront and a challenge.

Police racism has been a pretty major part of American culture, and it's only been addressed relatively recently. So, you have a couple generations of black adults who grew up accustomed to a lifestyle where the police aren't trustworthy and are probably racist. It's not hard to see how this kind of thing can happen.

Could you give me some recommendations? I'm currently a third of the way through reading this one.

http://www.amazon.com/INTP-Personality-Careers-Relationships-Meaning-ebook/dp/B00H7NWLJ6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410382277&sr=8-1&keywords=intp

Get him this book:
https://www.amazon.com/INTP-Personality-Careers-Relationships-Meaning-ebook/dp/B00H7NWLJ6
And ask him to do a research for you on these:

1. Grit (Duckworth)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4fUK5KQ0o
   &
   
2. Flow (Csikszentmihalyi)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzPky5Xe1-s
   Tell him you are having a hard time understanding both of them and he must help you out.
   Regards
   

If the ebook you're referring to is INTP by A.J. Drenth, I highly recommend that one. It's extensive and well-written, and I sense a lot of personal understanding behind the content given the Drenth himself is an INTP.

I would recommend the book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity", which posits that human violence has drastically declined through the ages, and uses a whole lot of properly referenced scientific data and research to support its bold claim. It also describes the reasons why this has happened.

I'm still going through it myself, as it's a big book, but I think it's worth it, and it's quite an interesting read too.

As far as the book recommendations go, it would be good if you could qualify what kind of books you're interested in (e.g. philosophy, psychology, history, science, etc.).


Books I recommend:


Psychology (or: On Human Nature)

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

Thinking, Fast and Slow (my personal favorite)

The Undiscovered Self

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

History

Strategy: A History

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

Economics

Economics in One Lesson

Basic Economics


Politics

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

As always, the list of books to read is too long, so I'll stop here.

I don't know of anywhere else it's available. It's more aimed towards researchers and serious academics than for everyday readers though.

For more accessible and cheaper reads I recommend these books:
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Brain-Biological-Differences-Between/dp/0140263489

http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427266852&sr=1-1&keywords=demonic+males

and the chapters on violence and gender in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427266870&sr=1-1&keywords=the+blank+slate

All of those should be available at any library.

Interesting, I don't think I've ever seen "cussing" written in any but extremely informal contexts in the wild, and the chapter on vulgar words in Stephen pinker's Stuff of Thought definitely uses "swearing" throughout to describe the entire broad set of things you call "cussing" here, which is consistent with the usage I'm most used to otherwise

I would read some more "casual" or pop linguistics books to really cement your interest in linguistics before any of the more heady pieces of literature scare you off. As a side note, I'd learn the English IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart before you pursue further literature. Not knowing would be like performing math calculations without knowing what any of the operator signs were. As a high schooler, this is your time to read. God knows you won't have as much time to do it in college. Only after you get a general feel for what linguists actually do and study, would I recommend making a choice, it's certainly not for everyone :)

Great story demonstrating just how different certain languages can be.
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335511683&sr=8-1

If you want a great pop introduction that'll really help you tap your toe on the vast ocean surface known as linguistics, I'd give this a try too http://www.amazon.com/The-Stuff-Thought-Language-Window/dp/0143114247/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335511905&sr=1-2

If you like what you read, and think it would be admirable to contribute to the swiftly growing pool of knowledge we currently have in this wonderful field, then pursue more academically oriented sources, and as others said, maybe narrow your interests further by contacting a certain professor or researcher. Hope this helped :)

So a couple of things:

1.) Just because something happened out of necessity, doesn't mean we should KEEP DOING IT.

2.) In a way you are saying male aggression makes male aggression necessary. I don't say this flippantly or to blame the victim. I am pointing out how this is a self reinforcing cycle that can only be disrupted by outside forces, namely the criminal justice system. There is a strong correlation between how much of the population can rely on the governement for justice, and how much inter-personal violence there is in that society.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

Hmm I look at it this way. Indeed morality is simply a product of the human mind, and this is exactly what makes it objective. And I don't mean like "I think this is right, therefore it is". It is bigger than that. Morality is real, natural and objective the same way water is wet and planets are things. There isn't anything wet individual H2O molecules. Yet through their interaction a property we call 'wet' is presented. The same goes for planets. They are really just big balls of elementary particles. But it doesn’t help anyone to think of it this way. There are still laws like Newton’s law of gravitation that describe how planets work. This is the idea behind reductionism. While things are really made out of ever smaller parts (until you hit quantum mechanics), it is still useful to describe reality at higher levels of generalization.

For morality the same works in two steps (ending the line of reduction down at the human individual). Imagine two strangers meeting each other. They both need medical attention due to a civil war. Now the other could provide the medical attention but also pose a threat. When these people interact one of two things can happen. Either they cooperate or they oppose each other (cooperate/defect in the Prisoners Dilemma as it is called in game theory and economics). Now when people oppose each other nothing really changes compared to when they didn't interact with each other. All participants are still selfishly trying to achieve their own goals regardless of anything or anyone else. But when they cooperate something new is created. A unit of several individuals that works together towards a common goal. This unit of people is similar to water being wet. But this is not morality yet. This is more like selfish cooperation.

The difference lies in the fact that humans can do one thing that water molecules can't. And that is reproduce, both sexually and intellectually (by changing other people’s minds they in effect let you copy a part of you, namely your thoughts, into them). This gives rise to a second level of effects due to evolutionary theory. We find that there is another more general way to look at human behaviour that can be described using scientific laws just like planets can. Not only do people sometimes cooperate, but whenever they do they also generate profit. In fact they generate more profit compared to when they had worked alone. The only additional route to this is in a perfectly competitive market, but as anyone who has taken econ 101 may remember there are at least 12 separate conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for this to work. Making cooperation the dominant mechanism by which people become rich.* Because cooperation=profit there is a force acting towards individuals, small groups of people and societies to cooperate more with each other. There is ample evidence for this (see for example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Morality is therefore (at least in my mind) the tendency for more cooperative societies* to grow and flourish while societies which exploit, oppress, oppose each other and their members are retarded, stagnant or collapse.

From this follows what I think of as objective morality. In societies where no cooperation at all takes place society is destroyed, civilization collapses, and humanity is reduced to a collection of wandering individuals constantly trying to survive and kill each other (basically an unending version of the Purge but more extreme). In society where everyone cooperates to rationally find the best solution to bring everyone happiness, individuals live longer and the amount of suffering, pain and death is minimized/eliminated. I would call the first Evil and the second Good but really I don't have to because humanity as a whole has already done this by. Words are defined by the majority of opinions after all (Luckily regardless of what name we give this phenomenon the effect remains real).

Incidentally these 12 conditions basically never occur so whenever someone says “the market will solve everything” I recommend to take a very very close look at what they are actually proposing.

**In the sense of the prisoners dilemma not the communistic/socialistic sense. The communists didn't in fact base their society on the community but on the communist party. And everyone else got kicked into the dirt.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 this helped me to be more optimistic

Here, read this book and criticism of it to start your journey:

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature#Criticism

Don't just skip straight to the criticism and assume the book is wrong.

Maybe your prayer worked. Evil does seem to be dramatically lessening in the world. And it would explain why the 2nd coming hasn't happened yet...

Thanks a lot. You might have messed up the entire plan.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: http://smile.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|UK|amazon.co.uk|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Italy|amazon.it|
|China|amazon.cn|




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Ah I didn't really mean it like that. I meant that having advanced technology is a sign of being around a long time which would've given them time to transition out of primitive behavior -- like we are slowly doing. But maybe their technology progressed at a more exponential rate than ours and their social evolution wasn't as fast. This is all so speculative and we only have one example (us) so it's really just a fun guessing game.

You make a good point about how long it takes us to advance morally. But the key idea is that we ARE advancing. A great book on this is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Stephen Pinker. Things now are immensely better than they were even 100 years ago.

One unnerving thought is how little our treatment of animals has progressed. Arguably, it has gotten worth with our factory farming methods. Perhaps this is insight into how we would treat other species. We have a threshold for what we deem as worthy of protection laws based on our interpretation of intelligence. Will that threshold be raised if we advance our intelligence through artificial means? Do beings of lesser intelligence deserve and equal chance at life as those of higher intelligence?

This is one excellent way out of the JWs, and it is a morally uplifting one at that. When the person is reduced to arguing that the world is awful just to maintain 'hope', the battle is 90% over. Pinkers' book is highly recommended. Best $20 I ever spent.

>Because i'm pretty sure the amount of civilians murdering each other is 10000% higher now than it was while WW2 was going on...

Why are you "pretty sure" of this? Do you have any evidence or is it just gut feeling based on the amount of current murder etc you're aware of reading about in the news?

You might be interested to read The Better Angels Of Our Nature - it contains data from dozens of different studies looking at all kinds of violence right from the dawn of human civilization (as far as we have evidence/data for). War deaths, homicides, genocides, rape, assault, armed robbery, domestic violence, child abuse... there's pages and pages of graphs showing how their rates have changed over the years. All of the evidence presented really does support the claim that yes, life for most humans is vastly less violent now than it was 1000, 100 or even 50 years ago.

To anyone who wants to read more about this I thoroughly recommend "Better Angels of our Nature" - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0141034645

It's a study into the reduction of violence throughout history, why it happens, why it's beneficial and comparisons with other animals societies. It's really good.

I agree that I'm not going to understand gangs because I'm not in the right age range, but no matter what newspapers tell you we are living in a safer, better London than in the past - there are spikes in some years and we should continue to put money towards stopping gang culture.

This is a great article from Steven Pinker

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/11/news-isis-syria-headlines-violence-steven-pinker

who's book the better angels of our time is a great read about how we live in an incredibly safer world - its hard work but worth it:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0141034645/ref=la_B000AQ3GGO_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496274248&sr=1-1

Specifically he uses the graph half way down this page to show that we do live in a safer city and country than ever before by every possible metric

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2015/sep/11/graphic-evidence-steven-pinkers-optimism-on-trial

Anyway stay safe and away from idiots!

Peace & love!

While I don't have the answers to many of your questions, I, too, feel a sense of exasperation when I try to engage in a dialogue about this topic. To me, popular opinions on rape, anything perceived as "victim blaming," and drunken coitous have become "moralized," meaning that the topic has, essentially, become morally offensive to question. Asking further questions aligns you with not a differing opinion but with depravity, as if even asking is akin to committing the original offense. I'm sure many other philosophers have discussed this idea, but I came to it through Steven Pinker's book "The Blank Slate." A quote to summarize from his New York Times article may be better:

> Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

To me, I find it fair to question the statistical confluence of rape culture on campuses (as I think you accurately describe it) with party/drinking culture. This is often viewed as victim blaming since it puts the victim and perpetrator in similar situations prior to the rape. What if, by some miracle, people stopped gathering in tight confines with copious amounts of intoxicants and no supervision and we saw a dramatic decline in these types of rape cases? If there was a decline, would it not require both young men and women to take the responsibility on themselves to change the society in which they want to relax and have fun? For now, though, as the stronger sex, men need to take far greater care in their drinking habits. I think this is a conversation worth having. This is a good article that is opening the discussion and complicating it - although I disagree on some points.

Also, to me, I think it is also fair to ask "is a sober person who rapes someone more heinous than a drunk person who rapes someone?" Obviously, the victim winds up with the same result, but I don't think that - superficially - those two rapists are equitable. Somewhere, a mitigation must occur in the sentencing of the latter, but how can it be approached when the court of pop opinion and the media frenzy surrounding it looks like this?

Also, welcome to the controversial comments section.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Yeah but it's damn refreshing when compared to the current post-modern paradigm of endless social constructs socially constructing with no clear imperative or starting point. It's no more a cocktail science than social science in general and both can be valid when they offer us repeatable tests, and both should be taken with a grain of salt. Studying bonobos and chimps and then extrapolating for homosapians is not going to be 100% conclusive, but neither is a dodgy survey.

We can learn a whole lot from the animal world but for a long time thought has been focused on distancing us from said world and I think it's a mistake. I think there are other valid ways to view society than the ones we've devised in academia... I, like Steven Pinker in 'The Blank Slate' also think that genetic science and neuroscience are going to deal some serious blows to other disciplines in the coming decades and that the social sciences have overstepped their bounds and have it coming.

further reading

I've been coming across information lately about scientists who bring up controversial topics and how much shit they have to deal with afterwards. Often their careers are ruined, they have to face angry mobs and their lives are threatened.

In Steven Pinkers The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature he devotes chapter 7 to this topic. There are many examples but off the top of my head I remember one guy who did some studies on left-handed people and discovered they are prone to birth defects and some other genetic disorders. He was sued, attacked and eventually the University he worked for made the topic illegal to study.

Another example is Charles Murray's The
Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. He has one chapter about IQ tests and race. He talks about the repercussions in this video Charles Murray -- The Bell Curve Revisited. But basically he was labeled a raciest for simply talking about the data.

I don't know if you're familiar with Richard Dawkins but he has also faced extreme criticism for his world changing book The Selfish Gene.

There are many examples and I can't list them all, but suffice it to say, people will take your words out of context, flat out miss quote you and spin your words in order to discredit what you say and have you labeled negatively. Just look at Trump and how they've done this to him. He is compared to Hitler and seen as the epitome of evil itself.

I'm finding that most people are immune to logic. Many people believe that race and sex are social constructs. 40% of Americans deny evolution. Libertarians are demonized and dismissed as idiots all over the place....

I've come to the conclusion that the information I've acquired pertaining to politics, social science, anthropology, evolution, religion, and sexuality, however much it is backed by science and reason, is very, very unpopular, and it's wiser for me to pretend to be and think like others. Getting tingles from some women at a party because you challenge their beliefs is not worth the very real possibility of having your character slandered and your carrier ruined.

You might be more intelligent than I and able to pull it off but I'm probably older, and I've been around long enough to see just how shitty and back-stabbing people can be, even those you considered friends. So I'm playing it safe and keeping my thoughts on controversial topics to myself.

This is only tangentially related to this comment, but I find it odd that Pinker, who's now known for arguing for the notion of perpetual progress and humans constantly becoming less violent and more rational, also wrote this, which is all about the existence of human nature with inherent biases to violence and without pure rationality. I wouldn't consider the recognition of human nature pessimistic when looked at in the right light, but from a simplistic viewpoint of one who believes in a malleable human nature, it's funny comparing his present reputation for "optimism" with his past "pessimism".

