(Part 2) Top products from r/lectures

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We found 21 product mentions on r/lectures. We ranked the 45 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.

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Top comments that mention products on r/lectures:

u/Stewjon · 3 pointsr/lectures

Good find! I could watch this for hours.

I wish all anthropology and linguistics departments did this demonstration once a semester/quarter, not just for students, but for the public. It's fun to see structure and rules emerge in only a few minutes of interaction. It's difficult to think about linguistics or cultural anthropology and not start recognizing the arbitrariness of our own ways of thinking and communicating. That kind of confrontation/awareness/seeing is really invaluable; it's good for everyone.

Everett's book "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes" is a really fun field memoir of his time with the Piraha. One need not be a linguist to understand and enjoy it. It's not heavy on the academic linguistic stuff. It's sort of light linguistic and light ethnography. So if anyone finds something in this lecture intriguing, I'd recommend checking it out. Piraha is one of the most interesting languages I've come across. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498712271&sr=8-1&keywords=daniel+everett

He also spoke at The Long Now Foundation about the Piraha, and about saving disappearing/endangered languages. https://soundcloud.com/longnow/endangered-languages-lost-knowledge-and-future

If anyone watched "Arrival" and thought "hey that looks interesting", guess what! You can do that! Even without aliens. It's almost just as hard, and definitely a lot of fun.

Actually, if you saw "Arrival" and thought "hey that seems neat" or "ugh this is NOT how linguistics and aliens would work" or whatever, then you might be interested in a collection of articles put together by NASA into one document called "Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication" which goes a bit more into the history of concepts around alien contact scenarios. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/archaeology_anthropology_and_interstellar_communication.html

u/godless_communism · 6 pointsr/lectures

This! This! A hundred times this!

Game Theory will really open your eyes to patterns of social interactions and competition. For those who are unfamiliar, Game Theory tells you the best strategy to take given your opponent is rational, but you don't know what he'll do. The insights are amazing.

Also, I would highly recommend this book which I am halfway through - Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

u/WhereaboutsUnknown · 5 pointsr/lectures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the effects of TV on perception of reality.

Tannis MacBeth also did a study and wrote an amazing book on the effects of TV on society, as seen in a real life rural village, from the very beginning.

Book'll change your life, bro, swear to god. Here is a link to amazon, I don't waste my time with money making schemes or none of that shit, so: http://www.amazon.com/The-Impact-Television-Experiment-Communities/dp/0127562915

...but the internet is cool, bros, don't worry. . ..

u/Stavica · 2 pointsr/lectures

Crystal is an excellent author of books regarding the english language, read one of his books for linguistic anthropology, http://www.amazon.ca/Little-Book-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0300170823.

This subreddit is nice, seeing a name I've studied content from :).

As an edit, I figured there was an Aeon article that fit well enough: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

Basically, why is english so odd and different from othr languages, what led up to it, etc.

u/resilienceforall · 10 pointsr/lectures

Second this. It's an absolutely brilliant, thought provoking book.

It grabbed me when I first read it more than 15 years ago with its very first paragraph (in which he was talking about the prevailing Skinnerian idea of punishments and rewards working to shape behavior over time) and never let go. The beginning read:

>"There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us."

That opening gambit is so powerful. I think it can be applied to many other areas of life beyond the psychology of competition too.

Interested readers can buy it on Amazon for as little as one penny.

u/Zossimov · 1 pointr/lectures

Not fully on topic but I can recommend a book entitled Understanding Cross-Cultural Management which I use for a summer course of the same title. A comprehensive manual encompassing different fields from organisational culture and change to leadership attributes in multicultural settings.

u/sina12345 · 9 pointsr/lectures

The assessment is interesting, and from a physical/dynamical perspective, it's very enticing. However I can't help but feel unsatisfied that still it's not clear what society should actually do in such a situation.

I also tend to agree with the wildfire analogy right at the very end and have used it myself a few times. I think the useful thing about a wildfire is its obvious ability to quickly deconstruct a massive amount of space at a molecular level, allowing new life to take its place. Nature, evolution, culture are all emergent properties of hysteresis; the past is encoded deeply into the future. When the environment/constraints of life change quicker than the hysteresis allows, societies (or avalanches) collapse. While catastrophic, these collapses can also open new space for new opportunities to blossom that otherwise would not get the chance to.

So I think the problem is that as humans, a controlled and quick deconstruction is not something we like or are good at doing. Tradition, while useful in it's wisdom, also has an interval of relevance. If the constraints of life change quicker than tradition can explain, one must change and explore the chaos and unknown. The age old dichotomy of left and right or yin and yang. Obviously it's a balance of the two, so that means we need to learn as a society when to be swift, and when to be calm.

In today's world where change seems inevitable and tradition longs for relevancy, we face the dilemma of what we keep and what we throw over board. If we don't figure it out fast enough, the probability of collapse or at least a catastrophe will continue to increase as the constraints of life overpower our ability to make the choices required to create a good future and prevent misery.

