(Part 3) Top products from r/IntellectualDarkWeb

Steven Pinker shares this article that challenges some of Peterson's assumptions.

An excerpt:

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>Dostoevsky Distraction — Abandon Judeo-Christianity at your peril:
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>“Crime and Punishment is the best investigation, I know, of what happens if you take the notion that there’s nothing divine about the individual seriously.”
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>Deconstruction #1 — Jordan repeatedly cites the character Raskolnikov as being the poster child for what happens when a person gives up a belief in the divinity of other humans; or, as he and Dostoevsky define it, an atheist. Except, and as a psychologist, he knows that someone who determines other people have no intrinsic value “is the psychopath’s viewpoint.” That he conflates atheism with psychopathy is disingenuous, intellectually dishonest, and professionally irresponsible.
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>Deconstruction #2 — Like Jordan, Dostoevsky was a committed Christian who viewed the abandonment of Judeo-Christian values as an ill omen, and sounded the warning. However, Jordan omitted the inconvenient truth that his literary hero was an avowed Christian socialist who proclaimed: “If everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up.”



Moral Atheist Mystification — If you act in a moral way, you’re acting out religious values:

>“As I said at the beginning, the atheist types act out a religious structure.”

Deconstruction #1 — As pointed out in the Deuteronomistic Paradigm, moral values preceded their codification in religious texts, and in the Dostoevsky Distraction, that Jordan has his own, unique, definition of what atheist means, it is irresponsible for Jordan to fuel the flawed perception that atheists are immoral.

Deconstruction #2 — Despite Jordan’s ominous warnings that leaving religion behind is bad for society, there is a clear correlation between countries with increasingly secular tendencies and the happiness of its citizens.

Deconstruction #3 — Again, also despite Jordan’s warning of putting the Judeo-Christian traditions out to pasture, is the idea that atheists are calling for anarchy and immoral behaviour. In conjunction with this perspective, is Jordan’s wholesale ignoring of the immoral acts listed in the Bible (drowning the planet, Abraham’s willingness to murder his child, the Passover slaughter of innocent Egyptians to make a point, Job, etc.); and the fact that most parishioners do not read these stories metaphorically, as Jordan claims religious passages should be understood — not literally, but figuratively — for the morals of the story.

Deconstruction #4 — Jordan’s obsession with the nihilism of Nietzsche is unwarranted, and, indeed, bordering on Chicken Little; especially in light of the facts of deconstruction #2.

It appears contradictory, to me anyway, that if the values contained within the Judeo-Christian tradition preceded the tradition (part 4), then why should Jordan be worried if people are simply abandoning the vehicle which, successfully, conveyed the values? The values are the important factor, the ones that emerged from the unconscious, not the transmission mechanism. “Adamant anti-religious thinkers” are not advocating that we abandon morality, or “our immersement in the underlying dream,” so the values themselves will remain intact. Another Canadian psychologist, Steven Pinker, makes this point in Enlightenment Now:

>“If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case.”

Steven, as the subtitle of the book alludes, made “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” that society is not in any danger — contrary to Jordan’s dire warnings — from increasing secularization:

>“Evolution helps explain another foundation of secular morality: our capacity for sympathy (or, as the Enlightenment writers variously referred to it, benevolence, pity, imagination, or commiseration). Even if a rational agent deduces that it’s in everyone’s long-term interests to be moral, it’s hard to imagine him sticking his neck out to make a sacrifice for another’s benefit unless something gives him a nudge. The nudge needn’t come from an angel on one shoulder; evolutionary psychology explains how it comes from the emotions that make us social animals…Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to encompass all sentient beings…
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>A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing — that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives — is just such a principle, since it’s based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.
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>History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism.”

The book itself it a hack-job hit piece on men, and Ben Sixsmith's review – which is what's linked – is a great takedown of Plank's "work."

If anyone is interested in further reading regarding actual masculinity and what men face today, here's a small reading list:

• King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette [Both of these two gentlemen work is generally worth reading but this is the best breakdown of the positive and negative sides of masculinity that I've found. It also equipped me to start tackling my own masculinity in earnest; especially once I had the "immature masculine" models laid out before me in this book.]
  
• The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Warren Farrell PhD and John Gray PhD. [Don't let the title mislead you; Farrell does an excellent job of identifying the overarching issues facing men today and from where they seem to stem. His use of "you're son" in the place of a proverbial "you" takes some getting used to, but it is every bit an eve-opening, depressing, motivating, and forthright read. This was tied for the top of this list with 'KWML. The importance of a present and engaged father cannot be ignored any longer.']
  
