(Part 2) Best social psychology & interactions books according to redditors
We found 1,336 Reddit comments discussing the best social psychology & interactions books. We ranked the 293 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Joe Henrich proposes a theory in his recent book that cultures perform cranial deformation as a difficult-to-fake signal of cultural membership. The idea is that you have a vested interest in (quickly) finding out if a stranger shares your cultural norms and values, but you can't directly observe many of these. But you can observe outward cultural identifiers such as clothing, tattoos, piercings, etc.
These cultural markers are more effective if they are costly, and cranial deformation is a good candidate because it must be done from infancy, which means you can't possibly have just done it to yourself this morning so you could sneak into someone else's tribe. It proves that you really have been part of that culture since birth.
You're making some assumptions that aren't warranted. I'm going to assume you are discussing training like that in the US. There is no training to neglect their humanity. The training does two primary things in regards to mental frameworks. It instills discipline to follow orders, and begins to develop reaction patterns so soldiers can react instinctively rather than stopping to think about what to do (the time delay can easily mean the difference between life and death). It is their humanity generally that cause them to fight. There can be many influences, but often the most influential is fighting to protect the other members of their unit to whom they've bonded.
Many soldiers experience a psychological cost from combat. One of the most influential works on the subject that may answer some of your questions is "On Killing: The Pyschological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" by Dave Grossman.
I'm so sorry. It makes it even more sad when their "proof" is just delusion. Anyone can be deluded into believing the most unbelievable things, these people believed they were getting communications from outer space from "Sandana", and that a flood was coming, but it never did . . . yet, they still believed, and they conveniently believed it was their "devotion" that saved the planet from a major flood. Cognitive dissonance, HOORAY!
The animal drive to pursue altered states of mind is fundamental, right up there after eating and sex-- and often ahead of them. Framing this as a black & white issue requiring absolute abstinence, as 12-step programs do, is misleading, ridiculous and insulting to
any thinking personmany addicts. The copious usage of caffeine, nicotine and antidepressants among 12 steppers reveals the dishonesty of this approach.To go on and use charged language like 'clean', and then on top of this implying that someone who's been sober for years but slips up once has been knocked back to square zero,
is utterly reprehensiblecan contribute to setbacks for a lot of folks.I went to a bunch of 12 step meetings, mostly AA. It puts way too much pressure on people to adopt a zero tolerance perspective which I am convinced absolutely does more harm than good (except perhaps in a small minority of cases that don't come anywhere close to outweighing the harm done to everyone else). The fact that it is treated universally as The Only Way to deal with addiction is disgusting to me.
We are not powerless. [Edit: Not all of us addicts are, anyway.] It is an important part of being a responsible adult to take ownership of your actions. Yeah, it's fucking difficult as hell to do certain things - or resist doing others - but aside from avoiding death from extreme withdrawal, it's not at all impossible.
I have enjoyed more success and happiness in my struggles with depression and substance dependence when I faced them head on and started being brutally honest with myself and my loved ones about what I was doing. Honesty [edit: for me] does not mean telling everyone that I'm a victim of a disease and need to go to pseudo-church meetings all the time now because otherwise my sickness will overwhelm me-- it means admitting that I like to get too fucked up too often and that I have the capacity to change that. There's nothing wrong with asking for help, but not everyone has that option, and trying to do it on your own is clearly at least as effective as
building a fantasy wherebelieving your 12-step higher power is making it possible, and I would strongly argue that it's much healthier [edit: for a lot of us].I've been reducing my dependence gradually. There have been slip-ups, but I see this as far more sustainable than any approach I ever encountered 'in the rooms'. Yeah, sure, moderation is tough as hell for an addict. It's also totally worth it [edit: again, for me]. The feeling of accomplishment is far greater than simply avoiding a drink for months on end, and one slip-up doesn't reset your progress. It used to be that once I started drinking, I was going to have at least a 12 pack, if not twice that. Guess what? I can have a single beer now with a meal, then walk away and not have another for days and be fine. I can also do the same thing with a sugar-free vodka drink when I'm watching calories. AA told me this was impossible. They were wrong.
Edit: I used some pretty strong and possibly unfair language when I first wrote this. The point I'm trying to make is that for me, the struggle against temptation became a lot easier when I began exploring the possibility that AA was incorrect about me never, ever being able to drink 'normally' again. I came to realize that the option to alter my consciousness is a precious, integral part of my existence and it didn't work for me to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because it got out of control for a while. It only made my cravings and my sense of being unable to control them worse. Willpower is like a muscle, it needs exercise. How do you know whether you can develop it if you don't try, repeatedly, over a decent period of time? If you love getting altered but are having trouble controlling that desire, it may be possible for you to achieve better balance with effort. It's not for every addict, of course... but neither is 12 step.
Cops and prosecutors are not known for considering people innocent until proven guilty. Technically, perhaps, but the number of times they resort to hiding exculpatory evidence, using jailhouse snitches, coaching witnesses, lying on the stand etc, implies that they think they "just know" who is guilty, and are willing to help the system along till it comes to the right conclusion. But their self-interest primes them to zero in on whoever they think they can get a conviction on, and try to close out that case so their numbers look good.
The fantastic book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) talks at length about how cops and prosecutors have high confidence that they can just tell who is lying, who is guilty, though their actual record is no better than chance. I don't think this phenomenon is particular to black suspects, though I realize blacks have higher conviction rates and disproportionate sentences. I'm not exonerating the justice system of racism (which would be absurd), just saying that racism isn't the only problem.
It's actually real. Read On Killing by Dave Grossman.
Until the Vietnam war, common foot soldiers were surprisingly bad at killing each other under most circumstances.
If you'd like to read a book that will demonstrate the ways that our world has improved with empirical data, check out Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.
I'm almost done reading it myself. It's very easy to get lost in the day-to-day bad news. This book takes the long view how nearly everything in our lifetime has gotten significantly better in spite of what we're constantly bombarded with in the media.
I’ve been reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/) and he makes some plausible arguments for how inequality, while bad, is not the metric to measure the health of our society. Poverty, which has been ever decreasing, is the measure for how successful our programs and approaches are, with inequality as a secondary metric to measure and work on. So we can take heart that many of the programs and progress of the last 70 years have truly increased the quality of life for most Americans. A corollary to this is: don’t rail to pull money from the richest; instead, take steps to make the poorest less poor.
I’m massacring his point, I’m sure, but it is interesting. Thinking of it not in terms of a zero sum game is worthwhile. My take was: it’s not the whole “a rising tide lifts all ships” schtick; it’s more about fixating less on the Waltons and their ilk, and more focusing on everyone else. There will be peaks when some people make off with a vulgar amount of cash/wealth, but as long as overall quality of life continues to rise for everyone, we’re doing well.
Worth thinking about.
Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.
> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)
There's a wonderful book that outlines the psychological reasoning behind this problem. Eric Hoffer, the author, writes that people only really join movements, even if they agree with everything they stand for, if they have only the wreckage of the previous society to keep afloat. If they've got their Jet's game, heat and air conditioning and a job that's getting them by then they're not going to spend months out Occupying Wall Street.
The longer this goes on at Wall Street I fear the only people left will be those who can mentally afford to stay there and that's going to be the radicals. It's a shame because this truly is a populist movement. I think more shit has got to hit the fan sooner rather than later.
Here's a link to the book, absolutely recommended reading if you're interested (and intellectually motivated as well as emotionally) in affecting real change:
http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movements/dp/0060916125
> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
> "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
> "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
> "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
> "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed."
~ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945
I know it's high hopes, but if at all possible, I would love to get mentally in JWs who believe times are getting worse to read The better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker.
Fascinating book that documents the history of violence and its decline over time across the world.
He just described ANYONE who feels shafted not just middle america republicans. Obama was elected by people who also thought they were being shafted. I.E. give me health care, welfare, social security, punish the evil rich guys, etc. He basically is talking about mass movements.
If it sounds interesting to you check out Eric Hoffer.
http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movements/dp/0060916125
So most explanations in here are... wrong. Yes, it might be advantageous for the ultra wealty to forego marriage, and in some cultures this is the norm. Some societies grant males a certain number of wives depending on their status, where the males highest up have upwards of hundreds of females to themselves. As a whole, though, according to evolutionarly psychology, polygamy is better for females then for males, and polygamy is bad for society as a whole. Let me try to give the explanation I've read in my studies;
Let's say we've got 50 females and 50 males, and they partner up in some way, monogamously. The context here is the "societal structure removed"-context, so everyone acts mathematically optimally, but they are humans, so they have a high parental investment, which is important for the reasoning. Another important bit of context is that the males and females are of "different quality", either you can think that they have some kind of "fitness value" and are ranked according to this value, or you can think of a kind of "general preference" (maybe like females generally liking fit, confident males, and males generally liking fit, petite women). So anyway, they are ranked, the first male is somehow "better quality" then the 50th male.
Ok, so let's forego marriage and accept polygamy. What happens? Well, the 50th female has a choice; she can either stay with her 50th male, or accept into a polygamous relationship with a male higher up in the chain - preferably the number 1 male. So let's say she asks to enter into the relationship with the #1 male - what does he do? He can accept and possibly lose his current girl, or deny and lose an opportunity to mate. But if his girl can only do worse since he is the best male, so the risk of losing her is small, so he accepts. Now, the 50th male has no partner. This can go on for a while, until females no longer feels that the "bubbling up" process is beneficial.
Of course, this is a very crude explanation, ranks are not cardinal like this and people have differing (though very similar) preferences - but it's very real and it does happen in real life where polygamy is accepted.
So, the #1 male get's lots of females, but what about the #50 male? He is now completely alone. So is the #49 male, and the #48, and a few more. With no chance of reproducing, these men might become depressed, alcoholic, and might resort to rape and violence as a last resort effort of reproducing.
And this effect is exactly the one we see in societies where polygamy is accepted; some men are left alone and they turn violent, leaving the society as a whole worse off.
Before you go out to start googling ways that I'm wrong in this reasoning, I know there are a couple of scientific articles about polygamy that portraits an idyllic society of free life and all that, but that article has been proven false; apparently the women in the study went out of their way to lie and deceive the scientists in the study.
This reasoning is mostly from Moral Animal by Robert Wright, but I've also read Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner's Guide and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind which also handle the subject but not so in-depth.