The Blank Slate or How the Mind Works by steven pinker

Your first point about blaming seems absurd to me. How can anyone be blamed for evolution or biology? The idea of ascribing agency to someone for a factor beyond their control is absurd to me. In this case we're talking about evolution which is an extremely large scale abstract process. You can't blame anyone for that except whatever you call God, certainly not women. And as I said in the edit to my first comment, if you did "blame" women for this (blame having a negative connotation) it would be a hugely positive since the increased selection pressure on humanity is what drove us to evolve so far beyond the other species on earth. That said, I don't see how anyone is to blame for evolution. It's too large a process.

Your observation that the discussion hinges on my claim that status is human nature is pretty apt. Disagreement over human nature is the deepest conflict between left and right. The left leans towards a blank slate theory, and the right leans towards some sort of human nature. Most political ideas can be gotten by assuming something along that spectrum and then extrapolating from there.

This is the scientific concept I'm referring to. Unfortunately because of the political ramifications of these ideas, psychology is massively fractured into many different fields and some engage with evolution more than others. Evolutionary biology is an especially hard field to make firm pronouncements on. There are a huge number of competing theories and because of the political ramifications, social scientists and social critics get involved too. I doubt anything I link will be up to your standards of irrefutable proof by authority (status), because of the politics. Some theories of social dominance informed and were informed by Marxist conceptions of hierarchy, and that throws a wrench in things as well.

I think the most well established advocate of these ideas is professor Steven Pinker, who wrote a whole book on this exact subject.

There's a huge amount of evidence on hierarchy among animals and it isn't in dispute at all. There's also a lot on humans. There's no one study I can link you that proves this finding (it would be hard to prove with a single study), so I'll link what I can find.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/201203/social-dominance-explained-part-i

This article explains a lot of the ideas.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/201211/are-there-universals-in-human-behavior-yes

This one by the same author refutes a good bit of criticism.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01542229

Here's a study on economic status and partner selection. It found a woman would rather an unattractive partner in high status clothes than an attractive one in a burger king outfit.

David Buss has done a lot of work on this subject. Buss has done large studies spanning many cultures to figure out sexual preferences.

http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~dmoore/2007_Buss_Evolution_of_human_mating.pdf

This summarizes a lot of his findings, you can find shorter ones on his wikipedia page. Men emphasize fertility and youth, while women prefer age and status across cultures.

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/10/buss-1989-sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences.pdf

Here is a cross cultural study from Buss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_humans#Selection_preferences_in_females

This section summarizes findings in womens sexul selection preferences.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513814001111

This study finds women prefer older men, which correlates with higher status.

http://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1722&context=soss_research

A study finding womem prioritize status and men prioritize physical attactiveness.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~seyfarth/Publications/tics.pdf

This one shows how the evolution of language can be traced to Primate knowledge of hierarchy.

There's also Jordan Peterson, who used to teach at Harvard and has numerous citations in his field. He constantly makes the argument of the lobster. It basically says that lobsters organize themselves into hierarchys, and we split off from them billions of years ago which means hierarchy's are something billions of years old. The reason he picks lobsters and not some other animal, is that they're so old, evolutionarily speaking, that it makes the example dramatic. The part of your brain responsible for hierarchy is ancient, and a core structure right up there with breathing and eating. Hierarchy is not caused by capitalism, or male power, or whatever social effects you want to ascribe them to, because hierarchy existed before any of that. Those things are rooted in hierarchy, but removing those things won't remove the hierarchy.

The more general argument is that hierarchy is observed in many many many animals in our evolutionary lineage. It is also observed in humans. Animals act based on instinct so if they organize and select for status, it is a biological behavior not a learned one. For your worldview to make sense, you'd have to reason that humans do organize themselves into hierarchys but that it has nothing to do with biology. Somehow that part of our biology, which is observed in our recent primate ancestors, got bred out but also that we arbitrarily made it the core of our social structures. It just doesn't make any sense. It's biological in animals, and it's biological in humans.

That's generally what I think, but I also think people's behavior is highly contingent on social circumstances. If I had to pick a book that represents my view, it would be Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Try This by Stephen Pinker.

Glad I could help! For more info, you should check out Steven Pinker's The better Angels of Our Nature.

I don't base my views on my own experience, but on more objective sources. You may be interested in, and surprised by, The Better Angels of our Nature, by Stephen Pinker. It is fascinating and surprising.

Also, I'm almost 59, so I'm not sure whether I'll have another 20 years or not.

You are mistaken. I suggest you read the following book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker.

If you are a fan of history, statistics, and extremely exhaustive and careful analysis, you will be compelled to change your mind on the issue of historical violence rates.

> Maybe I'm just getting old and falling victim to 'Back in my day' syndrome.

It's entirely this. Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature has lots of statistics to back up how crime and violence have declined, but it also has some accounts (first couple chapters) of how casually cruel life was 100+ years ago. And not just casually cruel, but that shit was basically celebrated. Things are much better now.

>I'm sorry how is the treaty of Versailles a good thing? It directly [lead] to WW2.

It didn't directly lead to World War II. The subreddit /r/badhistory has a pretty good rundown of why.

>Also today off the top of my head - North korea human rights issues

Their current leader's human rights record is way better (or, more accurately, less worse) than his predecessor's.

>chinese human rights

See above times ten.

>the entire middle east situation

The situation is bad there, but it's been a lot worse in the past.

>the Ukrainian crisis

In which very, very few people have died.

>i feel current diplomacy is useless in major situations.

Here's an interesting chart of war deaths over the centuries.

Note the biggest decline is among interstate wars (ie, wars between countries). This is in part due to diplomacy. When people can talk out their problems, they are less likely to go to war.

Two books on this I highly recommend:

http://www.winningthewaronwar.com/

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

I'm no hippy. In fact, I'm probably considerably more hawkish than the average redditor (supported the Iraq War, supported air strikes on Libya, still think we need a no-fly zone over Syria, disgusted by the deal with Iran). Still, diplomacy does work. It's not as sexy, interesting, or dramatic as war., but it can work.

Just what was described in Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature was good enough to make it clear that humans can be extensively and creatively despicable.

An interesting take on this is in The Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker. He argues quite persuasively that it's not wealth that determines level of violence in a society, but the degree to which citizens have surrendered to the authority of their government. In other words, how much they have agreed to the notion that a monopoly on violence should be granted to the state.

For example, in much of the American West and South, the government was much weaker until much more recently. Police and the legal system couldn't enforce people's rights, so people dealt with perceived injustices themselves, and that typically involved violence.

In New England (as well as "old England"), in comparison, the police and courts have been functional and reasonably effective for hundreds more years. People are more comfortable granting the government a monopoly on violence, and they are more trusting that the government will provide justice to them if they're wronged.

The argument goes that even after "the law" reached all parts of the country, areas that were settled in lawlessness tended to have ingrained habits of violence that have carried through to today. As you can see in this map showing violent crime by state, the West and South clearly have more violence than New England. I think you could also argue that this process is present in Canada as well (legend in article) - generally the oldest, most established provinces have lower crime rates, namely Quebec and Ontario. Impoverishment is still an issue, but note that the struggling Maritimes have lower crime rates than booming Alberta.

> states are necessarily brutal.

States are objectively less brutal than the alternative. And with your comment about wanting falsifiable theories, you'll be glad to know that this is confirmed by the sheer weight of historical evidence.

If you want a good summary, try this: https://www.amazon.ca/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

It's long, but that's only because he takes his time utterly obliterating the fantasy that a stateless society is anything other than orders of magnitude more violent than state societies.

The anarchist fantasy world is just that... a fantasy. It only works when it lives in the protective shadow of a state, which is to say... it doesn't work.

Yeah i wasn't being snarky. just dorkily name-dropping. (cause im uncool like dat)

In fact, as somebody who almost seriously went to graduate school for linguistics and/or cognitive science, I can attest that though Pinker is an old hero of mine, when he started getting all positive about the world i wasn't all in at first..

But he is persuasive.

.

For those playing "life sucks but i want to believe it is getting better" along at home here's a start:

​

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539983039&sr=8-2&keywords=books+by+steven+pinker

​

https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539983039&sr=8-1&keywords=books+by+steven+pinker

​

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1487001681/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i11

​

​

I get the feeling that you probably already know about this stuff, but here is is anyway: Steven Pinker at Edinburgh

And the book.

The book is pretty long, but worth it from cover to cover. The lecture at Edinburgh is a nice summary.

>This doesn't make you not racist.

That's just semantics.

> And what are those racial differences?

Let's start with the obvious. Clearly, given the sheer size of the population, Chinese and Indians ought to dominate the Olympics 100m-dash. But they do not. Almost all of the medalists have come from descendants of West Africa. Interestingly, as of late, Jamaicans have outperformed African-Americans despite coming from poverty-stricken environment with inferior training infrastructure. Same story with long distance running and marathons, where East Africans have dominated. These people are at a severe environmental disadvantage, so the case for cultural difference doesn't make sense in this case. So what is the reason? Well, a gene called ACTN3 - sometimes called a "sprint gene" - which is expressed primarily in fast-twich muscle fibers, were found in high frequency among the West-Africans. So, more ACTN3 genes you have, the more likely you will run faster in short distance. On the other hand, slow-twitch fibers aid you in endurance sports - such as distance running - and East Africans tend to have more of them than fast-twich fibers.

If you are interested, have a look at "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein, where he goes into depth on this topic.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sports-Gene-Extraordinary-Performance/dp/161723012X

The science is already pretty clear on this issue : There are meaningful, statistically significant differences between varying ethnic/racial groups. And this is common sense, if you think about it. The reason Japanese are shorter on average than Dinka people of Sudan is not because they are more poor and nutritionally deficient.

So, the burden is on you to explain to me why there can't be any differences in terms of mental capacity or personality traits between races - of which there are some scientific evidence, although not as conclusive - when there are clear differences regarding physical makeup and ability. If you take animals of the same species and let them evolve in separate environments for centuries, exposed to varying degrees and kinds of selection pressure, they will show significant differences in physical strength and temperaments. Why shouldn't the same law of nature apply to human beings? Not all scientific facts are in favor of liberal/leftist ideology. Just as right-wingers are in denial about climate change, liberals have their fair share when it comes to scientific blind spot.

>I don't think it's so much that the west are the only ones who have done it. It's that the west has done it to far greater effect and has done far greater damage with it than anyone else. And sure, I'll bet if Southeast Asia was in a position to colonize Europe, they would have. I don't see why that should matter, though.

>You're not supposed to "feel sorry" for Southeast Asia as though the region itself has feelings. Individual people were harmed by colonialism, and are still by its lingering effects.

That's just sheer display of ignorance.

You can easily make a case that Mongol Invasion of Europe and other continents in 13th century were more devastating in terms of the number of people died as a proportion of the world population at that time. Do you also feel sorry for all the casualty deaths incurred by Muslim invasion of the West that happened throughout Middle Ages and up until 19th century by the Ottoman Empire? If you do not, you have very partial understanding and biased view of world history.

Yes, the West has done some damage to the world in recent times. At the same time, a lot of great modern scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation of the Western civilization have brought about unprecedented amounts of wealth to this world. People are living longer than ever due to advances in medicine, and we are living in one of the most safest, peaceful, prosperous, and most egalitarian (with regards to human rights) time period than ever before.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

As far as lay public goes, start here: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Possibly the best researched book around violence directed to lay people... His sources especially are eye opening...

I highly recommend both Sapiens, and also The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker (which Bill Gates calls "the most inspiring book I've ever read")

They'll make you think (a lot) but they're good reads and super interesting.

Also, was that citation needed a request for my source? Steven Pinker wrote a great book about violence, to combat many of the misconceptions and speculations that people have surrounding the topic.

Obviously people's changing perspective affects their behavior along with cultural and social norms, from views on slavery to civil rights or from war to types of government over the ages, but all of that and our reactions to it are based on human nature. We all have biases, complex motivations, and evolved tendencies which can make us get jealous, angry, and so on resulting in horrible mistakes, while also causing us to fall in love, express gratitude, and feel empathy with others, along with the unintended consequences and unexpected results which can always haunt us.

That doesn't mean we can't temper unwanted behavior through laws criminalizing violence, shunning bigotry in media, or removing incentives to cheat, while supporting desirable behavior by promoting education, rewarding cooperation, and building helpful institutions, which people have been attempting to do for millennia. Sometimes these attempts succeed in addressing one problem yet cause other issues we didn't expect, such as the rise of globalism. Other times they fail miserably and hurt even more people than they were meant to help, like the war on drugs.

Our perspectives on the world motivate or discourage us from implementing the changes we think it needs, yet through it all we are still bound by human nature and the consequences of trying to apply our lofty ideals onto the slippery nature of reality. Meaning that no matter what perfectly moral laws we create, people will still react with violence in times of stress. That however much we condemn racism, people are prone to categorizing others as different. And while we can educate people better than anyone else in the past, ignorance will always cause problems.

This doesn't mean the world hasn't been getting better than the past, it truly has in many ways, but that unless we start changing our DNA, some humans will continue to make the same old mistakes we've made for millennia, only with fewer and fewer people making those mistakes as progress marches on.

(I realize this was less an answer to your question and more of a concept I wanted to express to anyone willing to read it. And for anyone wanting to know more on how things are actually getting better, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, and Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling explain things much better than I could.)

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Stephen Pinker does a great book on how violence has been on the decline historically.

I have reflected on this issue a lot and the main conclusion I've come to is that all people are caught between a central conflict of: "do I whats best for me and mine, or work for the greater good" For many self-interest rules their behaviour. Furthermore people disagree on what is best for the world, i.e. left and right wing politics. So even if all people wanted to work towards the greater good they disagree on what will get to the greater good.

Finally there is this viscous cycle in the world of endless retribution. Most of the Western world hates ISIS at present due to their terrorist acts, (fair) but I would also say that half the reason ISIS exists is out of the military actions of the western world in the Middle, but of course those military actions were likely prompted by the LAST horrific terrorist acts, and so on. The problem is that if people don't want to see the actions of their enemies in historic context with any sort of justification, they see their enemies actions as simply evil acts.

If you find the video interesting, I highly recommend the book on the same subject. I'm reading it right now, and if offers a pretty good case (so far) that we should be optimistic about the future, largely by showing that humanity and life has been consistently getting better throughout history so far. We have a natural tendency to assume the past was better than it really was.

>Why all these warnings not just against murder, but against Christians being murderers? It seems God knew these things would happen and wanted to warn His church about it before they did.

