(Part 3) Top products from r/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.

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.

> Why is that?

Because people should think for themselves.

> But you cannot judge a man based on one work.

Good point. If you want a bit more meat, Peterson also wrote a book called Maps of Meaning which is supported by his class on YouTube.

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.

Richard Wolff has actually coauthored a book on why the USSR failed using the theories in this course. The book is called Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. http://www.amazon.com/Class-Theory-History-Capitalism-Communism/dp/0415933188