Oh you would probably enjoy this book:
The Secret of Our Success
Also fun fact: The US dropped the A-Bomb on Japan and thus thrust the world into the atomic age before Watson and Crick discovered what our own DNA looked like. @_@
An anthropology professor at Harvard, Joseph Heinrich,
wrote a book on this topic (and others) that I strongly recommend.
Henrich, Joseph (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press
Here is an interview with Tyler Cowen about his book.
Most people say that the change was pushed by the catholic church during and especially after the fall of the roman West, so it can't have much to do with roman law.
This theory is actually pretty popular in hbd circles. Steve Sailer used in early aughts to explain why american state building efforts in Iraq were doomed to fail.
HBDchick blogged a lot about this.
This is a thorough answer to your question. But the short answer is that you're wrong. Culture exists and it changes the way people think.
Maybe try The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer.
Also, this video might be helpful.
There’s actually a lot of evidence that suggests that beauty standards for women are universal.
For the most part, there’s gonna be a lot of accordance on expected hip:waist ratio, hair length, and more (for women).
There’s greater variance for dudes, but only because there’s different signaling across cultures for wealth and power —things that are traditionally sought after in mates.
It is a trend, but it's not inevitable.
I highly recommend Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion as one of the best intros to the cognitive science of politics. The short story is we will always have a left/right divide, but the degree to which we feel safe, secure, and similar to the rest of our fellow humans drives how much each side holds power at any given time.
This is why modern news media with it's focus on threats is perhaps the biggest enemy of the march of leftward progress. We as humans suck at risk assessment, and are demonstrably way more pessimistic about the state of the world than we should be. People think the world is much more violent, poor and uneducated than it actually is. Things have never been better in almost every measure since the dawn of civilization, and in most respects in the history of the world. People like Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker and Max Roser who are campaigning for a data based assessment of the state of the world instead of a anecdote and emotional based assessment have the best chance of moving us towards a better world.
Being black is not a mark of Cain, I know this because the flood that God sent killed everyone but Noah and his family (not descendants of Cain). It's an evolutionary marker for people who lived closer to the equator and developed more melatonin in their skin.
If you are interested in the actual history of mythical creatures like minotaurs or centaurs, I strongly suggest you read On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Reprint Edition
by Stephen T. Asma. This book explains how these myths began in a very real and rational sense. https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Unnatural-History-Worst-Fears/dp/0199798095/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=51FHx5FEXSL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR212%2C320_&refRID=8W9V8HVF53DH8FQMCXV4
Elites actually worship Lucifer. They follow Aleister Crowley's demonology. http://vigilantcitizen.com/hidden-knowledge/aleister-crowley-his-story-his-elite-ties-and-his-legacy/
I don't know where you're getting your information, but read the links I've suggested. Don't be led astray into thinking there is no hope, there most definitely is.
I’m in the middle of reading this book, based on postwar interviews with ten Germans from a rural town that, like most of the country, was unaffected by the murder machine. Most of them seem still to buy their own propaganda that it wasn’t really a murder machine. They excuse Hitler as beset by conniving zealots. The excuse themselves as mere citizens who never believed any of the wild propaganda but were in no position to challenge it. As before, they rely on selective memory, vague double standards and, more than anything else, unending stories of their heroic victimhood to evade direct conversation.
Which sounds really familiar. From adults looking back on the people they helped murder.
I'd propose The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. In true neo-liberal fashion, I'll just quote a bit of the Economist's review for the summary:
>FIRST the good news—people are much nicer than they used to be and they are becoming steadily less violent. This is the thesis of Steven Pinker's absorbing and detailed survey of human behaviour that goes right back to early Christendom. His work is based on two arguments. The first is that the past was far more unpleasant than it was thought to be, whereas the present is altogether more peaceable, contrary to what many believe.
...
>But what is the lesson of this generally benign assessment? Immanuel Kant's famous “triangle” of factors—open economies, democracy and engagement with the outside world—are still the prerequisites for reliable peace. Professor Pinker (unfashionably) praises United Nations peacekeeping. It makes it harder for the bellicose to start wars and helps nip some resurgent conflicts in the bud before they can spark off yet more carnage. Aspiring to bourgeois prosperity and free trade is also important; people are less inclined to kill those with whom they can do business.
>Professor Pinker ends with a treatise on brain science, a fluent home run for a psychologist-turned-historian. Neuro-plasticity, the human brain's ability to change in response to experience, means that people are less likely to resort to violence in their daily lives than their forebears; other behavioural strategies work better. That may not have been quite what Lincoln meant, though the belief in man's improvability is as uplifting in this magisterial work as it was in the president's speech.
I highlighted the bits of the conclusion that are particularly ((neoliberal))) for your convenience.
In all seriousness, it's a fascinating very well-written and very wide-ranging book with a neo-liberal conclusion, but also one which has already invited a lot of debate and criticism. That makes for more interesting discussion and a perfect book club selection. The only downside is the intimidating length of the book, but I think many of the chapters could be read separately instead.
Buy here: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/1531823971
Genre: Amazon puts it under 'Psychology and Counselling', but in reality it could fit under 'sociology', 'cultural history', 'anthropology', 'psychology' and 'philosophy'.
The classic treatise on Cognitive Dissonance is When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger (the Psychologist who coined the term). It's a fascinating read. Festinger and a few of his students infiltrated a Chicago-based UFO cult in the 50s. They observed firsthand what happens in a religious group when presented with undeniable evidence that their beliefs are false.
If you want to understand the psychology of belief, this is an invaluable book.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234337601300405
This paper discusses it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679779124/ref=pd_aw_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=YS4XTDQ804Q93Z340PX7&dpPl=1&dpID=41BY9WY7RAL
This book discusses it. Find somewhere to seize it, comrade.
I did my undergrad work at UT (BS in CS), and I took a CS ethics class in the spring of '06. This is the class, although I took it with a different prof.
I really loved the class. My prof was a bit eccentric (I can't remember his name at the moment...), and we covered a ton of topics. He was a staunch atheist (at the time, I was a religiously-confused kid that grew up going to a fairly liberal Christian church) and highly encouraged debate. There were some classes where we would debate religion the entire time, and I loved it. I looked forward to the class every time I went.
We spent a lot of time discussing morality and ethics in the more philosophical sense. We read The Science of Good and Evil (and several other books), which made a pretty huge impact on me. The class, although held in the CS department, wasn't in practice really computer science-y. Oftentimes, topics would be related to computer topics (e.g., hacking, human research, what to do in certain hypothetical situations at work), and test questions (which were short essays) often involved hypothetical situations we might encounter.
To date, I still think that was one of the best 2 or 3 classes I took in undergrad. That class is single-handedly responsible for me changing my religious views (I'm an agnostic atheist now). I've always had the need to question everything, but this class made that need explicit.
Sure it is.
This book can help you get a good picture of when this happened in the not too distant past. It's a pretty easy and somewhat entertaining read. The end gets a little academic, but it's not as important to getting the gist.
There's a fascinating book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic by psychiatrist James Gilligan that talks about the social dynamics of prisons, where the guards like to empower violent chiefs that control subordinates in exchange for favoritism, graft, etc. It makes the guards jobs MUCH easier, and since they are vastly outnumbered by inmates, safer.
Odd to hear the same dynamics used on children...
>I just don't know how smart people can believe it. How can the academy embrace it. It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny...
Read The Secret of Our Success. Essentially, even the very smartest among us (and the early hominids we descended from and who initially evolved these systems we still carry around with us) are idiots compared to large groups of people reality-testing their ideas over whole generations, thus we evolved to intuitively emulate other (successful) people's behaviour. So smart academics will simply observe what the most prestigious academics in their field thinks and then start thinking the same things those people think without realizing why they're doing it: When anyone disagrees, then, as long as it's possible to handwave away their arguments, the arguments will just be shouted down by the mob - which will simply intuit that the most prestigious people are correct, and the upstarts wrong, and so will not look any further into it but just go along with the mob in laughing at that obvious idiot. Why dig into the research data when all these prestigious people are saying it's wrong? They're prestigious, so (your heuristics tell you) they're probably right. You've got better things to do with your time!
So usually, only when those people at the top die or are somehow unambiguously discredited will people start seriously considering new ideas. Thus, the adage that science advances one funeral at a time.
Then just toss in the stuff that people like Jonathan Haidt write about, like the tribalism, or the religious-like moral code that seems to spontaneously emerge in the absence of a pre-existing one, or the enormous bias people are towards finding reasons to believe what they already feel like is true, etc., and maybe add a dash of cynical self-interest among people looking to appeal to the seeming powers-that-be in order to advance their own careers, and that probably explains most of it.
On a slightly more positive note, it is possible to get these - or, well, any - people to consider whether what they believe is wrong, but to do so you need to disconnect them from their intuitive or 'system 1' thinking and activate their deliberate or 'system 2' thinking, and doing that isn't always easy. Apparently, when it comes to morality, one way to do that is to expose them to the thing you want to ask them about, but then wait like 5 minutes after exposure before actually asking them about it. By then their initial moral reaction will have died down and they can more calmly and rationally examine the problem. Another way is to trigger an error in their intuitive system that it can't resolve, which will then activate their conscious system which you can actually have a conversation with. Doing that is easier said than done though, especially as triggering any specific error in the intuitive system only really works once before a resistance is developed to it - intelligent people especially are very good at coming up with reasons for why any given error is not actually an error at all and then conditioning their intuitive system not to respond to it again.
Of course, for cynics who know they're wrong but are just using the agenda as a vehicle to advance themselves, no argument is likely to work.
Anyway. That's probably mostly why even very intelligent people believe very stupid things.
I've been reading the book, On Killing, and it's a must-read by every legislator that wants to arm teachers.
Just putting a gun in a teacher's hand is not going to guarantee that they will kill. The act of killing another human is an immensely difficult thing to do. Prior to the modern era, as many as 80% of soldiers in combat on the battlefield refused to actually shoot the enemy. E.g., thousands of Civil War muskets have been recovered from battlefields where the soldiers only pretended to shoot them. Only in the modern era has the military learned through constant drilling how to get 90% of soldiers to shoot an enemy they are face to face with.
And we're going to put guns in the hands of schoolteachers and expect them to psychologically break out of teacher mode and kill on sight?
>No, it is precisely because Jews have adopted secular moral systems that they suffer. That's my point.