Thats my point. Crusades and inquisition are over. For the most part Christianity has gotten back to its roots and is more peaceful comparatively. If God was going to strike when Christianity was at it's most corrupt state God missed the ball there.

>That's really not academic. You know very well that violent death during the 20th century has skyrocketed compared to all other centuries.

Except for the research that this Psychologist has research that says otherwise. Also check out this article.

You see when I make a claim I have research to back it up. Your claim that violent death has skyrocketed is unfounded and based on tuthiness and not fact.

Your little war video doesn't factor in the realization that smaller skirmishes happened earlier in history and were not recorded as often. So these recorded 'battles' have a stronger weight toward the modern understanding. And then the video even has the audacity to include many of these smaller skirmishes towards the timeline because we have a better recorded history of them. Not to mention that a video like this is not peer reviewed and is heavily steeped in confirmation bias.

Wait?

>I never said "I KNOW FOR A FACT."

>If it's true, then why not proclaim it?

Man you like to contradict yourself in just a couple of lines.

>If I truly believe it, and can see plain evident signs of it, then why not proclaim it?

Because your "plain evident signs of it" have been around since the beginning of humanity. Nothing you have stated as a sign of the end times hasn't been true of the entire history of humanity. I emphasize this point by showing how not only are we not living in the most corrupt time in human history but that the opposite might be true.

Show me one sign that couldn't have been said to have been true 10,000 years ago and I will concede. And Israel doesn't count because the generation that saw its creation was going to be the end so that is out as well because the statue of limitations on it being a sign is up.

I'm not saying your not allowed to believe what you want to believe. But don't believe it under false pretenses. EVERY generation has had its handful of people who honestly believed they were living in the end times. This is because EVERY generation of humanity has been corrupt in some way. Evil exists in this world. We look forward to the eschaton in hopes that one day no more evil will exist in this world.

But as for right now mine and what should be your goal as well is to bring Christ's kingdom to the here and now. How do we do that? If we see an injustice we squash it. If I can reach out to one person tomorrow and help take some of their pain away and squash just a little bit of evil in this world I am working towards bringing christ's kingdom to the here and now. I'm working towards taking that eschatological hope for the future and rather than longing for it in the distance I am working for it here and now.

What I see you doing is waiving your arms in the air crying out for God to come save humanity from evil when God is looking back going "Hey! you see that guy you're telling the end is near? guess what he's in pain help him destroy that little bit of evil in the world and get off your butt and help bring my kingdom to earth!". That isn't done by preaching God's word alone. It also requires action.

It requires things like rather than fighting congress for a bill to end abortion that you are in the city streets fighting for an end to the evil where women feel it is their only viable option. God's kingdom isn't on capitol hill in the laws of the land. It's in the homes of the broken. Its with the 19 year old who's parents kicked her out and found love in all the wrong places. Show her God's kingdom not God's condemnation. When we can end the cycle of abuse and poverty then we are working to end evil.

St. Francis of Assisi "Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words."

I've been reading a book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels of Our Nature; it's about the decline of violence over the entire history of man.

One of my takeaways so far is that religion has had almost nothing to do with the decline of violence; it has existed as far back as we have recorded history. And, in many cases, ancient religious texts actually encourage violence (such as the Old Testament). "Thou shall not kill" only applied to Jews, as they were commanded to kill the men, women, and children of many other nations; there was also the problem that their god commanded the murder of many within their tribe for religious disobedience.

What has most effectively lowered violence and increased morality, I think, is our growing interdependence on one another. As hunter/gatherers, the world was horribly violent; it was literally "kill or be killed". Then we banded together in larger tribes for mutual protection. Then we became farmers, which required long periods of peaceful co-existence to produce crops. Then we formed large cities, where many of the necessities of life were outsourced, and we traded money for necessities that were produced by others rather than creating them ourselves.

As society grows more and more sophisticated, I think that an increased emphasis on morality is the byproduct; it has become a necessity in order for people to live together in community.

Rather than reducing violence, I think that religion encourages violence, because it encourages the thinking that people can be divided into two groups: the Chosen and the Fallen. And the Chosen often believe that they must advance the kingdom of their god in society by any means, including acts of violence.

One paper does not 'prove' anything, but I did look at it, and I looked at the law and economics literature in general and it seems like there is indeed a concensus on there being both gender and racial bias in the us justice system.

here

here

and here

Here is a nice review on the issue of gender and crime. Among other things they looked at FBI arrest statistics which show that males are arrested with much higher frequency than females. I checked the official statistics for my country, Norway

>Female perpetrators are still rare, but are nevertheless more common than
before. Out of a total of 307 000 sanctioned in 2007, 66 800 were women,
which represents 23 per cent.

It appears we also might have a judicial bias according to the following from same article:

>Approximately 9 per cent of new inmates in prisons are women. However,
women are given shorter sentences than men, which means that only just
below 6 per cent of inmates are women. The corresponding figure was 3 per
cent 25 years ago.

So the bias emerges from the fact that although 23% of perpetrators are women, only 6 per cent of inmates are women. I feel we now have established that the US juidicial system and possibly the norwegian are biased towards women. But it is also clear that women commit far fewer crimes. And this holds true across cultures, although I honestly can't find a good source for it, if you find one let me know.
The gender difference in crime is there. And there have been many attempts to try and explain it, from many different perspectives, including many different evolutionary explanations. Here is one example.

Whenever something is a cultural universal it is a strong indicator that something biological is going on. If something is specific to certain cultures (like the oppression and social inequality of black people) it is more likely historical cultural and socioeconomic explanations.

I admit I am probably biased towards a biological explanation than a sociological, or historical explanation because it is closer to my field. I do think it's because of biology, but there are no interdisciplinary concensus on this, (as far as I know, I am no expert on the subject).

Lastly I recommend Steven Pinkers book the better angels of our nature. This is probably the most famous and comprehensive examination of the history of violence. Pinker has this to say on the subject of gender and violence:

>Violence is largely a guy thing. In all societies, most of the homicides and assaults, and the preponderance of rapes, are committed by men, together with virtually all the tribal warfare, which is often motivated by the abduction of women or revenge for past abductions. Boys in all cultures indulge in far more rough-and-tumble play than girls do, and grown-up boys consume more violent entertainment, have more violent fantasies, and are more hawkish in their opinions and voting patterns. This is not to say that women never commit violence or are always dovish – just that there’s a large statistical difference, particularly when it comes to certain categories of violence, such as the establishment of dominance or the carrying out of revenge. The biological explanation for this psychological difference is straightforward: In virtually all mammals, males can reproduce more quickly than females, so males take greater risks to compete for mating opportunities than females do.

The main problem with subjects regarding gender is that it is highly political, making intellectually honest discourse very difficult. There is massive statistical evidence that men are more violent, and more prone to crime than females. anthropology, sociology, economics and law, psychology, are some of the disciplines that have tried to answer the question why this is. I think that biological differences is by far the most likely explanation, although it is probably a mixture of different ones. Hope this helped to illuminate my position.
PS: I just realized some of my sources might be behind a paywall if you are not affiliated with a university or read scientific journals as a hobby/profession, let me know if you need me to email you pdfs.

We. Me. I.

What is an I? Where is the "thing" that is the stuff of a separate entity somewhere under your skin, behind your eyes?

The reality is that there is no center to one's experience. No separate long-lasting "me" that experiences. Only experience itself. The ego arises out of thought, and a "me" is just a concept that the thinking mind conjures up. No agent means no agency. No chooser.

While on first glance this may sounds either incredibly stupid, confusing or woo-woo. But take a look and see.

I suggest you check out this video by Sam Harris that explores the concept of "illusion of self."
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wakingup

Or a book by Bruce Hood that scientifically explains this illusion:
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781

Or others:

http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=61R1WPTGL%2BL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR216%2C320_&refRID=0DKBDNE0ZCT2P7423FK2

http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Trick-Julian-Baggini/dp/1847082734/ref=pd_sim_14_5?ie=UTF8&dpID=41AJedx6m9L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR101%2C160_&refRID=1A6QPVE3CNXPPJFX84Z9

Once you break the spell of "self-identity", unity arises.

Two contemporary books, by western scientists, pretty much confirm the position about "self" found in Buddhist philosophy.

The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood (https://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781)

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger (https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690)

Hey there. YES. Touching the Void is a must. If you like it, go ahead and read Deep Survival. That book changed my life. So amazing.

Good point. A lot of people tend to underestimate Mt. Hood, but people still die up there regularly enough that folks should take it seriously. I just finished reading Luis Gonzales book Deep Survival and he has an entire chapter where he talks about Mt Hood and uses it to point out how people often underestimate how dangerous situations can be.

Hoow. Well, I'm in the middle of re-reading The E-Myth, since it's a good refresher and I find myself having to scale up one of my businesses.

I'm looking at (re)reading Deep Survival next week because I'm going on retreat. I have saved it for a close reading and copious notes because I think there's something similar in the people who survive dangerous situations and the people who survive and thrive in starting small businesses.

I'm in the middle of The Social Animal, by David Brooks, which I adore. I think I'm going to keep it. (That's saying something, since I read voraciously, but I have only one shelf of books I felt was worth revisiting.) The way he's tackled the book is very interesting and it's incredibly deftly done.

I have Republic of Thieves out from the library, the newest in the Gentleman Bastards series. I don't know when I'm going to get to it. When I start a fiction book I tend to read it straight through, and nothing else gets done, so I'm loathe to start one.

I also have TapDancing to Work the new Warren Buffet autobiography, The Compass of Pleasure (which has been on my wishlist so long I've forgotten what I wanted it for) and Medieval Mercenaries a book about the history of mercenaries. I've always been very interested in mercenaries. I don't know why.

Today a friend recommended The Small Business Life Cycle which I already own, so it will be moving up on the list. I really admire the author, a US Army veteran and philosopher.

It has been a while since I read either of the two, but I really enjoyed both Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzalez and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

They both address the ability to continue on in the face of adversity. How people are able to keep going when things get really shitty, and how you can as well.

[Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure on the Presidential Range of New Hampshire] (https://www.amazon.com/Not-Without-Peril-Misadventure-Presidential/dp/1934028320/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469484204&sr=1-1&keywords=not+without+peril+150+years+of+misadventure+on+the+presidential+range+of+new+hampshire) by Nicholas Howe is a fascinating book filled with hiking and backcountry history, adventure, and misadventure.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why by Laurence Gonzales is an interesting look at survival in the wilderness, which is always handy for those of us who spend a good deal of time in the backcountry.

No I'm not. I troll it from time to time for beta on routes and stuff. I believe I used to post there during my active climbing years (I started doing tree work for a living and have since slowed down much on my climbing).

I didn't even know who he was at the time. I was camping out there about to start the JMT and decided to shoulder tap to get some beer. He said Sure! and i asked if he spent much time in Yosemite. He laughed it off and said yea, 8 or 9 seasons...

We briefly spoke about a book he was reading ( Deep Survival )

He was such a nice guy. Told me to climb certain routes and stuff....

Then I humped my gear up the death slabs to the base of half dome to start my JMT hike and while running away from a rock fall (you can hear it coming) I sliced my heel open and ruined my opportunity to complete the JMT.

So i bummed around the valley for a about a month and climbed and set up slacklines over the river below middle cathedral.

> The fact that I fucked up on this means I'm carrying something in my head that is getting in the way of success.

Wrong.

Interviews are stressful, and many people choke up under certain types of stress and pressure. I recommend practicing, and I think Toastmasters can help you. Part of the reason for the baloney and screaming in basic training is that you can be innoculated to handle stress: you feel the fear and do it anyway. Then when you encounter fear and stress, you've already experienced it, and survived it, and you'll survive this stress as well.

There is also a book I recommend to folks called On Combat. There are a number of chapters that explain what stress can do to people, and how your body will do things you won't expect.

> And I blanked out.

All mammals experience the fight or flight response. You aren't the only person to sit there with your mouth open, like a deer in headlights. Another book that is helpful to read is Deep Survival, because some folks become addicted to that adrenaline rush, and that addiction leads people to take risks that they should have survived, but died.

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales is good as well.

http://amzn.com/0393326152

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393353710/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_P58VBb623H3AT

Just a quick comment. Your post reminded me of this book:

> Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves.

> This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world.

> In clear language, full of wit and rich in examples, Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Everyone-Else-Hypocrite-Evolution/dp/0691154392

Eg. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

Adam Smith wrote a book called Theory of Moral Sentiments that described human nature in a way that would be familiar to many socialists. We are altruistic, compassionate, cooperative, and loving. Humans don't act like homo economicus in our daily lives. All of this is complementary to and compatible with Smith's description of man as a self-interested being, which most people are familiar with because of his much more famous book, Wealth of Nations. These aspects of human nature are, in fact, what make capitalism work so well.

Good books on the subject:

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts. This book is brand new and excellent.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

I agree with you.

We have better angels in our nature.

LOL, no, its a good book but there are many better recommendations.

For example, if you wanted to understand the tools of state/religious oppression and its consequences in modern context I may recommend; Why Nations fail

Or if you desired to have greater understanding of the consequences of inventing money; Debt, the first 5000 years

Or if you felt that religion was cool but the idea of God was wrong you could read; Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

Or if you wanted to read about the decline of world wide violence; The Better Angels of our Nature

For more on this : Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Oh Jesus on a stick.

Those are what we call outliers. Mass conflict, and violence, has been decreasing. ISIS is small potatos; it might seem otherwise due to the political and religions impact. Their actions might barely qualify as a small genocide, in a historical perspective.

I assumed I was talking to someone as informed as I am. I see now that is not the case. So, for starters you should go read that book.

And others think the decline was caused by the availability of abortion, or by the decline of the drug cartels and still others point to a downward trend in violence in all of western civilization that's been apparently going on for centuries.

Humans aren't the only intelligent life on this planet. We share that distinction with some species of whales and dolphins (which are as smart or smarter) and some other primates (which are perhaps not as smart but still "intelligent" in my mind) and possibly even some parrots (very smart). In none of these cases do we have an example of a species destroying itself.

Granted, we've got just a handful of species to draw conclusions from. But it's a small sample size with no examples to demonstrate your thesis.

On humans specifically - we've had the capacity to wipe ourselves out for over half a century and haven't done it yet. And decade over decade, the odds of that happening seem less, not more. If it's our nature to destroy ourselves, we're bad at it.