PS. The citations on the wiki article on Self-organized Criticality is an interesting place to explore the idea of criticality in nature, the human brain, and society. One of the original authors, Per Bak, wrote a whole book on this subject which I've heard is good though I have not had the chance to read yet.

u/BruceWayneIsBarman · 1 pointr/lectures

For others interested in this topic: I highly recommend a book called The Filter Bubble that explores how algorithms impact our social and political lives.

u/gu1t4r5 · 1 pointr/lectures

Yeah, and it seems like Jerry has just released a book with the same title too. Couldn't find any other reference to the title in my quick google

u/StructuralViolence · 2 pointsr/lectures

If you enjoyed that talk, you'd likely enjoy books from Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker. If you don't have a dozen or more hours to read both of these books, the NYBOOKS writeup is pretty good (and might convince you to spend the dozen hours, as it did me). Lastly, if your schedule/lifestyle better accommodates listening to an mp3 rather than reading a book, I cannot recommend highly enough a talk from UW School of Public Health senior lecturer Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, "Is America Driving You Crazy?" [10mb mp3 or low quality YouTube video].

For those who are too lazy to click the NYBOOKS writeup above, here's a brief excerpt that gets at some of the good stuff:

>For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

>Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.

>Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.

>Kirsch was also struck by another unexpected finding. In his earlier study and in work by others, he observed that even treatments that were not considered to be antidepressants—such as synthetic thyroid hormone, opiates, sedatives, stimulants, and some herbal remedies—were as effective as antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression. Kirsch writes, “When administered as antidepressants, drugs that increase, decrease or have no effect on serotonin all relieve depression to about the same degree.” What all these “effective” drugs had in common was that they produced side effects, which participating patients had been told they might experience.

>It is important that clinical trials, particularly those dealing with subjective conditions like depression, remain double-blind, with neither patients nor doctors knowing whether or not they are getting a placebo. That prevents both patients and doctors from imagining improvements that are not there, something that is more likely if they believe the agent being administered is an active drug instead of a placebo. Faced with his findings that nearly any pill with side effects was slightly more effective in treating depression than an inert placebo, Kirsch speculated that the presence of side effects in individuals receiving drugs enabled them to guess correctly that they were getting active treatment—and this was borne out by interviews with patients and doctors—which made them more likely to report improvement. He suggests that the reason antidepressants appear to work better in relieving severe depression than in less severe cases is that patients with severe symptoms are likely to be on higher doses and therefore experience more side effects.

u/locster · 1 pointr/lectures

If you like this then also check out Danial Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, which, among other things, discusses the planning fallacy and Dunning-Kruger effect.

u/Qwill2 · 1 pointr/lectures

The speaker is John Gray (wiki) and the title of the lecture seems to be Isaiah Berlin and the Meaning of Freedom:

> John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948, in South Shields, then in County Durham) is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He is formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

> He has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religious ideologies, and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

>Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray writes that 'humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.'

u/georgedean · 4 pointsr/lectures

I think you can absolutely make that argument! In fact, it's been recently made in book form here. As Merridale argues, without Germany's role in Lenin's return, the USSR would not have existed.

More to the point, the German role in transporting Lenin was part of a broader plan to foment revolution in Russia, topple the provisional government, and ensure Russia withdrew from the war. This was the only plausible path to victory the Germans had in 1917. And in the short term the plot was very successful, although it backfired dramatically in the ensuing decades.

u/acdenh · 9 pointsr/lectures

van der Kolk notably the author of The Body Keeps the Score, best selling book on CPTSD.

edit: more personal note; I dealt with abuse and emotional neglect in childhood, also some physical and sexual abuse from classmates. What is interesting is that I am transgender but at a certain point in childhood I somehow forgot and stopped understanding this about myself. I previously thought that I might have CPTSD, most specifically because I often deal with depersonalization and derealization, but it turns out that is extremely common in gender dysphoria. And more importantly, childhood trauma causes that splintering of the personality, or impairment in describing emotional states and their meanings. That is to say, for many years I could no longer recognize that gender dysphoria I was experiencing came from being internally female, rather than arising out of apparently nowhere.

u/rnaa49 · 28 pointsr/lectures

I saw Ronson on C-SPAN back then, and it was like he was describing my brother. I read his book, and many others, and sooo many mysteries of my life were explained. It turns out my mother was a psychopath, and two of my siblings inherited it from her. Growing up in a family of psychopaths caused me to think they were the normal ones. And, so, I ended up marrying one. That's all in the past now.

My standard elevator talk about the danger of psychopaths:
(Recommended references are at the end.)

-- I am on a mission to expose the reality of psychopaths. Like David Vincent on the old TV show The Invaders, I know there are predators among us. Like on the show, many people I talk to can't fathom their existence.

-- The words psychopath and sociopath are synonymous today.
Disparate avenues of research came to be understood to have the same subject. (The so-called "official" name, anti-social personality disorder, in DSM-5 is so vague it's meaningless.) The originator of the clinical test for the condition prefers psychopath, and this is what I will use. Also, see the first paragraph of the fifth reference.