Really? Seems like they're doing fine here in the US. Exactly which suffering are you referring to? Are you referring to Israel? How are they suffering from secular morality? Can you draw a causal link from:
We gave up slavery ---> therefore we are suffering
We gave women rights --> therefore we are suffering
>That's my point. And I don't know what, exactly, you're thinking of when you say that people today are flourishing as opposed to previous times.
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-1/short-history.htm
Then there's just flourishing in general...:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Deaths caused by disease, technological advancements, etc.
Further reading: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/1531823971
You might enjoy some of these:
Shock Value How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror by Jason Zinoman
A History of Horror by Wheeler Winston Dixon
The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart by Noel Carroll
On Monsters An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T Asma
Dark Dreamers Facing the Masters of Fear by Stanley Wiater
J-Horror The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge and Beyond by David Kalat
Hollywood Horror From Gothic to Cosmic by Mark A Vieira
Why Should I Cut Your Throat Excursions Into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror by Jeff VanderMeer
And I haven't read this one yet, as I'm still on the waiting list at the local library, but it looks quite interesting:
The Gothic Imagination Coversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media by John C Tibbetts
Edit: fix link
One of the problems about Buddhism is the amount of money it seems to suck away from the people who practice that religion. We have family friends in Thailand and Korea who practice Buddhism and both of their families get mad at them because when the Buddhists get some extra money- it goes to their religion instead of saving it for something else (i.e. retirement).
I recommend The science of Good and Evil as a book to consider.
You convinced me to buy the book and hey; it's only 3 dollars on kindle
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003K15IOE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Doesn't matter where they go, they will be rejected again and again.
They are definitely a people that shall dwell alone.
> Do you think role models/idols of same sex are better for that particular person, or is that completely unnecessary? Provide your reasons.
From Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter:
> Automatically and unconsciously, people also use cues of self-similarity, like sex and ethnicity, to further hone and personalize their cultural learning. Self-similarity cues help learners acquire the skills, practices, beliefs, and motivations that are, or were in our evolutionary past, most likely to be suitable to them, their talents, or their probable roles later in life. For example, many anthropologists argue that the division of labor between males and females is hundreds of thousands of years old in our species’ lineage. If true, we should expect males to preferentially hang around, attend to, and learn from other males—and vice versa for females. This will result in novices learning the skills and expectations required for their likely roles later in life, as mothers, hunters, cooks, and weavers.
(the book goes into this in a lot more detail)
This one might be good
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Yeah, I mentioned that citing Duke would be problematic, but what he said was not without merit, and that's why I linked to MacDonald's work - and of course MacDonald is also despised by the ADL and their pals, but his he cites impeccable sources, frustrating all attempts to discredit him.
I don't believe that MacDonald started out intending to pick a bone with Jews - but his decision to pursue a study of their culture led to some unflattering revelations - which he proceeded to publish - and they began to viciously attack him, doing all in their power to discredit him and to get him fired (fortunately, he's tenured).
You can only put up with such abuses for so long before you tend to resent those that are trying to ruin your life.
Here are some of his major works:
A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples
Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
Not so casual and perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but definitely read the Linguistics Wars by Randy A Harris. It's enjoyable, extremely rigorous (it came out of Harris's PhD dissertation) and very, very insightful: it digs really deep into one of the most controversial period of linguistics in the United States. The author even went through underground notes. The best part about it is that it doesn't require you to be a linguist but it's even better if you are; a lot of things in there you simply can't get from modern textbooks and you get to learn how linguistic ideas originated and evolved. He has a second edition coming out so you might wanna wait for that.
For something perhaps surprising and illuminating: read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson. Most people I know were impressed at how pervasive metaphors actually are in language and cognition. It's very intuitive and sensible once you get the gist of it. This one is quite specific though.
Finally, although now I don't quite agree with it, Language Instinct is what lured me into linguistics so definitely check it out.
These books are quite old now and obviously linguists know much more (although not nearly enough) about language today than they did back then. Claims are also often exaggerated (with the exception of the first one, I think) but they're fun to read and will interest you for sure.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning To Kill In War And Society
The Monster Show was interesting and so was On Monsters.
It has been a few years since I've read it, but I believe that is covered in the book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which, by the way, is a fantastic book, and is probably especially apropos today. Basically, the author asserts that the type of person who can lead a revolution is the type who is dissatisfied with the status quo, perhaps due to something inherent in their personality. But the person who can lead a country and maintain stability and order is the type who prefers to more or less preserve the status quo. Thus (assuming those two things), a person who is good at one is not good at the other.
He should probably stock up on these books:
1
2
3
4
Miller, Alan and Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2007. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1999. The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism. Pp. 401-29 in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, edited by Helen Tager-Flusberg. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2003. The Essential Difference. London: Penguin.
Baron-Cohen, Simon, Svetlana Lutchmaya, and Rebecca KNickmeer. 2004. Prenatal Testosterone in Mind: Amniotic Fluid Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2003. The Essential Difference. London: Penguin. Pp. 63
The scientific "arm" of people with the TRP mindset is Evolutionary Psychology.
If you or your social circle have a scientific bent, I recommend having a look at Kanazawa's or Baron-Cohen's publications in the journal Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
Or, if you're more into popular science, pick up a copy of Miller's "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters".
I, too, love monsters. In fact, I'm preparing to write a dissertation on monstrosity in 19th century British/American Gothic literature. Here are a handful of books you may find interesting:
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma
-- If you want a comprehensive history of monsters, this is an excellent book to start with. Asma discusses everything from mythological beasts to cyborgs, and the discussion is very well written and easy to follow.
Skin Show: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Judith Halberstam
-- In the opening chapter, Halberstam offers a very interesting reading of The Silence of the Lambs, which she identifies as a sort of re-telling of Frankenstein. Generally, though, Halberstam tends to focus on Gothic lit. (Shelley, Stoker, and Wilde are prominent in her discussion), but she also brings up horror film and newer horror phenomena.
Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan
-- Conceptually, this book is very similar to Asma's but there's a key distinction. Whereas Asma is a philosophy professor, Kaplan is a science journalist, so his take on the subject is quite different. Kaplan tends to explore "why do monsters exist?" but Asma seems to prefer to ask "what do monsters mean?"
Those are the three texts that I would recommend most highly, and I'd definitely start with Asma if you're interested in a sociocultural history of monsters. I should warn you that Halberstam is more theoretical in nature, in terms of the discussion of literature, so it may not be what you're looking for. Either way, I have a ton of articles on my hard drive about monstrosity and horror in general...if there's any other area of horror/Gothic you're interested in, I'd be happy to recommend further reading. Enjoy!
I had to read On Killing in college and it really gets into the weeds of it. I remember it being kind of dry, but if you're interested in this kind of stuff you should check it out.
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
Here's a book on killing.
I've listened to the audio version and also read it. It might be able to answer many of the questions you have.
I'm not opposed to it always. But slashers deal with sexuality in a surprisingly specific way, and since you're early in your career it may be too much to delve into that sort of stuff when you've just started classes. I was just suggesting for your first project you stay away from that, as it will make your slasher stand out, as opposed to reshaping it, which can be tricky.
My advice is to watch as many films as possible and read about films as much as possible throughout your schooling. There are lots of valuable things to be learned from both.
I was going to say Clover, she's great!
Not all of these are slasher or gender specific, but they're solid.
The Dread of Difference Is a good collection of essays. Clover will be in there along with some others. The quality varies though. (I remember the Fatal Attraction one wasn't that great)
On Monsters is good. However, not all of it is about gender. But the chapter on witches, monstrous births, and monstrous mothers are interesting.
These books you should be able to buy get in a local library. Academic Articles that may be harder to find (I've sort of clumped essays with similar themes or that talk about similar movies)
-Virginia Wright Wexman, “The Trauma of Infancy in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby,” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 30-43.
-Robert Skal, “It’s Alive, I’m Afraid,” The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Norton & Co., 1993), 287-305.
-Julia Kristeva, “From Filth to Defilement,” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 56-89.
-Barry Keith Grant, “When the Woman Looks: Haute Tension and the Horrors of Heteronormativity,” Feminism at the Movies, eds. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 283-195.
--Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-28.
-Deborah Jermyn, “Rereading the Bitches from Hell: A Feminist Appropriation of the Female Psychopath,” Screen 37, 3 (Autumn 1998), 251-267.
-Linda Willaims, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess"
I can't say I agree with all the authors I've listed, but this is a good start. If you have a professor who is a specialist in gender in media (there's usually at least one) or horror (not as common) also ask them for suggestions. If someone is teaching a class you can't take, ask for a copy of the syllabus.
Good luck!
The red pill is essentially applied evolutionary psychology. The most prominent red pill book is Rollo Tomassi's The Rational Male. These theories explain a lot of social problems we have, as described in The Misandry Bubble. MGTOW use this information (part 3) to increase the quality of the individual man's life (part 5).
You'll never be able to prove it, in when prophecy fails sociologists found that when "prophesy" is discomfirmed, people usually double down and believe it harder.
You never know what might break believers shelves, so you don't waste your time trying to prove it to them. It sucks, but I don't think there is any other way.
Under the banner of heaven is a good, but you're right that it's not the full picture. I'd recommend "No man knows my history" by Brodie for an objective attempt at presenting the history. Bushman's "Rough Stone Rolling" was written as a replacement of Brodie's work and will give you [most of] the same information with apolegetics mixed in.
A good rule of thumb. If it's historical, but not apologetic, then many members will consider it "anti". It's a duality in the religion, especially among the older groups. Either you're defending the LDS church, or you're against the church.
In fact, if you're interested in history, check out this entire list. Even though it has nothing to do with Mormonism, I highly recommend when prophecy fails as an insight into religious devotion when presented with counter evidence.
> I’m not sure if there is any truth to that, but it is interesting to think about.
"Truth" in this case is complicated. It is true that some things, like oil, are scarce now. That doesn't mean we don't have plenty of it, but like /u/ARandomBlackDude said, it's not because we don't know where to find it, it is just that it is more difficult to get at.
That is true of most of the resources that people worry about: It's not that we are running low, it's just that we will have to spend more in the future.
But that is not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Oil is great for energy because it is cheap and packs a lot of energy by weight. But it's also dirty and polluting, and recovering it is really bad for the environment, so the higher it's price goes, the more it drives people to alternative fuels like electric or hydrogen.