And in fact the long arc of history is that humans have gotten less violent, fought fewer, and become better at cooperation (aka, economics). You mention Darwinism, but this is actually what evolution would predict. Cooperation is the better survival strategy for all involved, and over time it's the societies that were more insular and more war-like that have fell in the dustbin of history. (See: [The Better Angels of Our Nature](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1491518243/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1491518243&linkCode=as2&tag=musingofthegr-20&linkId=N2J6U5BTXNOCEFA7">The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=musingofthegr-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1491518243)).

It's also flawed to think that all intelligent life will have followed the same evolutionary path as us. Others could have evolved under different evolutionary pressures leading them to be instinctually cooperative - hive minds or collective intelligence, for example. Or AI - it's not unreasonable to think that robots will explore the galaxy rather than biological humans (since we're not really evolved to survive in space), but there's no reason to think an artifical intelligence would have any propensity for destroying itself.

There are plenty of other potential answers to the Fermi paradox that don't assume self annihilation. My personal belief is simply that we don't have the technology to detect other civilizations, nor the technology to make ourselves known. Our radio signals are undetectable after a few light years, and the same is likely for any other radio based civilization. My gut says we'll start to find signs of extra-solar civilization once we have the technology to physically visit other stars, and not sooner.

Dude... you just have no concept of the breadth of your ignorance. I did indeed get taught about the "complete insignificance of race" - which is a bald lie.

"Dark ages" art (from that period where you were taught Europeans were so desperately ignorant that they needed Islam to teach them civilization)

Racial IQ distribution(I did say Asia would probably be mostly okay)

Racial differences in criminality

Racial differences in skull shape 2

Do you think the sickle cell gives a shit about what you were taught in school? Race is real and race matters. The belief that it is not so is part of a widespread corruption of social science by postmodernists which began in the 1970s and continues today. Basically, lots of people will tell you the science of racial difference is corrupt, evil pseudo-science - but none of them will actually debunk it, because they can't, because it's fact. They may pretend to debunk it, for example by advancing an alternative explanation without proof (very common, such as the "poverty causes the IQ/crime rate" claim - which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny when compared to eg impoverished Asian refugees) while trying to deter you with shaming tactics - but they never actually put a true dent in the credibility of the evidence.

Read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for more on how science came to be so corrupted. (This one is mainstream and uncontroversial.)

Read Professor Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique to understand why this came about. (This one is "forbidden knowledge", if you actually read it don't tell people about it.)

I don't think there's an “ultimate guide” out there, since there are so many different ways of seeing and interpreting the tarot, not to mention, there are lots of different decks and philosophies behind them. I think we're bound to be jumping from one book to the next, just as we do in every other field of interest, speaking generally.

Having said that, there is actually one book that comes to mind, and that's Holistic Tarot by Benebell Wen.

> I've started, then stopped, then started then stopped over and over because everyone has a different opinion on how it should be done and frankly, it's just discouraging.

You sound sooo much like me, I feel I should say something about that (not sure how much of this really applies to your situation — basically I will write this as if I were talking to my past self): Whatever book or guide you decide to follow, stick with that. You will always encounter different opinions, some of them completely dismissive of the path you chose to follow. Allow them to be and please, allow yourself to ignore them. They will always be there for you to expand your horizons, but in the meantime, they're nothing but noise. What you want right now is to have a strong foundation and build up until you reach a certain level of understanding that you can consider to be “comprehensive”. Once you've done that then, by all means, open the gates and let all esoteric books come your way. 👍

Please read Holistic Tarot by Benebell Wen. She really breaks down the tarot in an easy-to-approach manner.

Well, the second isn't, it is sourced (see left hand side of page).

Both are taken from the first chapter or two from the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407796183&sr=8-1&keywords=better+angels+of+our+nature

Feel free to pick up a copy, check out the first 1 or 2 chapters or so. It goes into great length laying out the methodology of how the data was collected, as well as the primary sources.

Attribution to the decline of violence isn't really strongly linked to capitalism, but it is linked to intra-national trade. There are also many, many other non-economic factors that contribute to the decline in violence. The humanitarian revolution, public education, the rights revolution, and other movements are purely social, and not economic in nature. A good book to read would be http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

The bad news is that we already have a UN (and before the UN there was something called the League of Nations that existed between WWI and WWII) and such things don't guarantee that there will be no wars.

But the good news is that there are a lot fewer wars today than in any previous era in history, and both wars and the chances of being killed by violence keep going down over recent centuries. (It's hard to summarize too much in one post, but there's a good book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that charts a lot of this progress and explores reasons for the shift.)

> It wouldn't be viable contradict because we don't know when this instinct became a thing.

We actually have a reasonable idea of when social instincts evolved. Somewhat early in the evolutionary history of social mammals-- well before human-like species.

> Also I don't know there I said that was the only instinct humans care about. History shows growth and thriving because like us, early humans must have decided it was better for them to work together than to work alone.

This doesn't seem likely if you imply humans had to evolve sufficient intelligence to learn that it was better to work together than alone. We know that kind of advanced intelligence arrived very late on the primate scene. So why didn't early primates kill each other and go extinct long before homo sapiens evolved? Early social mammals had to get along without virtue of intelligence or complex governing or policing hierarchies, or no social mammals could have evolved.

The solution I think can be arrived at quite simply. Consider a mother's love for her child, the earliest form of mammal caring for live young. This kind of truly altruistic love does not seem accounted for in your view of human nature. But at the same time, there can't be anything magical about a mother's love if we subscribe to a naturalistic view. It has to be, ultimately, neurotransmitters, biological hard-wiring, vast complexity fine-tuned by eons of failure. And if a mother's love can evolve, then evolution is free to build on the same neurological and biological mechanisms to create other forms of love: pair bonding, family bonding, group bonding, tribe bonding.

Human nature, in an evolutionarily informed view then, can be seen to have intrinsic capacity for love for children, love for spouse, love for family, love for group, love for tribe, love for nation hardwired in by millions of years of social mammal evolution. Love = altruism. That has to be the main reason human society has thrived and the reason why we seem to continually grow less violent over time (see Pinker).

(This shouldn't be taken to argue that humanity is not doomed by its own efforts. It can be argued convincingly that super-intelligent AI represents a significant future threat to humanity. But in that scenario, failure to understand and properly design moral behavior in AI would be at fault, not active malice.)

Most of us prefer modernity to feudalism thank you very much.

read this book...

I don't like planning, because planning is decision making, and decision making is limiting your options.

You're right about meeting any demand with an automatic refusal, but there is a huge difference between a demand and a suggestion, this is what I was referring to originally as planning vs controlling.

Imagine I'm going to come up with cool ideas of fun things for you and me to do and ask you if you want to do them, does that sound bad? That's what I would consider planning for someone else.

Your Taco Bell example isn't really about making plans, its about breaking plans. An INTP would be very unhappy to change a plan that's already been decided precisely because we don't like planning. It takes so much thinking to finally come to a decision that once something is decided it is decided. If I've already been through all that to decide on Taco Bell I don't want to go back to the drawing board and start thinking about a new option, this is me avoiding going back to planning.

As for the food-related boundaries, I'm surprised to hear that is an INTP thing, and don't really understand why it would be. However, I'm afraid of new restaurants for exactly the reasons you describe. That said, I've learned to face that fear and be willing to try new restaurants more, and I definitely recommend working through that issue as it is very socially limiting.

But going back to planning vs controlling, its not 'carte blanche permission' unless its controlling. I wouldn't want someone deciding on things I didn't have a say in at all, but I would rather have someone else come up with the options, so long as I still have the ability to say no if I want. If I try to pick a restaurant myself, I'll open up yelp and see 1000 options, and think about the pros and cons of each one and alternately decide why each one can't work or is good and never really come to a decision. If I really have to pick I'll probably just end up picking the same place I've been to a million times because I can't convince myself a new option is the right one and I'll be kind of unhappy with that decision because its boring. This is not fun for me, a bunch of indecisiveness followed by doing the same thing I'd always do. If someone else has basically picked one or a few options it makes it much easier to convince myself that's a good idea and I'll actually try something new and be much happier.

As for me being INTP vs INTJ, I'm pretty sure. I've done a lot of reading on it and this book and this description describe me extremely accurately.

Read this book and you will get a great introduction to a) MBTI as a system and b) how our minds work and its relationship to behavior patterns/preferences.

I recently read Setting Limits for your Strong Willed Child and it's been working great for my 2.5 year old. He's not even particularly 'strong willed,' we just don't know wtf we're doing with discipline so this has really helped. Some of the examples with the older kids in the book seem a bit restrictive but for basic limit setting and consequence based problem solving it's great.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0770436595/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1404881657&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40
Three's awfully young for a kitten. I would not leave them unsupervised ever, and before your son even interacts with the cat, remind him that any hitting/chasing/ tail pulling means the cat gets 'put away' and then take the kitten away- hopefully to a toddler-free room with its food, water, and litter.

It baffles me how you people fall for blatantly fake pictures people on 4chan make.

Not only are you outright lying about Paddock, you're linking blatantly photoshopped pictures as if they're real.

I feel really sorry for you. I'm sorry the education system failed you and I wish there was some way I could help you.

The only thing I can do is suggest a book that might improve your ability to spot bullshit: https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

If you want to be a smarter person, read it. If you want to keep getting bamboozled by 4chan, then don't.

There is a really good book called Suspicious Minds from a couple of years ago that reaches the same conclusion, written by Dr Rob Brotherton. The book is based on his Psychology PhD thesis.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915615

Check out Rob Brotherton's (2015) Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. He specifically focuses on the psychological components.




Another book worth checking out is Michael Shermer's (2012) The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How we Construct Beliefs and Reinforce them as Truths. While the book touches on a wide number of topics beyond conspiracy theories, it addresses much of the psychology underlying the belief in conspiracy theories.

Human society is evolving to be less violent. See this. Decreated religiosity may be part of it. But there are plenty of other reasons Pinker covers in his book.

Some light reading:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/atrocities/243392473.html?listingId=-1&sclid=pla_google_rakuten.com&adid=29963&gclid=CKT13pfAvMICFQcxaQodNbMAjQ

Steven Pinker articulates that, specifically, the monopoly is on legitimate use of violence. In Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues (IMHO) effectively that Hobbe's Leviathon theory is essentially correct, and is the nature of a state.

The death toll and scale of WWII was the greatest in absolute numbers of any war in world history. It wasn't the largest relative to the size of world population, but it was up there. This article and accompanying video demonstrate that while perceptions of worldwide violence have increased since 1945, absolute and relative fatalities have decreased drastically.

My point is, while Western Europe and N. America won't have a decisive victory, neither will ISIS, because the whole conflict is actually very small in terms of numbers. We'll never have to worry about ISIS taking over the world; it's not possible.

More information here and here.

Indeed. But 383 would not be far off from last year's total of 328. Murder, and crime in general, has dropped precipitously in the last 25 years. (There's a ton of evidence and discussion of this in Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature)

1. So instead of addressing the problems with the regimes we're discussing, you launch into 'whataboutism' and divert the discussion to discuss America's supposed failings; and every example is more than 25 years old.
   
   
2. The supposed evil West: led the charge for the UN (the first int'l organization to give smaller/weaker countries a voice & way to influence global governance); helped institute the Geneva Conventions which have imposed limits on military force and protections for POWs; guaranteed human rights and protections to all; have presided over the most peaceful period ever; and global capitalism provides people an economic system that doesn't require them all to be murdered.
   
   The West isn't perfect, and often doesn't follow its own ideals, but it sure doesn't fall to the level of starving prisoners to death, assassinations, or tearing its own country apart. Assad's men fired the first shots, as I'm sure you recall.
   
   
3. I'm not sure you want to compare per capita civilian deaths between the US and Syria over the past decade, even. Especially when Assad targets civilians on purpose. I doubt even you would try to claim the US does the same, since you'd have to explain how it benefits us.

You do need a plan to shoot someone. I'm talking from a reductionist image here. If you think about every single thought that occurred in the shooter up until the point of them pulling the trigger, lets say up to that point there is a collection of thoughts that gave rise to every action that culminated in the shooter pulling the trigger. Most of the thoughts in that collection, where did they come from? Where did the shooter get the idea to get the gun in the first place? While it's possible that thought might have been 100% created by the person, most likely the person was exposed to an environment containing some kind of information about guns, if not he/she will have had a direct influence by someone else. Basically, I can't picture someone who has never heard of a gun or doesn't even hold a concept of firearm, to spontaneously pull the trigger on a gun. All these thoughts came from somewhere. I think there's enough evidence in certain fields of sciences that say most behavior is learned, and we're only born with predispositions (or buttons and dials as an analogy), and these buttons and dials get set with our environment and experiences. Steven Pinker's book Blank Slate talks in depth about this.

I added the last part about religion because as a set of ideas, they are put on a pedestal as if they were special by having been conceived in some mystical setting the past. They're just a set of ideas that people actually do cherry-pick (if you're a good person), but then my point is why even bother cherry-picking? This set of ideas is actually claiming to be the one true set of ideas, yet we're here cherry-picking it? This is what I meant by "not accomplishing what it says". It's like following a blueprint for a house, and as your building it you realize it's a warehouse, but you keep building it trying to adapt the warehouse to a house because the blueprints says it is a house in the title.

>No idea why this is downvoted ...

Because it's wrong?

There is a correlation between income and IQ.

There is a correlation between success in life in many facets and IQ.

The way you are is mainly due to hereditary genetics, meaning if your parents had a high IQ, you will likely also have a high IQ.

There is a correlation between IQ and ethnicity.

IQ correlates with many things in life. Calling it useless is, well, wrong.

I haven’t dove into it, but I believe the Holistic Tarot takes a more psychological and less spiritual take. I like what I’ve read of it so far, although the book is HUGE.

this book - http://www.amazon.com/Lesser-Banishing-Ritual-Pentagram/dp/1905713959/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1456980471&sr=8-1

• Modern Magick by DMK -
  
  
  and also this book - http://www.amazon.com/Simplified-Qabala-Magic-Ted-Andrews/dp/073870394X/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1456980494&sr=8-4&keywords=kabbalah+magic
  
  
  and this one -
  http://www.amazon.com/Initiation-into-Hermetics-Franz-Bardon/dp/1885928122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456980527&sr=8-1&keywords=into+hermetics
  
  
  
  that's a great coverage of magick and kabblah.
  
  
  oh and if you want a tarot book this book is great too -
  http://www.amazon.com/Holistic-Tarot-Integrative-Approach-Personal/dp/158394835X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456980615&sr=1-1&keywords=tarot+holistic
  

https://www.biddytarot.com/ is an excellent place to start. As far as books go, I'd say my favorite by far is the holistic tarot, I've been reading for two years and still pull something new from it every time.

https://www.amazon.com/Holistic-Tarot-Integrative-Approach-Personal/dp/158394835X&ved=2ahUKEwjYz66i6KbdAhWI-qQKHd-SCS0Q5OUBMAd6BAgEEAE&usg=AOvVaw0KMKbGPgI5VKFy1V7mNC3m

I highly recommend picking up Steven Pinker's book "The Blank Slate"

He goes deeply into the history and effects of this type of thinking and how it is used to subvert our understanding of ourselves.