-- Psychopathy is a brain defect.
It is not treatable. Their brains are not wired to see humans as anything besides objects to exploit. Their amygdala, the area of the brain that processes emotions, does not function as in a normal brain. That is why they feel no emotions or empathy, although many learn to fake these when it benefits them. (There is also a controversial hypothesis that their mirror neurons are inoperative.) Surprisingly, at least to me, this defect comes with two effects:

  1. Our mental states are completely hidden to them. They don't realize humans have minds and memories, hence their behavior of lying as easily as they breathe. Words have no meaning, and are simply tools to manipulate us automatons. Lies are throw-away and immediately forgotten. That's why they can make contradictory back-to-back statements without blinking an eye. It is sometimes said they are experts at reading people, but this is wrong. Instead, they are experts at putting people into situations with predictable reactions, a skill learned in childhood by "successful" psychopaths.
  2. They don't experience time like us. There is no past or future, only the now. Hence, they have no thought of past actions, or concern for future consequences of current actions.

    -- Not all narcissists are psychopaths, but all psychopaths are narcissistic.
    This is easy to understand because, to themselves, they are the only conscious being on Earth. They are the only thing that really matters. Everything and everyone are merely props in their world.

    -- Psychopaths are not crazy.
    Imagine being fully rational but without the burden of emotions like guilt, remorse, or shame, and without the chains of ethics, morals, or compassion. ("burden" and "chains" would be their words, not mine. They would say, "Only chumps follow the rules or give a shit.") They know what they're doing, and have to avoid being caught. Hence, they do their thing secretively, and behind peoples' backs. They will also distract and deflect attention away from their actions by blaming others, "throwing grenades," sabotaging or otherwise neutralizing anyone they regard as threats, and sowing doubt and distrust. But to your face, many are charming and disarming. One fascinating trait is their insistence on never being wrong or held accountable. This is a ploy for avoiding suspicion, and this is when their lying becomes truly bewildering.

    -- But psychopaths are lazy
    To a psychopath, life is a con on humans. Their goal is to acquire whatever drives them with the least effort. They learn early how to appear productive and hard-working, but it is usually superficial. They are the ultimate brown-nosers and flatterers since this helps get ahead, disguise their actions, and defend against peers' accusations of misdeeds. They are notorious for taking credit for other people's work. My favorite ploy is when they have to produce results or make a decision for which they have no idea, they will temporize in an effort to appear smart, and try to bluff their way till a meeting ends. (This last one is not limited to psychopaths, of course. But they are consummate posers.)

    -- Tips for identifying a psychopath
    (These are meant to help cold-read a suspected psychopath, not to substitute for more extensive analysis, such as presented in the recommended readings. They are based on 50+ years of experience living intimately with psychopaths.)
  • A psychopath flies blind when talking on a phone. Without a human present for cues, they tend to expose their thought processes, which can be jarring and disturbing, and a departure from their public persona.
  • A psychopath does not cry (except for those who have learned to). A female psychopath once told me only wimps cry, to justify her never crying. Remember, no emotions, so no normal emotional responses.
  • Psychopaths do not understand word play or figurative language, and they tend to take language literally. Communication often requires getting inside another's head to understand the words, and to read between the lines. Psychopaths are unable to do this.
  • A psychopath manipulates by relying on our normal reactions to situations. They become confused and impotent when you react differently than they expect. For example, if they insult you to put you on the defensive, simply laugh back.
  • Psychopaths are generally glib, using language (as untruthful as it is) to smoothly smother suspicion, and to control interactions. They aren't interested in what you have to say, and will dominate the time rather than yield in a conversation -- and risk exposing their inability to connect or care.
  • Many people report a 1000-foot stare or "dead eyes" in a psychopath. This is not unexpected as they simply regard you as an object and not a person.

    -- A psychopath uses tactics common to salespersons to manipulate you.
    This is because these tactics work. This specific problem is not with psychopaths (or salespersons!), but with us. It's human nature to believe people are trustworthy, to believe flattery, to question our own eyes when presented with disturbing evidence -- in other words, to be easy marks.

    -- It is estimated that at least 1 in 100 is a psychopath.
    That's over 3 million in the US. The percentage is higher in certain fields, such as politics and finance, that attract the psychopath. Seemingly, they pursue the Big Three: money, power, sex. (Why? With no real connection to humankind, and devoid of morals, these are aspects of life that can be easily taken and enjoyed.) Educate yourself on psychopathy because the odds are good one or more of them are fucking up your life.

    -- Here are some books I used on my journey to discovery of the malevolent influence of psychopaths in my own life.

    Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
    Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
    Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight
    The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
    The Inner World of the Psychopath: A definitive primer on the psychopathic personality
    The Sociopath Next Door
    The Wisdom of Psychopaths

    The first two books are written by Dr. Robert Hare. He developed the clinical test for psychopathy that is the subject of the fourth book (which is an entertaining, yet disturbing, read).