And again, this is true of most things. If we really do start to run low, we can find an alternate.
None of this is intended to argue against conservation at all, but the people who push the "if we ever get hit with a spot of bad luck we are totaled as a species" lines are really not looking at the issue dispassionately.
Another thing to consider is that, contrary what you might think, most people are actually using substantially fewer resources today then we have in the past. Stephen Pinker talks about it in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress:
> All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the fortyodd
consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor
thermometer, and spirit level.
> Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The
advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status. The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs. Social media have encouraged younger people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in
beer, coffee, and music. The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.
> The expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular after the energy crises of the 1970s, refers to the year that the world would reach its maximum extraction of petroleum. Ausubel notes that because of the demographic transition, densification, and dematerialization, we may have reached Peak
Children, Peak Farmland, Peak Timber, Peak Paper, and Peak Car. Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop (including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.
> These remarkable trends required no coercion, legislation, or moralization; they spontaneously unfolded as people made choices about how to live their lives. The trends certainly don’t show that environmental legislation is dispensable—by all accounts, environmental protection agencies, mandated energy standards, endangered species protection, and national and international clean air and water acts have had enormously beneficial effects. But they suggest that the tide of modernity does not sweep humanity headlong toward ever more unsustainable use of resources. Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.
Not specific to Japan, but The Geography of Thought covers many differences in perception between Asian and Western ways of thinking. I have found it to be both amazingly accurate and enlightening.
According to Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, yes. I have not seen discussion of this aside from that book though.
Bart Ehrman's books & videos are a great start for the accuracy of the Bible. He is very clear especially considering he's an academic. Forged would be the best one specifically about the accuracy of the Bible. His books are linked at his website: http://www.bartdehrman.com/books.htm
There are no historical documents of Jesus' life, only a few references to Christians from later documents. Nobody disputes that people believed in Jesus, so those don't really prove anything. It's clear that people believed in Thor and Zeus too. That doesn't mean a thing.
Whether faith is helpful or good, can't help you there. I think it's totally useless except to control sociopaths with low IQs.
For morality, check out Good without God: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Without-God-Billion-Nonreligious/dp/006167012X
or Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: http://www.samharris.org/the-moral-landscape
Science vs religion: that's kind of apples & oranges despite what believers keep saying. Science is a method of investigating hunches. Religion is subservience to an unproven deity.
How about the science of religion? Try Michael Shermer: The Science of Good and Evil: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077693/ or The Believing Brain: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808/ or Why We Believe Weird Things: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893/
Thanks for visiting. An unexamined belief system is not worth believing!
I thought about this a little more on a bike ride...
\> I agree again - in principle. However, insofar as your view is relatively marginal, how do you explain that? Do you and your allies acknowledge something that the majority is not able to acknowledge? Or is the majority manipulated financially in some ways? Is there another explanation? I want to understand why all these presumably intelligent people are not able to see what you can see, because that's fundamentally what you're saying, right?
There's a great book that covers this subject by Tavris and Aronson called "Mistakes were made but not by me".
My favorite book on sunk costs is Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me
Tunnepohjainen suhtautuminen asiaan ei auta. Kuten tässäkin ketjussa on todettu, päihteiden käyttö periytyy meille jo eläinkunnasta. Suhtaudumme siihen tyypillisesti liian mustavalkoisesti. Ehkä syynä on liian laaja kategorisointi ("Mitä hyötyä päihteistä?").
Suosittelen perehtymään Ronald K. Siegelin kirjaan Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances.
> History shows that people have always used intoxicants. In every age, in every part of the world, people have pursued intoxication with plants, alcohol, and other mind-altering substances. In fact, this behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions much like our drives for food, sleep, and sex. This "fourth drive," says psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel, is a natural part of our biology, creating the irrepressible demand for intoxicating substances.
Sure! There's Bob Altemayer's "The Authoritarians", Leon Festiger's "When Prophecy Fails", and anything about The Great Disappointment:
>The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller's proclamations that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth in 1844, what he called the Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to the conclusion that Daniel’s “cleansing of the sanctuary” was cleansing of the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared, but October 22, 1844 came and they were disappointed. However, it paved the way for the Adventists who formed the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. They contended that what had happened on October 22 was not Jesus’ return, as Miller had thought, but the start of Jesus’ final work of atonement, the cleansing in the heavenly sanctuary, leading up to the Second Coming.
Tens of thousands of people (maybe more but I only feel comfortable saying 5 digits) across the US in the 19th century were convinced Jesus would return on a very specific day. He did not return as you might have guessed. A very very popular grassroots national religious movement died almost immediately. Instead of just disappearing though, it's practitioners basically just created new belief systems to deal with this change and entirely new religions were formed that still exist to this day. Even when proven 100% wrong about very substantial and elemental beliefs of their religion, the answer isn't to question it's necessity but to make a new one.
The phrase 'cognitive dissonance' gets thrown around a lot but it's in large part described first by Leon Festiger in that book I mention above.
Ultimately most of these people will just do their church, spend time on it, a few will even do good. Religion can be a negative force in some contexts but usually trying to crack down on it is far far worse than the religious practitioners themselves will be by default save certain examples (small death cults).
Thanks for this response. First thing that popped into my head was "it's actually more remarkable that we're ever not sad, considering the futility of existence & inevitability of death". Light and heavy reading on the topic.
The LDS Church will never go away. It will probably decline and become a minor religion (if it hasn't always been one), and the remainders will be the hard-core zealots who pass the religion along through their families. Property will be sold, doctrines will be changed and adapted, and the failures will be re-interpreted as triumphs (lots of talk of "wheat" and "chaff").
Read the book "When Prophecy Fails", which discusses the observed psychology of a 1950s UFO cult and how the cult members deal with failure, to see it in a microcosm:
When Prophecy Fails
> 1 families are separated when the you break the law
The Nazis said it like this: 1 hiding Jews like Anne Frank is against the law. In order to justify how they were treating other humans made in the image of God, they made the behavior illegal. "Oh, you didn't apply for refugee status correctly? That's against the law, so we're taking your kids." We're so much more holy.
>Trump calling out the press for being bias and having an agenda isn’t like the Nazis the Nazis killed journalists they didn’t like and the Saudi situation while I don’t like it this isn’t new we have made deals with the Saudis while they were doing messed up crap for decades this more US policy in action more then Trump I don’t like it either I’d rather give weapons to our allies who use it for protection. Or just give aid to allied countries to help if not helping our own citizens rebuild from the all the hurricanes
You are justifying the president trying to dismiss that a reporter was killed by the Saudi government. So we aren't the Nazis on this issue, we're just the ones trying to give them cover. I still thought it was worth the comparison.
>We are a republic not a democracy and we go by the electoral vote so that entire states votes aren’t rendered useless or ineffective. If you studied basic government and the history of the country you would know this.
I do know this. What makes you think I don't know this. What I said is that we are ruled by the minority. Is that true in this case? It was true when Bush 2 was elected the first time and I voted for him. Does it stop being true because you don't like it? You'll need to really flesh this out so I can follow your outrage at my obvious stupidity here. Educate me please as to how I was incorrect.
>The klan, Neo-Nazis have always been here they are evil bastards and should but treated as such but to say trump is cultivating these groups is bull. It has more to do with our two party system driving both sides further and further to the opposite ends of the spectrum. The media of course has made there fair share in driving a knife into our divisions and widening them for the sake of clickbait and money is in my opinion more to blame
It has to do with enabling racists and if you don't believe the president does this, you don't want to. Society erodes when the President calls people "horse face." When they say bullying is bad but cheer at his rallies when he does just that, it erodes society. You can actually read scholarly papers about this, but because you may not like the science I think you'd dismiss it as fake news.
You ought to read the book They Thought We Were Free and research it yourself. Few people educate themselves about the subjects they hold opinions about. Generally they just hold the opinions they are told to. I hope you actually seek truth, as we Christians say.
Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic- James Gilligan. https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Reflections-National-James-Gilligan/dp/0679779124
By far one of my favorite books.
I would also suggest reading papers by Loic Wacquant. His book Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer is also really interesting. It's about building social capital and the like.
Also for some history read On Crime and Punishment by Cesare Beccaria. Everything good that criminologist have come up with stem from Beccaria. He's kinda like our Freud: probably wrong about a lot of things, but still essential to our understanding of criminology.
Since you are interested in jails (or more likely prisons) I would highly suggest The Angola Prison Seminary: Effects of Faith-Based Ministry on Identity Transformation, Desistance, and Rehabilitation by Dr. Michael Hallet. 3 year study on the positive effects faith based higher education can have on the mentality of the prison (though it focuses in on the fact that the faith part is just what is avaiable and likely all education would have the same effect.) This book also runs through WHY our current system doesn't work.
Just a quick few:
Monsters
American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires
The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:
Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.
Oh man, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Stephen Pinker. https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/1531823971
Crazy smart, insightful, and funny exactly when it needs to be. Really changed the way I looked at things.
This book, Violence: Reflections on an Epidemic, is a fantastic read. It details mostly very violent crimes and the penal system in America, but it also is very useful in understanding what may be root causes for violence: repression and internalization of shame, perceived loss of respect, generational grasps for power. So while it may not be talking about abuse, I believe it could be a great tool for understanding any type of violence. And what is psychological abuse but a form of violence?
http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Reflections-National-James-Gilligan/dp/0679779124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417895422&sr=8-1&keywords=violence
Took a photo of the book cover because the last time I looked had issues finding it:
https://imgur.com/BIpU5f3
And then I just found the [Amazon link] (https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) if that helps you.
It reads like a novel but discusses a lot of data as well, so certain sections do read like scholarly journals, but overall really fascinating and gave me a lot to think about.
I read a book on sociology that postulated that lifestyles (fitness, obesity, addiction) ARE contagious. The example was something along these lines:
Amy and Julie are best friends, and go jogging every week. Julie starts a new job and makes some new friends, who aren't very fit. Julie's friends are happy without jogging, and Julie skips her jogging date with Amy with greater and greater frequency before stopping altogether. While Amy and Julie are still friends, Amy now jogs alone and loses motivation. Through Julie and Amy are still friends, and Amy has no direct contact with Julie's lazy associates, their laziness has spread through Julie to Amy.
Gross oversimplification, but definitely food for thought.