He has a TED talk on the subject. And a couple of lengthy talks at various institutions that are similar to this one The national academies

He also has a great, if tangential, talk on his other book "the language instinct" over at Google authors, and a very well done one for "the floating universty" over at bigthink.

Citation needed.

The world is actually the best it has ever been. Lower violence, higher quality of life, less war and conflict, more time to focus towards self fulfillment instead of needing to worry about survival.

You should check out Better Angels of Our Nature.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

Solid proof is hard to come by for a question this large and sociological, of course. Human interactions are more complex than physics can ever hope to be.

But there are actually a fair amount of explanations for the larger question of the overall drop in crime on a larger level - the consistent drop in the percentage of violent crimes for the human species.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" - Stephen Pinker

IIRC, your original points were something to the effect that it’s easier to ban guns than gas, and that the Kyoto attack wasn’t covered intensely because it wasn’t in America. I think other people pretty well addressed the ‘not in America’ part, referring to the wall to wall coverage Christchurch got because it served the Democrats’ gun ban agenda.

Anything can be banned. The question is how effective a ban could be. Alcohol, gambling, prostitution, recreational drugs and gay relationships have all been banned. How well did those work? By the way, gasoline is a lot harder to make and requires far more complex and expensive capital equipment to make than guns do. While gas might be practical to ban, at least for a while, most things that run on gas can be converted to run on alcohol, which is easy to make at home.

https://homemadeguns.wordpress.com/

Are you seriously arguing that Europe is an example of why mass slaughter is unlikely? Ever heard of Hitler? Stalin? The Armenian genocide? More recently, the wars in the Balkans?

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB16A.1.GIF

You certainly can run a country with an unarmed population, and if you’re in charge, that’s way easier than having peasants who can tell you to f*ck off.

The argument that the population can’t defeat the government has been addressed by a number of writers. The short version is:
The military is the people. In a rebellion, it would split like the population. In a rightist rebellion against a leftist government, two thirds of the predominantly conservative military will side with the rebels. In a left rebellion against a rightist government, about one military person in six would support the rebels. Defection or sabotage by one in six is more than enough to paralyze any military unit.

The military, in total, is about 1.3 million, including the Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and so on. About ten percent of the military can actually engage in combat, and nearly all of those are overseas. More than 100 million Americans have guns. Good luck suppressing even three million rebels spread over 3.8 million square miles, striking when they please and fading back into the population when they feel like it. There isn’t the remotest chance the military could suppress a rebellion of five percent of the population.

I get the feeling you’re fairly young. The political world hasn’t changed much at all for a very long time. It is, and always will be about power. The very recent experiments in democracy are only possible because power is diffused... in the form of privately owned guns.

A century is a very, very short piece of human history, and oppression and murder of people has been a constant for at least the past few thousand years of recorded history, and almost certainly much longer. Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

Anthropologists think 15% of people died violently through most of human existence. An American with no criminal record is very unlikely to be murdered.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

Five hundred years ago, anyone who could afford to buy horses and armor for half a dozen thugs could take anything you had, your wife, your kids, your property, your life, and those people routinely did. Freedom and safety have only existed for common people since the invention of portable firearms, because when the Lord of the fiefdom comes into your village to exercise his right of prima nocta now, you shoot him off his horse.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/historical-current-events/prima-nocta/

The problem with rules about who has guns is that the rich and powerful always make the rules.

As to a need for military grade guns for killing people... yes, that’s the point. America can’t have a Rwanda-style massacre because everyone is armed. A balance of arms is stability insurance.

You’re doing a decent job of presenting the standard anti-gun arguments, but I hope you think it through. If you’re a conservative or libertarian, would you be comfortable trusting your life to a leftist government, given how that’s played out around the world? If you’re a lefty, are you okay with Hitler’s cousin and best friend Trump having the power to wipe out leftists?
Armed commoners are your insurance against the truly massive violence governments can do, and that hostile groups can do to each other.

Leviathan by Hobbes... here's a 10min video on his life and work

I could substitute the word "State" for Leviathan, but then you wouldn't ask this question. Hobbes explores the idea that the state functions like a giant scary monster that can can enforce peace through its overwhelming power.

If you'd like a more contemporary explanation, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a great book. Pinker points out that although Hobbes suppositions about primitive man might have been inaccurate his analysis as to the causes of violence and the role of government as a civilizing force are still relevant.

Ok I think we have a misunderstanding about what morality really is. To me having morals doesn't mean you do the right thing all the time. It means you have a code of right and wrong. When you make a decision you can pass it through this code and tell if it feels right or feels wrong. What you actually do though isn't constrained by this. There's always an interplay between doing what's right and doing what you think is best for you. So yes people will cheat to get ahead, have affairs, bully people. The important thing though is that they know it's wrong.

In fact, the majority of murders are actually done for moral reasons. What I mean is that the murderer has passed his action through his moral code and determined that they are justified in doing it. Usually this is because their moral code differs from societies moral code and they deem that since society won't punish the wrong doer they have to punish them. This usually involves people who take loyalty very seriously. Like the gangsters who say snitches get stitches. They aren't just killing in self interest, they also feel a very strong moral obligation to punish disloyal members. There's nothing strictly strange about this, group loyalty is one of our strong moral intuitions. A large part of our modern western society involves trying culture us away from this tendency so that we don't end up committing genocides and stuff.

Likewise infidelity provokes moral murder. Husbands and wives with an unusually high regard for loyalty can find the disloyalty of their partners morally unacceptable and since the government won't punish them they have to do it. This is why so many murders like this have the dumbfounding end result of the murderer turning themselves in and proudly confessing, saying things like "and I'd do it again".

This is interesting because it strikingly illustrates where our societies morals have shifted away from the built in innate morals we are inclined towards. I mean all the abrahamic religions for instance say adultery is punishable by death. Punishment for infidelity is extremely common through history and across cultures and when we remove those laws people find it hard to not take the law into their own hands.


> I don't understand your evidence that apes have anywhere near the sense of morality we have. Sure, they teach their kids how to use tools from generation to generation but they also partake in murdering each other and rape. So they aren't paragons of morality in the animal world.

So I'm not saying they have anywhere near the level of "morality" that we do. Just that they have a sense of morality. It's not an all or nothing thing. Also, it's humorous that you would point to murdering and rape and say that means they're not moral. If that's so then discussion over, we're not moral either.

So like I said a lot of bad stuff is done for moral reason but there's a lot of bad stuff done for selfish reasons. There's an interplay in evolution of social species between cooperating and benefiting everyone and not cooperating to benefit yourself. This is what's going on in apes and in us. We rape because it benefits us (the more we rape the more children we have and children is everything) but we punish rape because it's bad for the community. Or in other words it's bad when everyone does it, it's good when I do it.

> I'm curious about your hypothetical island metaphor with 200 people. You seem to believe they would all get along and form a religion out of that morality. I feel like you're ignoring the likely possibility that 100 may form one religion, and the other 100 form another. So, what happens to morality then? What if they are at war?

Yeah I think I answered this above but to be clear, of course all that will happen because they are people but they will still form a moral code that they judge everyone on. Their fights will likely be of a moral character. Arguing as to whether it's ok to marry that widow or not and who get's to decide who marries who, who raises the orphans etc.

Ok, this has been so much writing so if you've gotten this far thank you but I wouldn't blame you if you flamed out half way through I just want to end with some very very strong book recommendations:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. - by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker

If you don't want to read either of those books at least just search for videos of presentations that they did on those books. It will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from.

https://www.amazon.com/INTP-Personality-Careers-Relationships-Meaning-ebook/dp/B00H7NWLJ6

Yeah. I discovered the INTP book a couple of days ago: http://www.amazon.com/INTP-Personality-Careers-Relationships-Meaning-ebook/dp/B00H7NWLJ6

It shocked me right out of my "Unique Little Snowflake" self-expectations. Down to "After a lot of thoughts, INTP usually become popularizers" - which I did. Oops, there go all my internal struggles, just to end up where the book predicts.

So, don't read the book if you have a sense of self. On the other hand, maybe do read it. It may help as it also talks about the dark sides of INTPs.

This is a pretty good book specifically for INTPs who wan to work on personal development. I'm not 100% done with it, but it is definitely worth reading.

> It is easy to see why we humans are not deserving of salvation or Heaven.

The Bible is a very misanthropic book that offers little hope to humanity as a whole. The New Testament carries the message that humanity will only get worse until Jesus comes to make all the non-believers suffer.

I recently started reading The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a very informative book that argues that humanity isn't getting worse (as the Bible would like us to believe), but better. We no longer tolerate the same degree of violence as we would have in past ages. Humans today get outraged by things that even 200 years ago would have been deemed normal.

In short, I don't believe the Bible's misanthropic message of doom and gloom.

> He wouldn't be affected at all if we were all damned to Hell. We certainly deserve it.

No we don't. Most people alive today are pretty decent people just wanting to get on with their lives in peace.

Logged comment posted by /u/ThisIsMyRedditLogin at 06/10/13 11:10:57:

> I wouldn't throw my ungrateful, disrespectful, misbehaving children into hell for eternity.

Logged comment posted by /u/ThisIsMyRedditLogin at 06/10/13 11:10:15:

> > It is easy to see why we humans are not deserving of salvation or Heaven.
>
> The Bible is a very misanthropic book that offers little hope to humanity as a whole. The New Testament carries the message that humanity will only get worse until Jesus comes to make all the non-believers suffer.
>
> I recently started reading The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a very informative book that argues that humanity isn't getting worse (as the Bible would like us to believe), but better. We no longer tolerate the same degree of violence as we would have in past ages. Humans today get outraged by things that even 200 years ago would have been deemed normal.
>
> In short, I don't believe the Bible's misanthropic message of doom and gloom.
>
> > He wouldn't be affected at all if we were all damned to Hell. We certainly deserve it.
>
> No we don't. Most people alive today are pretty decent people just wanting to get on with their lives in peace.

>Ehhez képest a legfrissebb német statok szerint: "A statisztikák szerint a nem németek által elkövetett bűncselekmények száma 736 ezer, ami egy év alatt 22,8 százalékos csökkenést jelent."

Fura, mert az osszes forras, amit google-on talalsz, epp az ellenkezojerol beszel. Mint ahogy azok is, amiket feltettem.

Erdekes.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/25/migrant-crime-germany-rises-50-per-cent-new-figures-show/

>“This is not something to gloss over,” Thomas de Maiziere, the interior minister, said as he presented the figures. “Those who commit serious offences here forfeit their right to stay here.”

>Crimes by migrants had “increased disproportionately” even when the huge influx into Germany under Angela Merkel’s “open-door” refugee policy was taken into account, he said.

Ja igen. Valaki hazudik. Es az te vagy. Vagy a nemet belugyminiszter. Vajon melyik a kettotok kozul?

>Ehhez képest, ha nem vakítana el a düh és végigkattintanád az általad is linkelt ourworldindata oldalt a 7-ik oldalig, akkor te is látnád hogy amit írtál tényszerűen NEM IGAZ!

Masodik slide, share of violent deaths, Europe 1900-1960.

Ennyire vak vagy?

De ha kepes vagy olvasni, akkor van errol konyv is. Sok-sok statisztikaval. Nagyon vastag, es nincsenek benne szines kepek.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0141034645

Knock yourself out, The Blank Slate. I don't remember which chapter, but obviously it's around the nurture-vs-nature parts.

Take a look at http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344

Edit: To clarify, I had a philosophy professor that tried to explain everything as being a result of the environment that a thing exists in. These are some of the positions that he held, and I believe they are held to an extent by certain leftists and SJWs.

1. There is no individual self.
   
2. Nothing has an ideal true "Nature."
   
3. Knowledge is always localized and subjective.
   
4. There is no biological determination and there is no instinct.
   
   These positions we held for the purpose of "pragmatic" social justice reasons.
   
   The importance of no self is that it can be used to explain how even a society that is only negative in thoughts towards an "other" can harm that "other."
   
   Removing a "true nature" was intended to prevent defining people as inherently good or bad. If there is "true nature", then individual differences of not should come from the environment and their society.
   
   The idea of localized knowledge was intended to prevent dismissive and colonial attitudes.
   
   That last one means that everything must be learned. This a product of an overly simple understanding of human psychology, which resulted in an acceptance of behaviorism as the end all be all.
   
   

> Yes, those are factors that could plausibly affect the learning curve.

Sure, plausibly they could affect the learning, but that's a bit different than 'it doesn't make sense that every language is as easy to learn', don't you think?

> If we take any language, and then artificially make it twice as difficult to learn by making new, difficult rules to the grammar, it would (almost by definition) mean that such a language would be more difficult to learn to a toddler.

But that's the thing - even very complex grammar rules such as grammatical genders or Finnish-style agglutinated suffixes (and their order!) are pieces of cake to toddlers. They just pick them up very rapidly while second language learners struggle with these for decades.

Here's a paper on the magnificient Stephen Pinker on the topic of language acquisition and also touching a little bit on the different languages topic. If you're interested, his book The Language Instinct is a more in-depth look at the issue at hand and a fun read. Pinker, in general, is a wonderful writer and I'd especially recommend his book The Blank Slate for an interesting look into humanity.

The study you linked to is interesting, but using different parts of the brain - in this case, to decode the tonality of the language - doesn't really say anything about difficulty. Note that the researches uses the term 'different' while the journalist invokes 'more difficult'. This would explain, however, why speakers of tonal languages more commonly have perfect pitch, though..

Check out The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.

As a metaphor, I agree with The_Absurdist that the world could be considered the canvas, and to quote an old Hollywood adage, you have to work to "leave your mark." But yes, it is up to you to decide what type of mark you leave, and how you leave it.

the myth of the blank slate

read it.

a TED talk from the author

or how 'bout these:

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325056263&sr=1-1

and:

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325056310&sr=1-1

read all four books and THEN decide if the field should be blown off...

If you're interested (especially) in why people "do the things they do," I recommend Ray Jackendoff - Patterns in the Mind, as well as pretty much any Steven Pinker book you can get your hands on -- The Blank Slate was an excellent read that goes well beyond basic linguistics as well. These two are some of my favorite "layman" authors for psycholinguistics. Enjoy!

