(Part 2) Top products from r/CrazyIdeas

No worries, I appreciate your continued interest and not dismissing this set of thought-patterns outright since there’s many compelling off-ramps / reasons they are not as common as you’d expect real/correct ones to be! :) Maybe the real “crazy idea” to me here is that it’s kind of wild how vastly common the non-reality-matching vague understanding is, when there is one that is more compelling / coherent / reality-observation-matching. I understand why we as humans have mostly begun thinking there, though, and it’s pretty interesting from a historical/evolutionary/meme-evolution angle.

Viewing the “mechanistic view” as opposed to “free will” is a false dichotomy—it’s crazy common though! In reality, the bundle of patterns we regard as “free will” is an emergent pattern FROM mechanistic patterns evolving. (In case you’re suuuper interested in a thorough slaying of the false dichotomy, the concisely-named Freedom Evolves by neuroscience-friendly philosopher-scientist Dennett is a mountain of science-backed evidence on the topic—but my caveat is he’s more annoyingly dense than anything you’ve just read from me! b/c this is hard shit we’re not very well set up / evolved to naturally comprehend—watching some YouTube videos of his might be more enjoyable)

I think the reason many folks view a vague concept of free will as vaguely opposed to a mechanistic view is often just (1) a failure of imagination — I can tell you I believe with extremely high confidence that there’s nothing non-physical about our brain’s operation in the mechanistic universe, and that doesn’t strike me as odd, wrong or irreconcilable. It just strikes me as—we were not historically great at thinking about how the very high level pattern of feeling of free will emerges from the low level pattern of the brain—given we didn’t even understand how the brain recognized objects based on our vision until less than 10 years ago—and it didn’t matter for our continued existence as patterns in the universe so why would we have evolved to care :D

Reason #2 is that many cling to a notion that the MIND must be somehow distinct from the BRAIN (i.e., “magical person sitting in your brain controlling it with levers” — we’ve peered into the brain and understand it quite well — that’s just not how the brain’s constituent patterns are structured). Why cling to such a notion? Why did we assume it’s distinct? Because it fits many of our preconceived world views — it helps us hold on to human special-ness, our religious precepts, hell—many words (fossils of past ideas) we are using to discuss with one another right now have these prejudices / assumptions baked in to them (notice the “I”s, “you”s, etc. — these are artificial distinctions we’ve just found evolutionarily / continued-pattern-existence useful).

We’re just in the last 5 or so years developing software thinking patterns (AI, narrowly focused than AGI) that have surpassed human-based thinking patterns in more and more fields. I can tell you with high confidence there is no ceiling that separates our bodies and brains and that which can be accomplished through software (even set within the Game of Life — just with a really large game board—the universe is vast like a super giant game of life game board). Those closest to development consider AGI something that will happen this century (myself included).

I believe there’s value in this reality-matching view becoming more common. It’s kind of like taking a dump and seeing things clearly when it clicks—damn—reality is all that is real. He’s a pattern, she’s a pattern, we’re all patterns, and that’s all cool!!

This was a character in "Lady Slings the Booze" by Spider Robinson. The hero's love interest was a pair of psychic twins who were raised to believe she was one person. She effectively became a single person with 2 bodies. One body was better at piano. The other was better at sex. She works in an extremely high class house of prostitution. Together with the hero, they save the world several times.

https://smile.amazon.com/Lady-Slings-Booze-Spider-Robinson/dp/0743435788?sa-no-redirect=1

1. If you think Congressman care about their $100,000 salary from the government, your understanding of how these people manipulate the system for personal gain is flawed.
   
   
2. If poor guy makes 1, and rich guy makes 100. Average is just over 50. If poor guy makes 10 times as much, and rich guy makes 100 - average is just 55. If poor guy makes 1, and rich guy doubles income to 200 - average is over 100. Your theory is flawed.
   
   
3. Who would calculate the average income? Oh, the same people who would benefit from the number being manipulated. A system like this would only provide a false sense of trust to the general public since all governments know How to Lie with Statistics
   

There's almost exactly that book. Each chapter in Click is written by a different author all telling the same story. I'm not positive they all have mental disorders, but they're creative authors so who really knows.
"Click"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RW813D6/

Have fun.

You may be interested in reading about Larry Niven's Ringworld novel, as it explores these same ideas.