Well if you're going to explain, might as well do it thoroughly.
It's probably mos helpful to read what Osama bin Ladin said himself:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
This is a letter he wrote "To the American People." I haven't read it in full, but now I plan to. So important.
Also important is this book (which I haven't read, but there is a great introduction here):
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=12576
"Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think"—it's polling data of 1.3 billion Muslims and what they want:
That article links to this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Terror-Networks-Marc-Sageman/dp/0812238087/antiwarbookstore
---
I'm putting this last because it's my viewpoint and not necessarily one that I've gotten verbatim from experts:
Al Qaeda is fighting, originally, against encroachment on their land by the West. And cultural encroachment on their way of life by the West.
it's not them who are encroaching on us, initially, but the West that is spreading around the world. This is not contested. We think that our wealth and creativity and freedom and democracy are so crucial to human happiness that we want to spread our way of becoming wealthy. Also, the way our wealth-acquisition works is that we expand. So we are wanting to help ourselves become more wealthy in addition to helping other nations become more wealthy.
Al Qaeda believes in a very Godly life, without consumer products or sexual lust. It's the opposite of what the West has found creates happiness. This leads to lots of restrictions on behavior to facilitate a quiet, Godly, mindset.
This is great for some people, because it helps them overcome these unhealthy temptations. I say "unhealthy" because we know that drinking, lots of sex, and unsustainable consumerism are bad for us and in regard to the last, the other creatures here.
It's not great for others, because it carries with it a lack of freedom. (More safety but less freedom.) This less-freedom turns out to lead to less creativity (which is one reason, one Muslim gave for why Muslim nations are not as productive creatively as the West in various fields).
So it's a matter of preference with drawbacks and benefits for each viewpoint. I assume that many Muslim nations want to have the culture they have; they choose to have this religiously-focused life.
That's the impression I get about Al Qaedaism and Islamic culture in general.
Good for you. May I recommend this book: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. It's not preachy or angry, just some very good observations.
Great Job! I think you will find this book on cognitive dissonance worthwhile - maybe share it with someone:
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Caroll Tavris
Genetics are what they are - facts aren't prejudiced.
There is TONS of information available for you on this. Do some research. There is some info out of of most universities on this, Stanford and UT stick out however, we are being killed by the Japanese and Chinese in these research areas bc they don't bow to PC culture and have no problems culturally with genetics based race realism - possibly bc they come out on top most of the time in all areas.
A good, fun easy read to start - complete with an into that explains the inflammatory nature of genetic based race realism and puts it into it's place - Why Beautiful People Gave More Daughters: From Shopping, and Praying and Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire by Alan Miller & Satoshi Kanazawa. https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399534539
Another basic book on genetics which touches on this briefly is Genes, People, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. https://www.amazon.com/Genes-Peoples-Languages-Luigi-Cavalli-Sforza/dp/0520228731/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479378195&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=sforzi+cavalli
Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances
I commented above, but if you want to read an interesting book on the subject and goes into the fire rates/kill rates and the training the US Military used to bring those rates up, check out "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" http://amzn.to/2eIIA76 — there's a pdf of it online if you'd rather go that route. It was a great book IMO.
There's a book called "Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances". It talks about animals that intentionally ingest psychoactive substances, including cannabis and alcohol. Fascinating stuff, really. http://amzn.com/1594770697
Hi! The FAQ on the sidebar has links to some previous threads on this question. There's a good post here breaking down the different subfields so you can decide if you want to do more specific reading about one specific area. For a general overview of the field written for a popular audience, I always recommend Pinker's The Language Instinct.
"They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer is the best book I've ever read on this
I have experienced people from different cultures seeing colors differently.. In South Korea I was confused when someone I was hiking with referred to the 'blue mountains' which were covered with trees, then we realized that he saw them as blue and I saw them as green. This super interesting book also discusses how cognitive testing shows that people from different cultures actually see things differently. The Geography of Thought
> I'm totally on board with the idea that our perceptions are all fabrications, and our seemingly 'real-time' decisions mostly post-facto rationalisations (in some contexts).
So "pink" appears one way to us (within our visual perception) and a TOTALLY different way to a camera/measuring-instrument.
It turns out that when you are faced with an engineering problem (like...my digital camera sees the world as it really IS (without pink), but I need to make a photo that adds pink the in places that humans would perceive "pink- the- experience", I need to engineer the camera to replicate the illusion of the human perceptual system in the same way that will excite the human visual system (2 simultaneous stimuli of ultra-violet + infra-red at the same time). The human perceptual system has a formula for how it invents our perception, and there is a real set of things which can reliably trigger this phenomenon.
OK, so "decisions" appear one way to us (from within our own perceptions of our internality), and a TOTALLY different way to a brain scanner.
I have a feeling this matters as a detail of engineering, if you are trying to make a conscious machine. It's probably analogous to the visual system problem. You might find that you have to engineer synthetic "consciousness" by retracing the same roadmap as how it works in humans, which we don't exactly understand right now.
At this point in time, you can say for sure that it's just interesting how our "perception" of what is going on in consciousness is a poor intuition for what's happening in reality.
Or maybe not. Here's some speculative woo-woo shit. What if the brain is somehow a quantum antenna that picks up the "thought" when it leaks backwards in time from the near-future? Perhaps brain scanners and computers and other instrumentation is FAR away right now from looking at the right set of electromagnetic forces. Our "scanners" are too crude to even be in the right place looking the right way at the issue. What looks like causality in one direction is actually our sensors just totally misunderstanding thought- time- travel and that the causality is working the other direction, backwards through time. Or not. We don't really know right now.
But basically every single thing we look at in science ends up going down this certain trajectory, over history. At one point, there's witchcraft or magic. Evil witches are burned at the stake and the proper prayers to the right benevolent deity have to be cast. Eventually, there's a theory of epilepsy, then eventually a precise understanding of some underlying causes and finally a medical therapy, drug, etc. At some point, epilepsy is some specific thing that always works a certain way with a set of underlying realities that are not arbitrary. It's becomes a known quantity.
I'm just at the point where I'm asking the question about whether we're prepared, as a society, for this same thing to happen to "free will", "responsibilty", "justice", "fairness" etc. What if all those things fall away once we really grasp what it going on in the conscious mind? It turns out that if you want to get rid of "violence", you have to make a better society that will make that inevitable. You can't just blame the violent person, who is really just a kind of victim of something their brain is involuntarily doing to them.
All these things that are a big mystery and chance and randomness at one point in time might actually be deterministic clockwork in a machine, from which there really IS no freedom ( no matter what it might feel like) at a later stage of understanding.
> But lots of people seem to make a leap from fabricated, to 'not real', or 'a lie'.
Sure, that's very tempting. But I don't think the bit totally flips that way, myself. Just because it's not 100% as it seems, doesn't mean it goes to 100% fake.
Can something be "fabricated" and a "lie" without it being an arbitrary lie? Like, what if this "consciousness" thing is just like an optical illusion...where it is a trick that depends on a set of specific inputs. Perhaps, when you have a consistent set of parameters (across different people, different times and with similar effect) the "trick" always works the same. In a sense, we're mapping the hardware/software of the brain to find the right set of details that "provoke" this illusion to come to be.
Down at the bottom, there's a formula, or a set of stimuli, which are nothing like "fake" and these are not optional either. They have to be there, existing, or it doesn't happen.
> The way I see it, my house is fabricated - that doesn't make it any less real.
Exactly. I might think I have pancreatic cancer where the next human might believe it's a spell of the evil witch-doctor and the third person might think it's a hex and the last person thinks it's not enough organic veggies in the diet. But deep underneath, there's a physical reality which is inexorably going to unfold a certain way that's deeply connected to some undeniable true set of circumstances. Reality is a bitch.
> My question to you, and I'm sure it's a standard one: if our perception is flagrantly unreliable, then how can the experiments and arguments showing that it's unreliable, have any validity?
What if our perceptions ARE partially reliable while our intuition of them is not? Say, like, it's true that I think this particular way is north, but it's not true that I know WHY/HOW I think that? Where out in reality, apart from all that, there can still be a referent "north" without us knowing whether I'm right about the direction or whether I'm right about how I came to have the sense of north. Basically, in this kind of case, "north" is happening on several levels at the same time, and this means that "north" has a sort of cybernetic quality that's not very simple but it can seem like it is, because we use the same word "north" quite imprecisely for the idea-north, the feeling-north, the concept-north and the direction-north, etc.
If you have come this far with me, here's the next big idea (from Ajit Varki). Here's a fun review of his book: ""This book answers the never-ending quest of what sets our species apart with a delightful suggestion. It is not so much our awareness of mortality that is special, the authors claim, but rather our ability to push this awareness to the farthest recesses of our minds. The ostrich has nothing on us."
Bottom line, our ancestors would not have made us exist if their brains didn't stop them from clearly thinking about objective reality. What makes us human is that we have a part of the brain which makes us do things that make us make more people, even if that's futile. We're smart, but in the ways that would have interfered with survival, our brain conceals our truth from ourselves, all by design.
There are many studies on the topic of the difference between west and east this book explains well or you can search on youtube
Ronald Siegel has suggested that desire for intoxication is your fourth drive.
http://www.amazon.com/Intoxication-Universal-Drive-Mind-Altering-Substances/dp/1594770697
Two of the most respected writers in the field, who have different understandings of how terrorist networks work and what the threat really is, are Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman.
Hoffman's key book is Inside Terrorism - it should be noted that was published before 9/11, but the reality of terrorism didn't change much. Hoffman stresses the top-down, leadership-driven nature of groups like al-Qa'ida.
Sageman's key books are Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad. These are not easy reads, though, so not best for newcomers to terrorism research. Sageman argues that leadership isn't as important to groups like al-Qa'ida as it used to be, and that the real threat is from 'bunches of guys' around the world inspired by al-Qa'ida who take up the mission of terrorism more or less on their own.
You can also search the web for freely available articles by these two, any of which will be worth reading.
Fat tails. Seriously. Evolutionary psychologists have tackled this question and the summary is that Nature randomizes males more than females. Females tend to be closer to the average on any measure you care to choose. Males tend to be more widely distributed - their statistics have "fat tails". Thus, there are more male idiots and more males geniuses. There are more male celibates and more male sex maniacs. And so on. Looked at in this light, we can think of serial killing as "being far from the average". Thus, there are more male serial killers than female serial killers.