>So what does science say about human nature? That it's "not a blank slate"? Well, of course not. No one said it was.

Oh?

The idea that human nature is a blank slate, an empty vessel into which society pours all of its assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, prejudices etc., has been one of the central, animating ideas for the far Left for many decades.

The idea first emerged the philosophers John Lock and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and later was incorporated into Marxism. Thomas Hobbes in his book 'Leviathan' defended a different view of human nature, in which the human mind is the result of inborn characteristics. The difference between the views of human nature conceived by Lock/Rousseau on the one hand, and Thomas Hobbes on the other, broadly speaking, have outlined the major differences between the Left and the Right over the centuries (as I see it the Left more or less begins in the French revolution).

It is not the only difference between the Left and Right, of course, and one needn't believe in the blank slate to be on the left.

A lot depends on which view is right.

The Marxist ideologies that swept the world in the twentieth century maintained that all of mankind's ills are imposed by cultural inheritance. In this view crime, racism, inequality, selfishness etc. are all consequences of views, beliefs, customs, economic structure of society at large. Marxism claims that human selfishness and malice are imposed by capitalist society and social institutions. Thus all of the ills of society can be fixed by simply changing the circumstances into which human beings are born. If instead humans grow up in a better, more equal, more just environment, then their blank slate personalities will absorb this, and subsequent generations will form a more equal and just society.

With this idea in mind, Marxist political parties seized power in many countries, overthrew the existing unjust order, and built extremely powerful states to force human society into perfection. They thought that human beings, being moldable like clay, would be changed by the newly shaped society, and a more just world would emerge.

The disaster that resulted is a consequence of the incompatibility of human nature with the policies that communism applied to society. If human nature is not a blank slate, and society's ills emerge from the interaction between human circumstance and a more fixed, more inborn human nature, then all the communist projects will have accomplished is to overthrow society and all existing institutions, and create chaos and misery, only to have all of the problems they claimed to be able to solve re-emerge. That is exactly what happened.

You can read more about all this here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331666634&sr=8-1

> Some yes, but I've found that pretty much all of these differences come down to reproduction and child rearing.

That's the politically correct belief. Apparently is not true. That's why I mentioned as an example autism, which affects males a lot more than females (like four times more).

> Statistics are a human creation used to better organize data and to recognize patterns.

I'm not sure what are you trying to say with this, other than dismiss statistics.

> It's worth adding that your social environment, especially why you're developing as a child, can actually effect the development of your brain.

Sure, but not so much as we used to think. There are studies with adopted children (different genes, same upbringing), separated twins (the reverse), etc.

Again, I recommend this wonderful book.

When it comes to universities, for instance, yes people are entitled to a platform.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/25/16524832/campus-free-speech-first-amendment-protest

Yes, a lot of conservatives deny evolutionary biology. But a lot of liberals deny that humans (and in particular the human brain) is a result of those same processes.
https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344

GMOs are safe.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/05/17/gmos-safe-academies-of-science-report-genetically-modified-food/84458872/

As for taxes and size of government, liberals have increasingly argued for larger government and increased taxes. You may think this is "right", but it also a shift to the left per definition. Here you go (if you accept quantitative studies...):
http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/1-partisan-divides-over-political-values-widen/

That means you believe in tabula rasa which turned out to be incorrect, and has probably had more damage of western civilization than any other single idea. Please consider reading: http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344

The Blank Slate

Shaynoodle is damn sexy

I do not believe this authors understands the subjects very well at all. She lost me at how Dawkins' theory doesn't explain how a tattoo isn't passed down. She fails to understand that Dawkins' is building on prior works. She seems entirely unaware about epigenetics.

Are you wondering what her article is actually about? What is actually driving her mindless drivel? Read: http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

This is a basic premise of Evolutionary Psychology.

Steven Pinker, one of the best non-fiction writers of our time, has an entire book about how we all share a common human (animal) nature.

Interesting! Proves something that has been known from practical experience for some time. It is discussed in The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker which is a damn good book all round actually

Nope. Go read The Blank Slate

> The premise that G-d communicated with the Jews and that we are following his word. I believe in a first cause that is above the rules of nature.

I truly hope it doesn't bother you, but that's definitely not Atheism. Sounds like textbook Deism to me.

For what it's worth, I consider Deism a reasonable conclusion. I think it's the only (best?) conclusion I could draw sans Torah.

And if you're interested, Halachically, it's apikorsus as opposed to minus.

> I had my ups and downs. ... The results astounded me (and made me sick and depressed)

It sounds like you've always been a bit of a square peg in a round hole. I really feel for you. It's really unfortunate. And, if you don't mind me saying so, it sounds like ... "mistakes were made" along the way by all parties. I don't know who Rabbi Nissim Kaplan is, but that's neither here nor there.

> after that I was trapped. Couldnt work because then i wouldnt find a shidduch. Couldnt go to college, because then I wouldnt find a shidduch. ...

I am very grateful that I can't relate to this shidduch culture at all, it's so unhealthy, and I don't think Torah-based at all (it allows no room for Teshuva, for example).

> It dawned on me that we are all products of our up bringing, not just our idiosyncrasies or tastes but our very thought patterns too.

Actually, there's a lot of evidence that the our basic nature -- the things you mentioned, for example -- comes pretty much built-in. I think Steven Pinker wrote a book about it (which I haven't read). When you say it dawned on you... Was this just an epiphany, or do you have some reasoning behind it? (I'm just curious about this, I don't think it's really relevant one way or the other).

> That scared me shitless (i dont use that term lightly). I began questioning every thing.

Sounds, honestly, like a fairly run of the mill existential crisis. It's a bit of a late bloom, but I think many or most thoughtful, intelligent people go through them in adolescence (which extends into your mid-20s, apparently). Nothing wrong with that, I'm just making an observation; and I do think it's relevant to your situation, insofar as I would caution you not to make rash decisions while in the midst of an existential crisis (also, you might enjoy some existential literature. I haven't read very much of it myself, but I could point towards some of the big names if you are unaware and interested; I know very little about what culture you grew up with or what you know now, so excuse me if I'm condescending).

> I took a kiruv course where an Aish rabbi

From my little experience, I'd say this is the wrong response to an intelligent person's existential crisis :)

> The results astounded me (and made me sick and depressed)

I'm just curious: care to elaborate? And, as LazerA said, this is probably a sign that the process was inappropriate for your intellectual level and/or was otherwise not run very well. That said, I don't really support the whole "kiruv" thing to begin with.

> Im not sure how to put it, a feeling of "we are different, there is a divide between us".

Alienation? Otherness?

> I only feel anger toward people in a position of leadership who continue to perpetuate great acts of social negligence (at best).

Can you elaborate on this? What social negligence? Also, am I right in saying that your anger is not at their belief or their beings, but at their actions? In other words, you feel pity for, frustrated by, and alienated from religious people, but are angry at people who perform acts of social negligence (that you happen to witness because these "leaders" are in "your" society).

> Like I said before, I am lonely. But I've always been a loner so not much difference there.

Although you do mention it, so there is something different, even though you are accustomed to loneliness and maybe even feeling like an outsider.

Now, please don't take this the wrong way, but have you considered speaking to a therapist? I'm definitely not saying "you're crazy", I've already said that I think your position is rational and reasonable. But some of the things you are experiencing can be symptomatic of something more troubling, or can at least be alleviated with therapy. I'm always nervous to recommend this (same goes for speaking to a Rabbi), because I know a really top-class therapist who says that most others do more harm than good. Still, I think it might be in your interests. And I'm not saying I think you can or should look to be cured of Apikorsus, I'm just concerned, and I think you might be able to have a better life, with whatever beliefs. As LazerA mentioned, it's possible that religion isn't the problem, and if it isn't, then abandoning it will only be a temporary relief, and maybe it is the right thing, but it's only partial.

While I wouldn't discount this advice without at least giving it some thought, it's obviously also entirely possible that I've misread or misunderstood, and I apologise profusely if I have.

Alternatively, maybe you just feel isolated and alone, but when you develop new friendships in the new and wider world, you will feel better and more connected.

> There is no way to accurately describe the feeling other than to say I feel "Bigger".

Well that is certainly a good thing. I'm glad you feel better about life. Although obviously I do wish you didn't feel that being frum was so constraining.

The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature by Steven Pinker. Takes a ton of ideas about humanity and turns them on their heads in a scientific and extremely well argued manner.

A good book to read on this topic would be Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344

Blank Slate:The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker.

HBD

Darwin’s Enemies on the Left and Right Part 1, Part 2 (Blog Post)*

The History and Geography of Human Genes (Abridged edition) – Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The 10,000 Year Explosion – Gregory Cochrane
Race, Evolution, and Behavior – Rushton
Why Race Matters – Michael Levin

****

Intelligence and Mind

The Bell Curve – Charles Murray
The Global Bell Curve – Richard Lynn
Human Intelligence – Earl Hunt
Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence – Robert Sternberg
A Conflict of Visions – Thomas Sowell
The Moral Animal – Robert Wright
The Blank Slate – Stephen Pinker
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature – Murray Rothbard (essay)

****

Education

Real Education – Charles Murray
Inside American Education – Thomas Sowell
Illiberal Education – Dinesh D’Sousa
God and Man at Yale – William Buckley
Weapons of Mass Instruction – John Taylor Gatto
The Higher Education Bubble – Glenn Reynolds

****

​

Margaret Mead was wrong about a ton of stuff (especially nonsense about "the noble savage) source: [this book] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0142003344/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/186-1121862-4716326)

Another good book along this line is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Pinker actually wrote a great book on this subject called The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Read this book

After reviewing the data compiled in The Better Angels of Our Nature, I'm inclined to believe wartime civility is what's new. Unfathomable brutality has apparently been the norm for the bulk of our history as a species.

Human nature isn't a matter of opinion--modern psychology and associated disciplines show humans to genuinely care about behaviors that show good will toward most strangers. The idea of humans as having a selfish core with a friendly exterior has been labeled "veneer theory" by the leading primatologist Frans de Waal and thoroughly debunked in that form. The idea that humans are generally unsociable and won't be nice to strangers if given zero motivation to do so has been shown to be incorrect by social psychology. The "Lord of the Flies" view of humans as unable to self-organize in uncertain times is also false as argued by cognitive psychologists. Humans are severely interested in being nice to other humans, according to the latest multicultural research in moral psychology.

I could give scientific articles instead of books, but these books are actually fun to read!

One thing that helps for me is to think how much I would like to see the future, and then I remember that we are living in the future of so many past lives. How many brilliant minds a hundred years ago wouldn't give anything to see the technology that we take for granted today. I think we're living in exciting times.

Your journey is unique. Thousands of years of humanity before you and hopefully thousands more after you won't be as lucky to say "I lived both before and after cell phones and internet".

And if you are looking for something more concrete to convince yourself that today is not that bad and to see the good in humanity (if you like to read long books), I recommend: The Better Angels of Our Nature Surely it doesn't do away with the all the bad things but it helps to put things in perspective.

At the absolute worst, I'm this guy. There are many words I might use to describe him, but "pussy" certainly isn't one of them.

This isn't a case of me knowing the truth but being too afraid to admit it. We live in the age of the panopticon, where information from around the world flies directly to us, filtered for that which the media considers the most sizzling and dramatic. We live in an age where terrorism, imperialism, purges, and mass murder are all considered abnormal.

If our ancestors came to the present day, and we told them the news, they would probably be horrified - until we told them that that was all that was wrong with the world. If they asked us "So, who's at war in Europe?" and we said, "Nobody", they'd be shocked beyond imagining.

The world right now is doing better than it ever has before. No, really. The idea that we live in some kind of dystopian nightmare is an optical illusion, created by the fact that now we can see so much more of the horror that we used to comfortably ignore. We're winning. Please stop trying to ruin it.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

HES A PROFESSOR OF PSYCH AT HARVARD: https://stevenpinker.com/

Today you learned: one article isn't the be all end all of an issue

From the titanic tome Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, page 103 on my copy:

> In the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions: 50 per 100,000 in Abilene, Kansas, 100 in Dodge City, 229 in Fort Griffin, Texas, and 1,500 in Wichita.96 The causes were right out of Hobbes. The criminal justice system was underfunded, inept, and often corrupt. “In 1877,” notes Courtwright, “some five thousand men were on the wanted list in Texas alone, not a very encouraging sign of efficiency in law enforcement.”97 Self-help justice was the only way to deter horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other brigands. The guarantor of its deterrent threat was a reputation for resolve that had to be defended at all costs, epitomized by the epitaph on a Colorado grave marker: “He Called Bill Smith a Liar.”98 One eyewitness described the casus belli of a fight that broke out during a card game in the caboose of a cattle train. One man remarked, “I don’t like to play cards with a dirty deck.” A cowboy from a rival company thought he said “dirty neck,” and when the gunsmoke cleared, one man was dead and three wounded.99

> It wasn’t just cowboy country that developed in Hobbesian anarchy; so did parts of the West settled by miners, railroad workers, loggers, and itinerant laborers. Here is an assertion of property rights found attached to a post during the California Gold Rush of 1849:All and everybody, this is my claim, fifty feet on the gulch, cordin to Clear Creek District Law, backed up by shotgun amendments.... Any person found trespassing on this claim will be persecuted to the full extent of the law. This is no monkey tale butt I will assert my rites at the pint of the sicks shirter if leagally necessary so taik head and good warning.100

I won't speak for r/bestof, but as you can see, my opinions certainly aren't sourceless.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1

I'm currently reading the better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker and i think you may find it interesting and insightful.

Ah yes, the mean world theory. There's a book on this!

> do you really think large-scale conflicts like the 7 Years War or the Napoleonic Wars were any better than the medieval quabbles between lords?

Actually, yes. See https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Our own modern, global society. Seriously, endemic violence has been on the decline for centuries and - in spite of one or two hiccups - that trend continues.

I suggest The Better Angels of Our Nature for a broader perspective on that.

A predicted a couple of things when I posted my previous reply. One was that you would only respond to my last point. And the other was that that point would trigger you to no end.

Look, you're just one of those people who thinks their views are universal. The things your pointing out as evidence of a morally degrading society aren't anything new. There is evidence that we're living in the best time ever in the history of mankind.

Let's look at you points:

> Hannah Montana is over here on TV showing her cooter to the world and you wanna talk about degradation of moral values?