More Information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

Does anyone remember Franken's book "Why Not Me?" The premise of the book is a hypothetical scenario wherein Franken is elected president and the results are comical and disastrous.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Me-Unmaking-Presidency/dp/0385334540

If I recall, this book was pretty good. Not as good as "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot", but okay.

Like SkyMaul?

You might want to read this.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487354433&sr=1-1&keywords=three+felonies+a+day

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Demand-Virtual-Reality-Works/dp/0393253694

Ah, Octember.

EDIT: adding link

Is it maybe the Motel of the Mysteries?

The Terence McKenna book, the H. G. Wells book, or the Bert Gordon movie? None of which have anything to do with cannibalism...

Everyone poops.

Ike didn't put on his own underwear.

They also ask questions. "What color Alex?"

You're right, and the guy who wrote the paper had no idea the U.S. had taken his work and run with it. He didn't find out until he came to teach in America in the early 90s.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003

No! Buy copies of Supercenter and mail them! It's an updated 1984

If you want some context for his case series and the variety of issues with it and him here is a section from Chapter 16 of Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (good book well worth reading) that covers it.

>Some fairly worrying questions have been raised since then. We won’t cover them in detail, because I don’t find ad hominem stories very interesting to write about, and because I don’t want that aspect of the story—rather than the research evidence—to be the reason why you come to your own conclusion about the risks of MMR and autism. There are things which came out in 2004, however, which cannot fairly be ignored, including allegations of multiple conflicts of interest, undeclared sources of bias in the recruitment of subjects for the paper, undisclosed negative findings, and problems with the ethical clearance for the tests. These were largely uncovered by a tenacious investigative journalist from the Sunday Times called Brian Deer, and they now form part of the allegations being investigated by the GMC.

>For example, it is investigating whether Wakefield failed to disclose to the editor of the Lancet his involvement in a patent relating to a new vaccine; more worrying are the concerns about where the twelve children in the 1998 Royal Free study came from. While in the paper it is stated that they were sequential referrals to a clinic, in fact Wakefield was already being paid £50,000 of legal aid money by a firm of solicitors to investigate children whose parents were preparing a case against MMR, and the GMC is further investigating where the patients in the study came from, because it seems that many of Wakefield’s referrals had come to him specifically as someone who could show a link between MMR and autism, whether formally or informally, and was working on a legal case. This is the beacon problem once more, and under these circumstances, the fact that only eight of the twelve children’s parents or physicians believed the problems were caused by MMR would be unimpressive, if anything.

>Of the twelve children in the paper, eleven sued drug companies (the one that didn’t was American), and ten of them already had legal aid to sue over MMR before the 1998 paper was published. Wakefield himself eventually received £435,643 plus expenses from the legal aid fund for his role in the case against MMR.

>Various intrusive clinical investigations—such as lumbar punctures and colonoscopies—were carried out on the children, and these required ethics committee clearance. The Ethics Committee had been assured that they were all clinically indicated, which is to say, in the interests of the children’s own clinical care: the GMC is now examining whether they were contrary to the clinical interests of the children, and performed simply for research.

>Lumbar puncture involves putting a needle into the centre of the spine to tap off some spinal fluid, and colonoscopy involves putting a flexible camera and light through the anus, up the rectum and into the bowel on a long lube. Neither is without risk, and indeed one of the children being investigated as part of an extension of the MMR research project was seriously harmed during colonoscopy, and was rushed to intensive care at Great Ormond Street Hospital after his bowel was punctured in twelve places. He suffered multiple organ failure, including kidney and liver problems, and neurological injuries, and received £482,300 in compensation. These things happen, nobody is to blame, and I am merely illustrating the reasons to be cautious about doing investigations.

>Meanwhile, in 1997 a young PhD student called Nick Chad-wick was starting his research career in Andrew Wakefield’s lab, using PCR technology (used as part of DNA fingerprinting) to look for traces of measles strain genetic material in the bowels of these twelve children, because this was a central feature of Wakefield’s theory. In 2004 Chadwick gave an interview to Channel 4’s Dispatches, and in 2007 he gave evidence at a US case on vaccines, stating that there was no measles RNA to be found in these samples. But this important finding, which conflicted with his charismatic supervisor’s theory, was not published.

If you believe in hell, you should read the book 23 Minutes in Hell by Bill Wiese! Definitely a thought provoking book, even if you don't believe its author was truthful!

http://www.amazon.com/23-Minutes-In-Hell-Torment/dp/1591858828