I strongly recommend that everyone read Kanazawa & Miller's brilliant popular introduction to evolutionary psychology: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters ... this is a must-read nowadays.
No worries. I read about it in this book:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399534539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410785962&sr=8-1&keywords=Why+Beautiful+People+Have+More+Daughters
It's authored by the guy mentioned in the wiki page. Worth a look as it goes into great detail but it's still easy to understand.
Since you seem to be asking about the motives behind Islamic terrorism, in particular, I've just had a long discussion with someone about it. It's mostly sourced with links to Wikipedia and covers background, but it should do for a start.
No expert I know accepts the explanation of the New atheists, and I'm an atheist myself. Sources to check are:
They Thought They Were Free (Excerpt)
Here's a list of their work. They haven't produced many books. Mostly articles. If you're interested in Evolutionary Psychology, I'd recommend checking out [this](https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/0205992129/ref=sr_1_1? ie=UTF8&qid=1523978075&sr=8-1&keywords=evolutionary+psychology+buss) book. I believe they wrote a few chapters in it
Atheism: The Case Against God by George Hamilton Smith
It was written over 30 years ago and puts to words many of my feelings better than other books I've read.
I would also add The True Believer by Eric Hoffer as it explains the nature of believers whether they believe in Christianity or Communism or whatever.
Sure I'll put together a list of scientific studies you can look at.
In 1988 http://www.canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/4-Engen-Marshall-under-fire.pdf A paper was written about the fire ratio of soldiers in WWII. The Army took into consideration and changed the basic training based on this study. Moving from bulleye type targets to silhouettes. Increased firing via direct order. E.g. before it was "fire when you have a target," type orders but became "wait to fire until your officer gives the direct command to do so." In this way the decision to pull the trigger was tied directly to an external stimuli, the officers orders. Instead of an internal decision tied up with doubt.
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/03autumn/chambers.pdf
This is the best find I could have for the response of the above paper, saying the ratio and numbers were off / did not use scientific methods. Mind you changes still happened with training of troops biased on the original paper's findings. Which is what we are focusing on, the changes.
This is fairly simply statement. If you are good with a gun and able to hit your target you are probably a good soldier, likewise if you can't hit your target you're not an effective solder. A very binary problem. A majority of the training from the 1950-70s evolving marksmanship programs focused on this. Hit the target, and hit it quickly.
Now transition this into a civilian role.
There is a saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer all problems look like nails. Likewise if you've been trained to see situations from a tactical or combat perspective that is how you are likely to see them. This is why we don't train our police the same way we train our soldiers. This is why we don't use the soldiers as police. It is also why combat veterans may sit with there back to a wall or able to seen the entrance. It's training not easily turned off.
What I am saying is you can take the fastest hockey skater there is and have them race in a foot race and they don't fair well at all. Why? Training. They use different muscles to skate than they do to run. The same happens with physiological training. Here is a modern study on how to implement confidence and ego into modern solders to improve performance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26011718 that is now being implemented (started in SC and now in other bases.)
Here is a link discussing implementing the above study widely.
https://www.army.mil/article/153231/mental_skills_training_improving_soldier_performance
Like athletes or sports training the goal here is to inflate the ego and confidence of the solders to the point where they can "brush off" any mistakes without dwelling on them and move forward confidant they are in the right and winners.
Here is a link (someone has taken notes but it was the only pdf I could find free to link to.) that discusses the effects of "feeling joy" or " talking trophy" about killing. E.g. how people deal with being the winners in a game of win or die. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/Wrangham-coalitionary.pdf
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/archneurpsyc/article-abstract/650218?redirect=true
It took me a while to find links to all this I hope it helps and that you were actually interested. For the published documents you need credentials to read, (your library should have access to those journals) Or sometimes they can be found with google scholar.
/u/Orageux101 I think was interested as well.
yes the key point is humans are not rational , rather rational thought is a cultural trait which also only acts superficially .
Humans are social imitators first and foremost.
I think a lot of psychological concepts need to be revised and build into the theoretical framework of cultural evolution and dual inheritance theory .
I am convinced it will change a lot of social sciences and how we view humans as a species .
We are much more a collective species than isolated individuals
This book https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854
made me completely rethink what humans are and I am convinced cultural evolution is here to stay and further research will also transform psychology as a field , could take a while though.
Basically a great deal of human psychology is dynamic , driven be cultural group selection , but this cultural selection also has an influence on gene selection .
Cultural selection is much faster than gene selection which explains why the same group of humans can behave completely differently in just a couple of hundert years, nothing much has changed genetically but a lot has changed culturally.
This what make humans special compared to other animals
> Do you think people can control their own emotions? Of course. We do it every day.
I strongly disagree. If we could I predict we would probably end up dead. Occasionally there are kids born without the ability to feel pain and they tend to die at young age from self-inflicted wounds they don't know about.
In the event of trauma body can shutdown feelings but it also results in situations which I consider unhealthy (e.g. violent criminals - source, video).
Now, we can control how we express emotions but that's a totally different story. However, I think that in the interview they didn't really meant "emotions". Maybe "desires"? I find the interview vague and I don't know what they're talking about.
You might check out Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. I've only read the first few chapters, but it seems to match what you're looking for.
If we're talking about resistance from other people, then I can absolutely relate and I have a ton of experience on this front.
I'm currently 32 years old. Like most of us Americans, I was raised in a society and family that reinforced pleasing others—more specifically, that if other people don't approve of your actions, then you're doing something wrong. Up until my mid-20s, I lived by this rule. That meant that, by the time I turned 28 (in other words, after a decade of being an adult), nearly everything I had and everything I was existed because they in some form satisfied the expectations of others. In essence, I was crowdsourcing my life. If my life was a canvas, I was asking everyone else to paint it. And, naturally, I had a long history of dissatisfaction and self-loathing to show for it.
Then I decided I was going to stop caring about what other people thought of me, and I was going to start living how I want. In the process of doing so, I got a lot of negative feedback from family and friends. The odd thing is, you're probably assuming that my idea of living life on my terms was rude, self-centered, or illegal; but actually, my idea of living life on my terms was very positive and altruistic. Before this time I worked for several years as a technical consultant making good money (but ultimately helping nobody but myself), and my life changes were that I wanted to work in a field that helped other people, I wanted to do volunteer work, and I wanted to go to grad school so I could become a licensed counselor. I was told by numerous people these were all "big mistakes" and that they were concerned about my well-being (important side note: since I moved out of my parent's house in May 2008, I've been entirely self-sufficient, have needed $0 from other people, and have not gotten into any trouble with the law aside from a couple speeding tickets). In fact, I haven't even told my grandfather I'm attending grad school for counseling (and currently have a 4.0 through 5 courses) because my family is convinced it'll kill him (he's still resentful that I didn't follow in his footsteps and become an engineer). So you see the pattern: the people who are aware of my preferences have spoken negatively about them and me, and people who should be aware of my preferences are not because they would be offended by them.
To reiterate: My major life changes were that I left technical consulting to work in the helping professions, I started a self-help brand on YouTube, and I became a Big Brother through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, where I've been a mentor for a local at-risk teen for 3.5 years. I didn't become a coke dealer or a porn star - I actually just became a nicer, happier person. And people still gave me crap!
So my big takeaway was that I have two options: I can live how everyone else wants me to live and end up hating my life because I don't want any of it, or I can live how I want to live and be happy. These are the same options we all have.
Today, my criteria for determining whether or not I do something is the following:
If the answers are 'Yes,' 'No,' and 'No,' respectively, then I do that thing. If not, I determine whether I can make changes that'll bring those answers in line, or I abandon the idea.
Okay, that's some analysis on the matter. Now I'm going to specifically answer your question.
The reason people try to tell others what to do and try to make it difficult for people to live their lives is because of our evolutionary history. Creatures we can generally consider humans came into existence roughly 2 million years ago (this would be Homo erectus). Our specific species, Homo sapiens, generally evolved from that species roughly 250,000 years ago. From 2,000,000 years ago until roughly 5,000 years ago, human beings lived in small, roving bands of roughly 40-80 individuals. In order for the group to survive, everyone in the group needed to satisfy a certain role and everyone needed to be working toward the same goals. If a nomadic tribe lived in northern Europe 50,000 years ago, for example, when winter was approaching, if half the tribe decided to not plan for the winter and the other half didn't, the entire tribe would perish because they would not have been adequately prepared for the winter. As a result of their deaths, the people who didn't see a need to plan would not pass on their genes to future offspring, and thus, the world would be composed of slightly less people who didn't plan for things. What this means is, the people who survived the last 2 million years generally saw value in making sure everyone in their tribe agreed with them - that nobody stepped out of line or 'went rogue'. As a result, humans who exist today tend to want everyone around them to do what they think is best; to fall in line. To not stand out. After all, standing out 100,000 years ago got you killed. (Note: if evolutionary psychology interests you, consider reading Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind by David Buss).
This answers the first question you pose in the title. As to the second question—when you fail or slip, why is the fall harder than ever?—the reason is because when we already know there are people who think that what we're doing is stupid, they're almost waiting for us to fall. They're waiting for the moment when things go wrong so they can be proven correct. What these people don't realize, however, is that even failure is progress. For example, if I end up graduating from grad school but for some reason I can't pass the licensing test to become a counselor, I still have a master's degree to my name and I still learned tons of skills and knowledge. Some people around me will probably say "You should've stuck to consulting," but that's wrong because it discredits all the value I got through trying a new path.
How do you overcome this? By teaching yourself to not give a f-ck what everyone else thinks. This is literally something you have to teach yourself - and it's something I still struggle with. We're so evolutionarily wired and societally-trained to fall in line and be like everyone else. The entire concept of social media is essentially a method for determining our value based on what other people think. If we post something smart or funny but it doesn't get any likes, then it was stupid and we're losers. On the other hand, if we post a photo of ourself half-naked, we'll get tons of likes (well, maybe not me, but some people will). So this is why I say learning to not care about the opinions of others takes time and effort. It's a skill like playing guitar is a skill.
Perhaps your question was more about why we're met with such internal resistance when we make life changes. If so, then the answer is much more simple: our minds have been conditioned, through months and years of experience, to think or act a certain way, meaning that when we try to change our habits it'll take time.
Hope any of this helps.