Has that happened? Has Miley Cyrus been nude on TV? But that's not important. Almost 70 years ago, people were saying "Marilyn Monroe is showing her cooter!" (who talks like that anyway?).

> We got people running up and knocking out elderly people in a 'game'.

Horrible, or course. But not new. Remember when people used to drag people behind their truck until they were dead?

> We have entire generations of people not working and living off of the government

Not true, but poverty isn't new.

You can't be older than me, and I'm not even close to "kids these days" as you are. Here's a relevant quote:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Who know who said that? Socrates. 2500 years ago.

You've asserted a lot in this thread. You've proved yourself incompetent in your attempts to support any of it.

I agree that I would much rather have Italy over Iran.

I do t believe Canada is weak. Countries that spend much more on their military (Saudi Arabia) are not going to outlast a western country with a military alone.

I think the US needs to stop policing the world, and we need to bring people out of poverty to lower these birth rates ie subsaharan Africa, parts of Asia.

I would rather we avoid mass extinction of humans to reset though. I think if we give people democracy, they will demand more freedom. And since we use democracy in the west to further our economies, we will be stronger than any nation. Besides, even places like China are beginning to democratize (albeit very slowly). The good news for democracy is that you can’t really stop it if you want to your economy to sustain and expansive action.


But I don’t think we need more forcing of people to do what we do, only being safe, and even then we can’t fight or police the world. That’s how won the Cold War. We basically gave them the Beatles and Levi jeans. Now it’s iPhones and cars/Uber.


Here is a good book you may enjoy.


https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Not sure if /s? This sub thumps the better angels of our nature as it's bible.

Not really. Genghis Khan razed down races of people, cities and empires, with no evidence left. There is still debate on whether WW2 was the bloodiest in history. You can read this acclaimed book- https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Which uses statistics to argue how violence has decreased through the ages.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 (mostly for an overview of how systems of society drive behavior for better or worse)

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

https://www.amazon.com/War-Society-Europe-Regime-1618-1787/dp/0750916036 (mostly for the understanding on how economics developed into political power in the context of taxation to pay soldiers)

https://www.amazon.com/Oil-Curse-Petroleum-Development-Nations-ebook/dp/B007AIXLIS

​

And given the context, probably Hobbes.

May I recommend this book?

The world is undeniably on a consistent path of less violence, better health, and higher standards of living. Even when the conflicts and problems we see. The key is that you are just aware of much more of it than anyone in history had ever been. Also, you didn't live at that time, so you have nothing to compare it to first hand. Everyone thinks they are living in the worst or end times, spoiler, they weren't, and most likely we aren't either.

Suggested reading: Better Angels of Our Nature

Read “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker. It’s an amazing book about the history of violence in societies and it’s steady decline. (I really recommend the audio book).

The Better Angels of Our Nature

William Barr would benefit from checking out Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek’s recent work. They're real utilitarians, not pretend ones. That might also help him better understand that leading secular moralists are not relativists or subjectivists and that their morality is about making the world a better place. Barr would also benefit from reading about the moral progress we Homo sapiens have made by reading Steven Pinker’s two recent works: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/utilitarianism-a-very-short-introduction-9780198728795?cc=au&lang=en& https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570

IF people were inherently corrupt we wouldn't even have society in the first place. But they are not.

While there are still a small percentage that game the system and make it more difficult than it needs to be for everyone else, currently the majority of the .01%, but it is not all of them. But it's not just the rich that cause problems, the problem is there are much more repercussions because of their actions, than one person stealing one thing from one other person.

Anyhow, if you read Better Angles of our Nature or Abundance you will see that there is a possibility of a better society in our future. but I get the gloom and doom, as our current "news" feeds our 'rustle in the bushes' brains to pay attention to its scary attention grabbing uselessness, but it depends if we pay attention to what is happening as our society changes due to technological progress, which it has been written about, decades before.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" is a great book about this by Steven Pinker

Anyone interested in this might turn to a deep study on the topic, Better Angels of our Nature by S. Pinker. He analyzes at length how this is actually the safest era for our species, global calamities and death rates are down, but with media exposure and broadcasting small events into national tragedies we get the opposite impression. Great read: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122010/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_v8sMAb47CJ4RG

I find books like Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature" helpful in remembering this. It enumerates and explains exactly what the poster you're replying to said: that in so many ways, we're making the world a better, less deadly place.

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker

Can you Google?

https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-good-or-bad-economy/

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/economic-benefits-immigration-5712.html

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove

https://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (by Steven Pinker).

she's still reading this I got her for christmas https://www.amazon.com/Pathological-Altruism-Barbara-Oakley/dp/0199738572/

but reiki isnt a religion its basically acupuncture.

They don't care if you call them racist -- by their definition, it's not possible -- so it only reinforces their view that you're stupid and backwards.


Yet they are trying to destroy the white race, which they view as evil and as the cause of all problems. They don't view this as racism, but as justice. They target the white race specifically -- hence the use of "white". However, anyone who shares the same values, supports the constitution, of whatever race, will also be a causality.


What about all those white people trying to destroy the white race? Dupes, useful idiots. The schools and government have conditioned them to have pathological altruism.

Couldn't find a free pdf, but you can read the book description.

There is also a book summary here courtesy of Jared Taylor that talks about the subject.

Read this

You should check out The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood

"Deep Survival" by Laurance Gonzales
http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393052761

By no means a how-to manual. But it does a great job explaining the psychology of what we go through and why so many people make poor decisions in a survival situation.

Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzales

https://mises.org/library/ira-levin-and-perfect-day


https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0718107896/ref=olp_page_next?ie=UTF8&f_used=true&f_usedAcceptable=true&f_usedGood=true&f_usedLikeNew=true&f_usedVeryGood=true&startIndex=10

and
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393307387/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483814705&sr=1-1&keywords=culture+of+narcissism

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

The spam filter has removed this post. If you edit your links to other subreddits to NP links, I'll approve the post.

Edit: Also change your Amazon link to:

• http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/0268035040
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393307387

You made the right call. Deep relationships are the bedrock of a meaningful life, and the shallowness of modern western relationships is a plague that people overlook. Good for you for choosing your values over pussy, that's a precursor to being a quality man.

​

If you're interested in the opinions of men who though more deeply about these problems and offer better solutions than I can, see below.

​

Christopher Lasch's *Cutlure of Narcissism*
He does not define narcissism in the Trump way where an individual constantly talks about how great he is, but rather as an emptiness, purposelessness, and general feeling of disconnection to people and the world around you.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393307387

​

Julius Evola's *Ride the Tiger*

​

Evola was an Italian philosopher who believed that history goes through cycles and that we are currently in the dark ages. It is not an easy read and some his ideas are a little out there (don't follow all of his advice, but keep an open mind), but you can see the collapse of long-standing social structures like the family (high divorce rates) and modesty (never-ending ads about sex, all kinds of ridiculous porn, hookup apps). His belief is that while the world might be going mad, you don't have to, and here is advice on how to handle the insanity that exists all around you.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Ride-Tiger-Survival-Manual-Aristocrats/dp/0892811250

Deep survival

Bushcraft

These are the two that come to mind. Deep survival focuses on frame of mind, and bushcraft focuses on skills. It's a good balance.

Edit: the art of the rifle if this doesn't motivate you to learn about shooting, nothing will.

A couple books that might be useful:

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152/

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Survival-Signals-Protect-Violence/dp/0440508835/

Deep Survival - awesome book!
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152

 

>Tuur Demeester @TuurDemeester



>All this Twitter joking and memeing may actually play a significant role in helping Bitcoin investors survive periods of heavy Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt. (src: www.amazon.com )

>🔁️ 89 ❤️ 367 ~ 📅 14/4/2018 🕑 22:46

 

Tweet Image: Image

 

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All this Twitter joking and memeing may actually play a significant role in helping Bitcoin investors survive periods of heavy Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt. (src: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393326152/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Y4Q0AbEGD2QEH )

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Deep Survival

Is about why people survive horrible circumstances and is extremely thought provoking. Not exactly what you asked for but based on what you are interested in I thought you might like it.

http://www.amazon.com/Hope-Hell-Doctors-Without-Borders/dp/155407634X

Hope in Hell. It's sort of frontier medicine - an intro into MSF.

Also not medically related, but science/outdoorsy - Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzalez (http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152) is really good nonfiction looking at why some people survive disasters and others don't. It's sort of pop sociology.

Don't bring a handgun. Statistically, there aren't any boogeymen out there. Perhaps the best thing you can do for you and your parents is to bring with you the best survival gear in the world, a well-stocked brain. For this, you already likely have everything you need. But here are a couple of good books:

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/dp/0393326152
http://www.amazon.com/98-6-Degrees-Keeping-Your-Alive/dp/1586852345

Source: 30-day-a-year backpacker and SAR team member.

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

I went into it not expecting him to explain exactly why people survive and give me a perfect plan to how to prepare for a disaster, as many people expected from the book, and I was blown away. Just a very interesting read for anyone remotely interested in the human mind during high stress situations.

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales... http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393326152?pc_redir=1406283000&robot_redir=1

Lightweight multi-purpose gear like a tarp, foam pad, cordelette, tape, and knife are all extremely useful in an outdoor emergency. If you haven't already, you might want to take a WFR course. You'll gain hands-on experience using the gear mentioned above in a variety of applications.

Also, check out Laurence Gonzales' book Deep Survival. It makes the case that survival in a wilderness environment has almost nothing to do with your gear and everything to do with your mindset and skill set. In other words, the more you know, the less gear you need.

My go-to kit includes the SOL sport utility blanket, the foam pad/frame of my Cilogear 30/30 pack, a small, lightweight climbers knife, and a bare bones custom built first-aid kit from Wilderness Medical Training Center.

Hope this helps!

I think Grey may know this, but we're more like 50 or 200 on a neurological level, rather than two. Quite a lot of our brain systems don't talk to each other, not just the right and left hemisphere in corpus callosotomy patients. Robert Kurzban has a great book about this: Evolution and the modular mind

Edit - Should have mentioned, but he makes a pretty convincing case (moreso than Grey imo) that one's coherent sense of self is mostly an illusion.

I initially followed the principles of Stoicism, which is a philosophy that's very close to the principles of CBT. So my first resource was /r/Stoicism, where you can find things like this and this that have direct correlation with CBT principles. Greek and Roman literature might be hard to get into, but there are very readable translations and the principles are applicable.

Of course, not everyone is interested in philosophy, so my recommendation would be to find something along the lines of Judith Beck's Cognitive Therapy, or other similar resources that are based on research. I can't really recommend else because I haven't read much from other authors.

But in general I would recommend reading about cognitive biases in general, along the lines of this, this, this, or this. Being conscious of how everybody thinks might help you see some negative spirals in your life, and can help you change the environment that might lead you to that negativity.

But again, professional help can be very useful, so definitely consult a professional who is maybe better for you. Good luck!

Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind totally changed the way I see myself and others, and our interactions with one another. It's not a hard or particularly long read (the Kindle version is something like 272 pages and the last 70-ish are citations so it's about 200 pages of actual reading) and it's one of those books that I think EVERYONE needs to read, even if you have zero interest in psychology or biology, because it will dramatically change the way you view your life.

I think you're missing the point here.

Many don't like Obama, but is anybody really excited enough about Romney to post pro-Romney stuff? Apparently this guy is . . .

Also: The caricature you described fits Romney supporters quite well. Visit a trailer park sometime.

Obama is a politician; they are all hypocrites for some very interesting reasons. A good book to check out was written by a colleague of mine.

>>Rather, there is a bias to publish positive results.

>This is a big problem in psychology journals. One of the impediments to psychology being actual science imo is the lack of negative results or falsifiable hypotheses.

As someone with a psychology degree, I agree 100%. Psychology has become very atheoretical. What passes are statistically significant results and some handwaving about how your results is evidence of your initial hypothesis.

Never mind trying to design experiments in a way that would falsify your position; screw replication; we just want sexy research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on psi powers and "feeling the future" because quantum mechanics.

Much of social psychology is utterly useless. I am sympathetic to those, like Robert Kurzban and Gregg Henriques, who are trying to interject some theoretical foundations into psychology.

EDIT: links

This one has been the most useful so far, but my kids are not yet teens - I feel that is an important disclaimer.

This book has helped me a ton with my strong willed 22 month old.http://smile.amazon.com/Setting-Limits-Strong-Willed-Revised-Expanded/dp/0770436595/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464493529&sr=1-2&keywords=strong+willed+child

She needs firm boundaries.

My daughter is like this too. And if you're like me, you're having a hell of a time some days even getting dressed much less putting dinner on the table and dealing with all the things.

Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child

This book helped me immensely. They want to know that when you say something you mean it. They will constantly test those boundaries. And your nerves. But it gets better. Sometimes she believes me when I tell her I'm going to set the timer if she doesn't stop doing X. And then I don't even have to set the timer because she already knows mom means business.

My advice to you is to read a book. The ones I pointed out would be a good start, but if you can't handle actual scholarly works yet, the Bible and Doctor Seuss aren't going to get you terribly far. So try finding a library. Pick up Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Then maybe you can graduate on to Jack Diamond and Graeber before tackling Pinker, Sagan and Krauss.

Read a book.

>A predicted a couple of things when I posted my previous reply. One was that you would only respond to my last point. And the other was that that point would trigger you to no end.
>
>Look, you're just one of those people who thinks their views are universal. The things your pointing out as evidence of a morally degrading society aren't anything new. There is evidence that we're living in the best time ever in the history of mankind.
>
>Let's look at you points:

You probably thought Hillary would win the election too, because of all the scientific polls done to prove she would win..

There is no arguing that we live in the best time to be alive, the entire point of my post, was that as we lose sight of religion we lose the actions that provided all of the prosperity you are pointing to. What is the source?

You are tearing down the building, then trying to use the bricks of that building to make a house..on sand....

>Has that happened? Has Miley Cyrus been nude on TV? But that's not important. Almost 70 years ago, people were saying "Marilyn Monroe is showing her cooter!" (who talks like that anyway?).

Have you seen any of her live performances at award shows? She might as well be fully naked...I mean come on could you be any more pedantic?

>Horrible, or course. But not new. Remember when people used to drag people behind their truck until they were dead?

I won't need to remember, because I will be seeing it again in this lifetime the way things are going...

>Not true, but poverty isn't new.
>
>You can't be older than me, and I'm not even close to "kids these days" as you are. Here's a relevant quote:
>
>“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
>
>Who know who said that? Socrates. 2500 years ago.

