Reddit Reddit reviews The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

We found 8 Reddit comments about The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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8 Reddit comments about The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World:

u/nate_rausch · 32 pointsr/JordanPeterson

There are multiple people, across the ideological spectrum.

Noam Chomsky
In that clip he is critiquing Slavoj Zizek's postmodernism (who himself in another clip is saying postmodernism is a form of totalitarianism by the way).

Here is an older one of Chomsky as well.

The most coherent I've ever read is the one by David Deutsch, in his great book The Beginning of Infinity. I would even go so far as to say that his critique is stronger than Jordan Petersons.

Then of course there is Stephen Hicks.

There are also many critiques which closely related to it, which is critique of "Critical theory" and "cultural marxism", which is closely related to it, especially in the universities.

I myself discovered postmodernism at the root of a cluster of very strange things in our culture long before I discovered JP, by simply having an ideological girlfriend and trying to get to the bottom of how her beliefs hang together.

What I discovered with her, and why I think it is also so important what JP is doing with labeling it and telling people what they're up against, is that she never used the word postmodernism herself. I don't even think she knew what it was. This was certainly not her identity label (Although she did talk about intersectionality). But every single of the big ideas she had formed the totality of postmodernism (conventionalism, relativism, social constructionism, that everything is power and groups battle for power, etc.).

Does the fact that she did not identify as a postmodernist make any difference to her acting out that ideology? No, not at all. If anything it just makes it harder to spot. It's in some way easier to fight marxism when everyone who shares that ideology identify themselves as marxists. While people can front radical postmodernist ideas in companies without being spotted because the spread of the ideology has not yet reached public awareness.

u/ThMogget · 5 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World calls this range feature reach. A very good theory is so precise that it has can reach far. We don't know what the reach is until we walk the 1000 miles, but the reach was already there. He seems to use reach to describe both the variety of the phenomena and the amount of phenomena (from small scales to galactic scales).

u/lkesteloot · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch radically changed the way I think about many things. It's one of the few books I've read twice (ten years apart). The physics part was interesting, but it's the philosophy of it that affected me.

Another book of his, The Beginning of Infinity, had quite an effect on me as well, especially the idea that all solutions have their problems, and that instead of regressing, we should push forward to find solutions to the new problems.

u/eternusvia · 2 pointsr/worldnews

I think you should check out the book the beginning of infinity by physicist David Deutsch.

He doesn't talk about exactly what you said, but I got the same vibe from you as I got from his book.

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/IntellectualDarkWeb

No.

I am challenging the idea that our "religious" behavior is genetic. It is not. Humans possess the ability to create explanatory knowledge which affects how we behave. Unlike animals who only run based on the knowledge contained within their genes.

So the idea that religious behavior is genetic and inevitable is mistaken. Religious behavior happens at the level of memes, not genes. Religious behavior is an anti-rational meme, in that it requires the suppression of criticism to replicate.

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359


The explanation of artificial creativity is contained in this book chapter 7. And the explanation about memes and the difference between rational memes and anti-rational memes is contained in chapter 15.

​

My argument has nothing to do with the human genome project.

u/kodheaven · 1 pointr/IntellectualDarkWeb

This podcast is inspired by the twice guest of Sam Harris's podcast, David Deutsch. I find David Deutsch to be the most interesting guest that Sam has ever had. He also the author of the best Book I ever read. The Beginning of Infinity.

u/TheFaggetman · 1 pointr/Futurology

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch is probably the book that has had the most impact on my thinking and view of the world, the universe and everything else.
 

It covers an extremely wide variety of subjects and is therefore difficult to sum up, but basically it tries to form a giant, coherent worldview with explanations as the center of everything.
 

You really have to read the book to appreciate just how magnificent it is, and hopefully it will change your way of thinking as profoundly and positively as it has changed my own. For a really good primer, listen to this podcast where Sam Harris interviews David Deutch.

u/guepier · 1 pointr/science

Malthus was wrong because he pretended that both sides of the equation were known and could be extrapolated; in reality, only one side was correctly extrapolated (the population growth) while he failed to account for yet-to-come developments on the other side. Of course, he couldn’t know these developments but it is a typical statistical mistake to assume that we can just extrapolate from past trends.

This is a common theme with (pessimist) predictions. David Deutsch discusses this in great detail in the fascinating The Beginning of Infinity and shows why we should be wary of such proclamations.