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I wrote a memoir that walks through some important life events that occurred during my first decade of adulthood, and it talks about how I learned to listen to myself and follow my vision. If this sounds like something that would interest you, there's a free PDF copy available on my website.
there's a whole chapter on it in this book, which IMO is an excellent read all around.
This a fantastic book about language that goes over this and a whole lot more. It is written in a way that really keeps you interested as well. Check it out.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/1491514981
A good place to start would be The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.
Playing this game lead me to this book:
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536369847&sr=1-1&keywords=connected
I always wondered how would Hoppe answer the empirical evidence of democratic peace. I read Democracy: The God That Failed long time ago but if I remember correctly he was arguing that since kings use their own resources they would be more careful to going into war. Even if he wasn't explicitly saying that, his reasoning can easily lead us this. Yes there are still wars but it's much less frequent compared to the pre-democracy. Liberal democracy creates both internal and external pressure against war; in domestic affairs voters care about deaths of their families and citizens so they don't want war, so if a politician wants to get elected or stay elected he should be careful with international relations. Externally, liberal democracy creates an interdependency -economically and politically- in international arena so this leads to a more peaceful relation with other countries. Yes, liberal democracies have lots of flaws but Hoppe misses almost every one of them, overall democracies are far better in every way than kingdoms and empires. Why should we read Hoppe when we have Caplan, Brennan, De Jasay?
You should read Connected. It doesn't really get at this per se, but some similar concepts.
It's been a while since I read it, but there was one part where the author talked about how you can stand on the street, stop, and just look up at some imaginary thing and X% of people around you will stop and do the same thing just because of curiosity/following your action.
Wow, I can relate to your first para. One of the first cracks on my shelf started when sitting in an ancient city and realising there was no evidence the Gospel had ever gone to this ancient empire. It was a pre-eminent civilisation for thousands of years, and no gospel. I then though of all the other ancient civilisations (Chinese, Minoan etc) that all didn't have any idea about the gospel, started to wonder from that point that it might not be true.
I'd recommend this book by Shermer.
Here's a great TED talk by Sam Harris.
and finally an awesome meme.
Peaceful is relatively. There are a few open conflicts right now around the globe but they are all small and isolated.
However, in general it is a more peaceful time, the fact is the murder rate is down, gun violence is down, and disease deaths are down. Fewer people are going hungry, clean water access is at an all time high, and recovering from disasters is faster.
There are of course still problems in the world and thanks to 24 news and the internet you hear about them more often and quicker but there is in total less problems then there was 30 years ago. You can read this book if you want to know more about how things are not getting worse but actually better. But news agencies don't typically make a lot of money on good news.
As for the doomsday clock, when the cold war ended it only got to 17 mins till midnight which is the farther it has ever been. Which was either the safest time ever or the most dangerous since a nuclear power was collapsing. So you can safely consider it all bullshit, a fun thing to put in the newspapers during the cold war and nothing more.
> There's no such thing as "western science". The scientific method has no particular nationality or culture to it.
Disagree. (A bit of digression, but an interesting side-debate nevertheless; skip this paragraph to go to the topic of the OP.) Cultural beliefs do actually influence ways of thought, scientific method included. A well-known pyschological experiment, for example, puts two objects on a table: a cork cylinder and a plastic pyramid. Participants are given a third item, a cork pyramid, and asked to which group does it belong to. Westerners disproportionately associate it with the plastic pyramid, while easterners disproportionately associate it with the cork cylinder. This (and other variations) show that westerners tend to focus more on object labels while easterners tend to focus more on substances and the environment. So, this and related experiments reveal there ARE trends indicative of differences in how easterners and westerners interpret knowledge. Westerners tend to rely more on formal logic and insist on correctness of one belief over another when investigating conflicting opinions or theories, while easterners consider all the interacting environmental relationships, even if they give conflicting answers (this has implications for the importance easterners place on causality, for example). So yes, cultural traditions CAN influence how you interpret science. When I said the (admittedly vague) phrase "western science", I was referring to the western tradition of highly logical and categorical induction. One can even argue the Scientific Method is actually an invention of the western tradition, but that doesn't mean other cultures don't approach the same issues from different ways. Anyways, I digress from the topic at hand... TL;DR: read something like [The Geography of Thought] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Thought-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344027939&sr=8-1&keywords=geography+of+thought) for intriguing trends in how your Asian lab partner interprets data differently from you.
>Yes, there's a lot of New Age bullshit books out there, trying to claim that physics legitimizes one particular philosophy or religion or another.
Difference being Goswami was a quantum physics professor who wrote respected college textbooks on the matter before he turned to mysticism. I picked the book up because the most interesting advances in human knowledge have been when science has collided head-on with religion/philosophy. You won't find Jesus mentioning anything about quantum physics, but reading about a physicist who turns mystic based on his interprettation is an interesting cross between science and religion. My background is not in quantum physics, but sooner or later you guys will have to (you should?) reconcile your understanding of reality with how different cultural traditions interpret reality. Historically, that has meant offering a more convincing, evidence-based view of reality (e.g. Galileo, etc.). So I thank you for your detailed responses... I was trying only to understand why Goswami's interpretation is not considered appropriate by mainstream physicists rather than trying to assert any particular philosophy.
> Electrons do not have Bohr-style 'orbits', nor do they move between them instantaneously. We know for a fact that they don't.
My understanding was that electrons orbit in fuzzy probability clouds rather than nice planetery-like orbits, but light is emitted when they acquire/lose enough energy to move from one to the next. Furthermore, the jump is discontinuous in that the electron is never in any orbit not defined by one of the probability clouds. Can you please point me to a more accurate description?
> A 'measurement' in quantum mechanics is an interaction (of a particular kind) with the system. The fact that manipulating an object in a different way will give a different outcome is not very surprising, and not what's interesting about the delayed-choice experiment.
What is the interesting part of the delayed-choice experiment then if it's not that what we observe depends on how we measure it?
> It appears as if one particle affects the other instantaneously, which makes it appear as if there is some faster-than-light interaction between them. That does not mean this is how it works. It's not known how it works. No such interaction is known to actually exist, and as far as I know, there's no popular hypothesis giving such a mechanism. [emphasis mine.]
> While if you can't distinguish interpretations of quantum physics from quantum physics, and science from philosophy you've failed to understand all the above.
And therein lies the crux of my original post: the most interesting scientific discoveries come when interpretations of science and philosophy butt up against each other. In the case of Aspect's Bell Test, it appears that a non-local signal (that is, a deliberate faster-than-light transmission) is impossible, but yet, it shows that there is at least some non-local correlated behavior. Goswami's interpretation resorts to a non-local unitary consciousness (which he later calls "god"; the personal diety aspect of the term being unfortunate cultural baggage). The point being, when does an interpretation become theory? When you can test it and do something useful with it. So if the unitary, non-local consciousness interpretation is not helpful, what other more plausible interpretations are there? Help me understand reality as you interpret it.
Yep, I studied psycholinguistics in college. Note sure if you've already read it but Steven Pinker wrote a book called "The Language Instinct" that delves into this exact premise...that language has become an evolutionary process not unlike how kids learn to walk or lose their baby teeth or whatever. I never wound up doing anything with those studies but I found them to be fascinating, easily one of the best courses I took.
With regard to this particular TIL though, discovering this is a wet dream for a researcher in the field ;)
How does Workman compare to Buss? I have only read Buss.
Furthermore, Buss is in the fifth edition now:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Science-Fifth-Edition/dp/0205992129/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=51BgqsFFOWL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR124%2C160_&refRID=064KHRM92M84AG53PQ6J
This Henry Rosemont quote may help clarify :
"there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others. I do not play or perform these roles; I am these roles. When they have all been specified I have been defined uniquely, fully, and altogether, with no
remainder with which to piece together a free, autonomous self."
[The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why] (http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/) will probably be helpful too, especially page 5 onwards.
So, idk if I have spyware or what, but when I loaded this page the first time, I was linked to a book on Amazon about this sort of thing - with a big blue banner over someone's comment (gone now though, after refresh)
https://puu.sh/styXC.png
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137
An excerpt from a talk by hope researcher, Shane Lopez:
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> The power of social networks (not just the online ones) can help you spread those things to your community. Book: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis
> Shane shows an image of 4 penguins walking in a line and says positive emotions move from one person to the next before they fizzle out. If you're a leader, you're the lead "pinguin." How you behave today will affect the next penguin. How that penguin behaves because they've been infected by your hope will affect another person--maybe someone you don't even know. And then that person will affect another person, before it fizzles out.
> The same is true about hopelessness. You can transfer it in the same way--a ripple effect--if you're not careful.
> So leaders have a responsibility.
> At Gallup they identify the most hopeful people in an organisation and power them to be hopeful beacons.
> Two years ago they put out a call to find hopeful teachers. The superintendents said it didn't take them a second to figure it out. Think of: who's the most hopeful person in your town. [Sad Australian fact: most people don't know the people in their own. We're isolated from our community members. Doesn't have to be]
> The most hopeful teacher in America: Mary Hawkins-Jones. She can transform an entire school district all by herself. When she was hired, she said "the children will remember me this year."
> You can do this for your school, community, town, workplace, government, children in your community. You can say to them: it's your responsibility to spread hope to the 3rd degree (the ripple effect mentioned above).
>* The three things hopeful leaders need to do to make hope happen in your community:
> Create and sustain excitement about the future. You need exciting (sometimes big) goals.
> Knock down existing obstacles to goals, and don't put up new ones.
> Re-establish goals--regoal--when the circumstances demand it.
>[...] “Hope matters. Hope is a choice. Hope can be learned. Hope is contagious.”
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source
Hoffman's book represents the orthodox western security agencies view of terrorism, it's superficial, partisan in its approach, and there are far better books out there. Its good for describing the media/Terror relationship but not much else.]
This is well worth a read, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
and this: Understanding Terror Networks
http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399534539
Books.
It's quite a bit more complicated than that, they still retain, even in the US, tighter circles that "inbreed" and maintain a constant core. And many of the ones at the edge still do very useful things for the group overall. If you're interested in more details on this, read the 2nd and maybe the 1st of Kevin McDonald's trilogy.