You know the funny thing about Socrates right? He didn't have Jesus either! So funny the problems he was encountering then in a rational advanced society without Jesus, is the same things happening to us as we lose Jesus! Super cool point thanks for making that.

Great thing all those Greek people converted to....Christianity!!! here is a wonderful excerpt from the Urantia book. The Greek Scholar Rodan of Alexandria. I suggest you read the entire chapter on him in the book, and then the next chapter titled "Further discussions with Rodan"

But the greatest of all methods of problem solving I have learned from Jesus, your Master. I refer to that which he so consistently practices, and which he has so faithfully taught you, the isolation of worshipful meditation. In this habit of Jesus’ going off so frequently by himself to commune with the Father in heaven is to be found the technique, not only of gathering strength and wisdom for the ordinary conflicts of living, but also of appropriating the energy for the solution of the higher problems of a moral and spiritual nature. But even correct methods of solving problems will not compensate for inherent defects of personality or atone for the absence of the hunger and thirst for true righteousness.

160:1.11 (1774.3) I am deeply impressed with the custom of Jesus in going apart by himself to engage in these seasons of solitary survey of the problems of living; to seek for new stores of wisdom and energy for meeting the manifold demands of social service; to quicken and deepen the supreme purpose of living by actually subjecting the total personality to the consciousness of contacting with divinity; to grasp for possession of new and better methods of adjusting oneself to the ever-changing situations of living existence; to effect those vital reconstructions and readjustments of one’s personal attitudes which are so essential to enhanced insight into everything worth while and real; and to do all of this with an eye single to the glory of God—to breathe in sincerity your Master’s favorite prayer, “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

You know I predicted a few things too.

1. You wouldn't be able to see any sense in anything I say because your reality is crooked.
   
2. You would argue even the most basic simple obvious worldly truths, or try and conflate them to meet your narrative.
   
   Edited to reference who was talking in the quote.

> I meant it (slavery) was a moral crime/atrocity/evil, then and now.

I agree.

> I'll be the first to agree the ancient Greeks and Romans shouldn't be thought of as beacons of enlightenment...They were, on the whole, brutal warrior/slave societies in a constant state of warfare with everyone and everything around them.

And so was most everyone else. Humans are an obviously violent species and for the simple reason than that violence is supremely effective. Humans have been abusing both other humans and other forms of life since there was a thing called humans. The idea that you will find a human community free of violence is an absurdity because if a society like this existed, they could simply be dominated by a more violent society.

However, I for one am comforted by the fact that the human species as a whole has been becoming less violent as civilization moves forward and I am confident that this trend will slowly continue. All the steps forward in civilization from Sumerian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Arab, and so many other cultures should all be considered beacons of enlightenment, or perhaps better thought of as ladder rungs, in our ever expanding circle of ethical progress.

Of course my time in existence is vanishingly small but there is good reason to think that there will be less suffering 5000 years from now just as there is less suffering now then 5000 years ago.

Steven Pinker wrote a book about exactly this!

I would argue that the self-illusion is the idea that we are the same now as we are five minutes from now. We think that we are a consistent "I" because this was the best for us as rational human beings. This leads to the common belief that we have a "soul" or essence that extends beyond the simple "physical" stuff that makes us human. This "I" we think is real is not actually a true thing, and only evolved because of our need for creating a "timeline" of sorts where our past, present, and future all apply to the same person.

I'm not a perfect parent, but I'm working on improving. A couple points though:

1. this discussion could be more of a symptom than the root cause of the behavior. We all, kids & parents, have a continuum of mood, from 1 being the Zen tranquility to 10 being active eruption. A small thing pushing an 8 to 10 is not about that small thing, but being at 8 to start. I noticed this more with myself than my kids and work, even on good days to get closer to tranquility.
   
   
   
2. A time like that is not the time to discuss why things are happening. You give choices and tell your kids you'll discuss more fully when they are calmed down.
   
   
   What I'm reading right now:
   
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Limits-Strong-Willed-Revised-Expanded/dp/0770436595

Some materials to try to understand it:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180124-the-enduring-appeal-of-conspiracy-theories


https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201801/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/

https://www.amazon.com/Suspicious-Minds-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories/dp/1472915631

You might be right about the media, but this is bullshit:

> So long as people are police this will ALWAYS happen, no amount of protest or technology will change basic human corruption.

We know how to prevent "basic human corruption". It's fucking called accountability. The problem is getting a system in place that has some. But we won't even have a chance if most folks are oblivious to its necessity, ergo protests.

> Good people die every day in horrible unjust ways. That is never going to change.

Except it does.

This is a great example of how liberal PC culture has stifled science.

The Left’s most rigid taboos involve the biology of race and gender, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker chronicles in The Blank Slate. The book takes its title from Pinker’s term for the dogma that “any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution but from differences in their experiences.” The dogma constricts researchers’ perspective—“No biology, please, we’re social scientists”—and discourages debate, in and out of academia. Early researchers in sociobiology faced vitriolic attacks from prominent scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, who accused them of racism and sexism for studying genetic influences on behavior.

Studying IQ has been a risky career move since the 1970s, when researchers like Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein had to cancel lectures (and sometimes hire bodyguards) because of angry protesters accusing them of racism. Government funding dried up, forcing researchers in IQ and behavioral genetics to rely on private donors, who in the 1980s financed the renowned Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Leftists tried to cut off that funding in the 1990s, when the University of Delaware halted the IQ research of Linda Gottfredson and Jan Blits for two years by refusing to let them accept a foundation’s grant; the research proceeded only after an arbitrator ruled that their academic freedom had been violated.

The Blank Slate dogma has perpetuated a liberal version of creationism: the belief that there has been no evolution in modern humans since they left their ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Except for a few genetic changes in skin color and other superficial qualities, humans everywhere are supposedly alike because there hasn’t been enough time for significant differences to evolve in their brains and innate behavior. This belief was plausible when biologists assumed that evolution was a slow process, but the decoding of the human genome has disproved it, as Nicholas Wade (a former colleague of mine at the New York Times) reported in his 2015 book, A Troublesome Inheritance.

https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfreedom.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QCTNIM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

You guys get suckered into the news too much. violent crime has decreased since 1994, but the reporting of violent crime has increased 1600%. If you are sheep you think crime is getting worse. Read a book Become educated.

Sorry but I couldn't get more than half way through that, your tone is horrible. Try reading Singer's The Expanding Circle or Pinker's Better Angels.

> Under your theory a dog could be considered more intelligent than a human if that dog could empathise more than the human.

MFW

>We have mass surveillance

When physicists at CERN investigate reality, the do so using staggeringly good technology, everything from enormous particle accelerators to vast detectors to the most advanced data analysis using machine intelligence.

Having information about things makes you good at doing things. What matters is what you do. I think that could be argued for surveillance. Having complete surveillance of everything (meaning the government having surveillance on the people and the people having a completely transparent government) could be fine if what is done with that intelligence is genuinely for the benefit of civilisation.

>We have the world's biggest prisons.

Yes, and the mass incarceration (particularly of the likes of those who self-medicate using currently-illegal chemicals) shall be remembered as one of the worst breaches of human rights of our time.

>against nations that never threatened us

Why "us"? If there is genocide, intervention is mandated by the convention.

>We are by far the most prolific killers of human beings outside our own borders in the post-WW2 period.

Technology has improved and we are far more targeted in our approach to fighting. However, the world is on a clear trend towards peace: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0141034645

I don't care if some parents reject evolution and don't want it taught to their kids. It's a difficult thing to accept, and many leftists are evolution deniers. For example, the left denies human nature, or the fact that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetic.

The kid can learn the truth when he is out of school if he chooses to.

In the long run, parental involvement is within a rounding error according to Steven Pinker

As they say on the left, "educate yourself" The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996

​

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579

​

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344

​

https://www.amazon.com/Sperm-Wars-Infidelity-Conflict-Bedroom/dp/1560258489/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549572306&sr=1-1&keywords=sperm+wars

​

https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Male-Rollo-Tomassi/dp/1492777862/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549572332&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=sperm+the+rationale+male

​

Steven Pinker has completely destroyed the Tabula Rasa argument.

Reminds me a bit of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature. Worth a read for anyone interested in the role of governments and violence prevention.

You're confusing "not perfect" with "not good". You're utterly delusional about the direction that society is headed. And, further, you don't even seem to know what "first world problems" are.

You aren't looking at the big picture, and you are limiting your scope to individual military conflicts. Getting into the math is beyond the scope of a reddit post, but there a good 'for general audiences' analysis of this by Steven Pinker.
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

http://www.amazon.com/Am-You-Metaphysical-Foundations-Synthese/dp/1402029993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454939417&sr=8-1&keywords=I+Am+You%3A+The+Metaphysical+Foundations+for+Global+Ethics

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+world+as+will+and+representation

http://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons-Derek-Parfit/dp/019824908X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463946771&sr=8-1&keywords=parfit

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463946648&sr=1-1&keywords=the+self+illusion

http://www.amazon.com/Kyoto-School-Introduction-Robert-Carter/dp/1438445423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463953085&sr=8-1&keywords=kyoto+school

https://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Eye-Anthology-School-Contemporaries-ebook/dp/B004GTN51C?ie=UTF8&keywords=kyoto%20school&qid=1463953085&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Siderits+

http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/monism.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Divine-Relativity-Social-Conception-Lectures/dp/0300028806/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443776539&sr=1-5&keywords=Charles+Hartshorne

http://www.amazon.com/Process-Lectures-Delivered-University-Edinburgh/dp/0029345707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463946909&sr=8-1&keywords=alfred+north+whitehead

http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Penguin-Classics-Benedict-Spinoza/dp/0140435719/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463946664&sr=1-1&keywords=spinoza

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456405155&sr=1-2&keywords=everything+must+go+science

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=quantum+field+theory

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-idind/

Rimends me of this

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Nature-new-Preface-Revised/dp/0674016386

https://www.amazon.com/Sociobiology-New-Synthesis-Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary/dp/0674002350

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/1501264338

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Society-Its-Enemies/dp/0691158134

Here's a start. All these were instrumental in dismantling communist ideology.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Om du tycker att det här är så osäkert, fundera då på hur osäkert vi faktiskt har haft det. Det finns inget skäl att fantisera om att vi har det osäkrare nu än innan. Det här jämför bara 10 år tillbaka, och dessutom bara sexualbrott (de påpekar ju att andra våldsbrott inte har ökat).

Pinker, Steven. 2003. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344. New York etc.: Penguin Books, 2003-08-26.

As quoted at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/703159-i-believe-that-the-rape-is-not-about-sex-doctrine-will-go-down-in

> I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out. ...

The burden of proof is on you, and defenders of the theory, to show why "rape is about power, not sex" is not also total bullshit.

Note to /u/must_not_forget_pwd and /u/Echospite.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Thanks for your support of criminals, by the way.

http://www.kaotic.com/35176_Justice-Videos-Rikers-Island-Prison-Inmate-Attack-a-Female-Medical-Intern,-Fracturing-Her-Jaw.html

Maybe in the future, Jarod will be just like this inmate who sucker punches a FEMALE healthcare worker out of no where and shatters her jaw. Maybe THEN you'll look at him for the TURD he is. He was likely THROWING BEER BOTTLES AT POLICE OFFICERS and you're fucking defending him.

Oh BOY I wish I had all of your phone numbers. I would confront each and every one of you one by one and I'd bet that each and every one of you losers know nothing about criminology, neuroscience, mental health, or even a basic understanding of the history of human violence.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010

There's a book you can start with. Oh, you mean it's over 800 pages and not a single paragraph? Sorry. I guess you're just going to sit there on your ever-widening can being on the wrong side of history AS USUAL.

"Rape culture" is a term that was made up by people who don't like to accept that human beings are biologically predisposed to rape in situations when they think they can get away with it with few or no consequences. And that biological drive evolved because it served a procreative end

If you look at all of human history, going back first hundreds but then also thousands and tens of thousands of years, the incidence of rape has always been much higher than it is in modern societies. And this is a feature of modern cultures, but that feature was made possible by the technological and social-order sophistications that allow us to police rape and organize our lives in a way that makes it much less likely

Another interesting point to note is that last century (the 21st century) was the least violent in human history. This includes all violence, particularly war and murder and rape, and also robberies.

Ref: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

Edit: I suppose it's worth quoting the description

> Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.

> Young girls talk a lot more

You could have stopped right there. I'm going to throw a recommendation for this book as its a good read:

http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767920104

Again a teenage girl's desire for communication and social bonding is very well documented. They even have that saying "Talking on the phone like a 16 year old girl".

> caused by societal pressure

I have an issue with this as well. Over the last few decades we have been playing with this idea of "societal pressures" shaping people. I'm on the other side of the fence with the idea that our nature is what shaped our society in the first place.

Throwing out another recommendation on your second point, also a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368644663&sr=1-2&keywords=blank+slate

You are welcome to challenge any of my opinions but calling them "simplistic" seems rather dense on your part.

Some ideas in 4 categories:

Body Language:

• What Every BODY is Saying
  
• Unmasking The Face
  
  Speed Reading:
  
  
• Breakthrough Rapid Reading
  
  Evolutionary Psych / Behavior:
  
  
• The Blank Slate
  
• How The Mind Works
  
  PUA / Attraction:
  
  
• Bang
  
• Mystery Method

I didn't think the obvious needed evidence. Didn't realize you were that clueless on the issue.
Here's a bio criminologist talking about his whole field is held back:
How criminologist who study biology are shunned by their field
Here's widely respected Steven Pinker who wrote a book on the subject: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

My God.. that linking was too much work to educate the clueless. I usually don't go there.

> Steves' point is that travel can help put problems into a wider context.

And my point is that that's puerile bullshit. Travel is great, but also completely irrelevant to what actions the government should or shouldn't take to restrict deadly hemorrhagic fevers from spreading. Seeing the world is wonderful, but doesn't actually help you form a better policy stance on illegal immigration. (In fact, some very intelligent people recognize that it can actually be counter-productive).

> At no point is this an argument that travel is the only way to do that.

At no point did I say that's the argument he was making.

I know, what a terrible capitalist world, with drastically declining poverty rates globally and a sharp decrease in historical violence. With women gaining ever increasing participation in society and anti-gay marriage amendments having been pretty unanimously opposed by corporate sectors and the uber capitalist world of entertainment pushing for ever more diversity in representation and awareness for environmental, human rights, and energy innovation campaigns.

Terrible, terrible system. I mean, feudal and socialist systems have worked so well!

http://humanprogress.org/about

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010