• The Myth of Male Power, by Warren Pharrell PhD. [Another hard-hitting contribution from Farrell, this entry challenges the dogma of the entire concept of a patriarchy an does so well-armed with stats, studies, and facts. Men being indoctrinated into being expendable with the illusion of gaining/having power could be (I believe it's VERY likely) a huge contributor to the increasing plight of men in western societies, despite the deluge of rhetoric claiming men are so powerful they oppress everyone else.]
  
  I may even make a separate post for this because it's very important to me. I am in the middle of researching and writing a book that, I hope, does what Plank's drivel claimed to do. The materials here are just a few selections I've come across in my research. Maybe I can elaborate more on my work if I make a more comprehensive 'recommended reading' post re: masculinity. I'd love to see more discussion around this as I believe it's exactly the kind of thing to tackle in a community like this.

Submission Statement: Universality fairly easily leads to the conclusion that humans anywhere out of the left tail are fundamentally the same, mentally speaking.

>In computation, universality simply means a process that can simulate all processes — including itself. By simulation, we mean copying the behavior of a process to as much fidelity as we would like. At some point, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, we stop, and consider it a duck for all practical purposes. (There, I wrapped the Turing test for artificial general intelligence in a nutshell for you.) Replace “processes” with “machines,” and you roughly see how computers work: a universal machine is a machine that can simulate all machines, including itself. You can think of a machine simply as a process that transforms an input to an output following a fixed set of rules.
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>Think about it: if the human species depended on exceptional geniuses who nevertheless could never communicate their exceptional thoughts to another human being, then either they are intellectual con-artists (like postmodernist “philosophers”), or we would have been doomed a long time ago. Although a few critical individuals clearly hit upon the right ideas at the right place at the right time, many other individuals need to be able to independently verify and improve upon these ideas. The real intelligence lies in human cooperation. There is no such thing as an exponentially smarter human being for the same reason as there is no such thing as an exponentially taller human being. A genius who cannot communicate his thoughts to another human is, in fact, not a genius!
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>As an individual, what matters much, much more than your alleged IQ is what you do with your precious, limited time on Earth. Remember, universality says that we are all capable of exactly the same ideas. That is why even differences in human languages don’t really matter. (Whether or not the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, we get for free the result that it is ultimately irrelevant.) Remember, the insidious thing about IQ — as Nassim astutely observed with his owl eye— is that there are people who fancy “their” people genetically smarter than yours, and only want to “help” you. (They are often the same people who like to mistakenly think that the “West” discovered all civilization, and that the “West” is Nordic / North Atlantic / North Europe.) At best, they are overeducated idiots; at worst, they are racialists. No matter what anyone tells you, you can learn about anything you like. Go out, and find out what you are good at, what Nature put you here to discover, and teach the rest of us.
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>So, who should care about IQ? Nobody! Why? Because we are universal!

Came here to second Sir Roger Scruton.

Watch Why Beauty Matters (BBC special, on YouTube I believe) to get an idea of Scruton's general flavour.

Conservatism: An Invitation to The Great Tradition

Culture Counts (rereleased Sept 2018)

Both the above books are very worthwhile reads.

Submission statement: Cal is an academic and bestselling author of many books on productivity, focus, and effective study. This post talks about the effectiveness of "Indie Social Media" to achieve a completely different objective than other alternative social media failures that try to be the next Facebook or Twitter. The IDW is name checked as well.

> If you’re deeply committed to the Intellectual Dark Web, for example, then Thinkspot will probably return you much more value than Instagram or Twitter, even though its audience size is a minuscule fraction of these giants.

If you're not familiar with the author, I highly recommend his books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

I took a semester of an introductory course of Game Theory. We followed the textbook An Introduction to Game Theory by Osborne. The book is great for a first dive into the subject, has ample examples, easy explanations, and is not too mathematically involved. Don't trust the online ratings; this is a very clear-cut book that covers a lot of material.

We also had Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Neumann and Morgenstern, the founders of Game Theory, as a reference. It covers the motivations for game theory, explains basic concepts (like utility) which are taken for granted, and also explains economic behavior using Game Theory. It's a 600-page monster.

Submission statement:

Andrew Heaton interviews P. J. O’Rourke. O’Rourke penned a summary of Adam Smith, On The Wealth of Nations. They banter through Smith’ s legacy.