Are you counting behavioral economics as Econ or psychology? I personally count all kahneman, fiske, and even green as psychologists. Econ might be useful for explaining how people behave after the action but it isn't good at explaining how to compel actions. I could explain more if you're interested. I saw you were looking to read the tipping point. Don't. Gladwell is crap. Read Connected instead:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316036137?pc_redir=1404306449&robot_redir=1
Honestly even sociology, especially social network theories, are much more useful to influence prosocial behavior than Econ. And unless you cite something specific, you should read up on some other fields. Econ in university always tries to make it sound like it has an answer for everything, but people are pretty complex.
Okay I usually post this when girls ask questions like that. You should get your hands on some of the few good seduction books for women, and besides that, there is some books written for both genders. If you're a nerd and need something more scientific, look into evolutionary psychology which also has a lot of knowledge about mating strategies. If you don't care much for scientifically backed stuff, but want a good communication training, then there's some good nlp books out there.
I can recommend a book that also has a lot of other references. http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399534539
Humans have evolved certain mating strategies due to sexual selection. If you want to know more, read for instance this:
https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/0205992129
This thread is ridiculous. Most people have absolutely no clue about human mating, and live in some fantasy world where they - consciously or unconsciously, reject human biology and evolution. Human instincts are far deeper and more influential on our behavior than current cultural trends.
First of all, it is an unfortunate byproduct of the far left that we now view 'diversity' as only meaning diversity in skin color, when there are so many more differences--of culture, religion, gender, class, and opinion--worth considering. Not even dwelling on the actual difficulty of calculating a society's 'diversity,' let's consider this: one way to look at science is that there are pieces of cultural knowledge that we all share. In order to make a discovery, formulate an opinion, or analyze something, one has to rely on previously learned, whether conscious or unconscious, concepts. It's impossible to talk about anything without using the cultural lexicon you've inherited since birth. What is a cultural lexicon? It is the values, norms, information, and ways of looking at the world that are the product of a culture. Joe Henrich, a professor of anthropology and cognition at Columbia, argues in his book The Secret of Our Success that the reason that science emerged out of Greece instead of, say, China, was a matter of the culture of the Ancient Greeks.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Our-Success-Domesticating/dp/0691166854
The East has traditionally followed a more holistic, interconnected philosophy, as opposed to the West, which is much more analytical and reductionist. Henrich shows that the way agriculture emerged in these respective countries, with China's shared system necessary for wet rice farming and Greece's individual farmers made Greeks more inclined to analyze something's separate parts. This is the foundation of science. (The etymology of 'analyze' is literally to break something apart.) Thus, the shared cultural lexicon of individual contribution and separate rather than all-encompassing inquiry allowed Greece to be the birthplace of modern science. Discoveries do not just come out of nowhere; the people who discovered new concepts owe themselves to the shared concepts they used to explore it. There are some discoveries that were, in a sense, inevitable--evolution, for example. This does not detract from Darwin's skill as a thinker, but the theory of evolution would've been (and was) formed without him. It was just a matter of who came first. Thus, the more cultures you have the more cultural lexicons you have and thus the more discoveries you are able to have. There are simply concepts and artworks and discoveries that are not going to be able to be made when someone is stuck in their paradigm. The black community is a great example of this: they have made sizable contributions--the works of Toni Morrison and the creation of hip-hop, for example--that depend of a shared system of ideas. Quite simply, the more diverse a society is the more concepts are able to be worked with, and the more discoveries are able to be made that depend on those concepts.
Except that denial of negative realities has recently been touted as the very mechanism responsible for our overwhelming dominance and progression, not "holding bad news with more regard than good".
>In Denial, biologists Varki and Brower (Brower died in 2007) propose a novel explanation for why humans surpassed all other species in mental prowess. The authors argue that as humans contemplated the intentions of those around them, they began reflecting more deeply on the meaning of life itself, and this examination led to the frightening awareness of their mortality. To assuage such fears, humans evolved the unique ability to deny reality. The authors reason that religion and philosophy represent some of our best efforts to do so.
>Scientific American goes on to opine that, “Although a gift for self-deception may have saved our ancestors from despair, it might also be our downfall. But recognizing this tendency in ourselves may push us to stop ignoring unpleasant truths, such as global warming and poverty, and start addressing them.”
As someone who has deeply studied the esoteric systems and the problems of "enlightenment", I think the evolutionary biology idea presented in this recently published book, talked about a bit in the article I linked, may lead to a revolution in "enlightenment"-seeking and advanced consciousness training.
I am likely to be coming back to this idea from biology and genetics again and again.
I'm going to post a few snippets - I think the article is well worth your time, not terribly long, and may take it's place among the most important things you will ever read.
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" ... a tall, intense man with a scraggly beard sat down next to me, introduced himself as Danny Brower, and pointedly informed me that we were “all asking the wrong question.” At first I thought he was some local eccentric, but when I realized he was a well-known professor at the university, I gave him a careful hearing.
Instead of just asking what evolutionary processes made us human, Danny said we should also be asking why such complex mental abilities have appeared only in humans, despite many other intelligent species having existed and evolved for millions of years. In other words, if having complex humanlike mental abilities has been so good for the success of our species (as everyone has assumed), then how is it that we are the only species that got so brainy? The usual assumption is that something very unusual and special happened to human brains during evolution, and that we just need to find out what that something is. But Danny took a fascinating contrarian’s position, saying that we should not be looking for what everyone else was—the presumed special brain changes that made us human. Rather, we should be asking what has been holding back all the other intelligent species that, like humans, seem to have self-awareness of themselves as individuals—a list that may include chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins, orcas (so-called killer whales), elephants, and even birds such as magpies. Danny asked: Why are there no humanlike elephant or humanlike dolphin species as yet, despite millions of years of evolutionary opportunity for making this transition?
The next mental step beyond the basic awareness of one’s own personhood that many of the species mentioned above seem to possess could be awareness of the personhood of others—in other words, knowing that others of your own kind are also equally self-aware. But Danny argued that gaining this useful ability would also result in understanding the deaths of others of your own kind—and, consequently , realizing one’s own individual mortality. And he suggested that this all-encompassing, persistent, terror-filled realization would cause an individual who first made that critical step to lose out in the struggle to secure a mate and pass his or her genes to the next generation—in other words, such an individual would reach an evolutionary dead end. Danny suggested that we humans were the only species to finally get past this long-standing barrier. And he posited that we did this by simultaneously evolving mechanisms to deny our mortality.
I suspect most readers will have the same initial reaction I had—that this seems much more convoluted and complicated than simply saying that we humans evolved special mental abilities over time. But I realized that Danny was describing an apparently novel theory based on a counterintuitive line of logic, which seemed relevant to explaining both human origins and some unique features of the human mind. And my decade-long self-education about human origins had already prepared me to consider the larger implications of what he was saying. I began to think that such a rare and difficult transition might even possibly explain why all humans on the planet today seem to have emerged from a small group in Africa, completely replacing all other humanlike species that coexisted at the time."
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"Soon after the letter’s publication, I heard from Sheldon Solomon, a member of a well-regarded group of psychologists influenced by the ideas of Ernest Becker and best known for their “terror management theory.” Their concept is supported by various types of experimental evidence and indicates that we humans have a variety of “worldview and self-esteem mechanisms” to deal with the terror of knowing we are going to die. In his letter to me, Solomon wrote: “We agree with your argument that the benefits of consciousness and self-awareness could only be reaped if they were accompanied by simultaneous mechanisms to deny death.”"
====================================
Here's a link to the book, just published, I am going to get it and read it, and see how well he supports his argument:
Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind
Jews are not a cohesive ethnic group either - they've got white Azkhenazim, Arab Mizrahim, Sephardim - and even a small number of black, Chinese, and mixed race Jews, but, they have figured out that if they want to become powerful they have to work together and they built an entire religion around that philosophy. Some people call that the Judaic ethnic group strategy. Their strategy works very well against atomized ethnic groups like whites. And, I can tell you for a fact that their is an appearance based group called "whites" - and this includes all white ethnic groups in Europe, Canada, America, and Australia. You say that whites don't exist, and that when I look in the mirror my eyes are deceiving me, but I can tell you for a fact that I am a white person. People see me as white. I don't know where my ancestors came from. Based on my features probably Scandinavia, but who knows. White people worldwide are part of a universal brotherhood, in the same way that Jews are (and their "race" is largely a fiction). Cultures, languages, and societies don't change your race. Did you know that in Israel people come from all over the world, but when they get Israeli citizenship they all learn Hebrew and identify themselves as one of the main three Jewish races - Azhenazim, Mizrahim, and Sephardim? Fiction or not - you will embrace ethnic consciousness or lose power to other ethnic groups that do. You should read this book:
https://www.amazon.ca/People-That-Shall-Dwell-Alone/dp/0595228380
I'll just ignore your patronising assumptions about me, but thanks for the thoughts.
Anyway - of course we're the same underneath, it's all gravy, tinsel and gristle. It's the 'cultural overlay' that makes us different.
>The psychology and emotions of Chinese people are exactly the same as all other humans.
Emotions - well, of course they get happy, sad, bored and lonely like everyone else but psychology is something else.
Try reading The Geography of Thought - although Nisbett perhaps goes a little too far in trying to extrapolate the data from experiments into all-encompassing generalisations, there is quite a lot to show that we are not 'all the same'. Not worse or better than each other, just different.
EDIT: added author's name
sitting around and debating the topic is exactly what I have a problem with. I am in no way qualified to answers these questions, and never claimed to be. I only pointed out that the philosophers aren't qualified either. Since this is /r/trueatheism, can I recommend a few books on the topic? Science of Good and Evil or The Moral Landscape are both good reads, and I think they have advanced the study of Ethics by leaps and bounds.
When prophecy fails
Edit: This post has come and gone, and my comment got downvoted a bit. I choose to believe it's because I didn't properly explain the context, so here goes:
This book is by (mostly) Leon Festinger, who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance in the early 60s. The book explains, in part, why evidence doesn't change people's minds very often. In fact, evidence contradicting an opinion seems to make most people double down, or dig in with their position even deeper. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful and (generally) empirically supported explanation for why that happens.
My comment, though lacking in details, was intended to direct people toward a source that, though several decades old, still provides an evidence-supported explanation for why the thing in this empirical study happens. In other words, it's a pretty reasonable explanation for why Republican men became more sexist (not less, as rationality would predict) after Blasey Ford's testimony. Because of cognitive dissonance.