(Part 2) Top products from r/slatestarcodex

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We found 27 product mentions on r/slatestarcodex. We ranked the 546 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/slatestarcodex:

u/[deleted] · 5 pointsr/slatestarcodex

youre talking yourself into staying miserable or numb, and paying someone to validate your internal status quo.

That's pretty sad and wasteful, because youre then going to use this failed therapy to further tell yourself "SEE I TRIED" to stay stuck indefinitely.

I've met and talked to lots of sad 50+ yr old self-bullshitting intelligent men like that in my neighborhood. They're well-educated lonely assholes who just can't see themselves from the outside. I was a 20something at the time and they'd chat with me about their lives (craving female company I guess) thinking I would be sympathetic, but I could see all their self-sabotaging patterns, subconsciously we are all exactly where we want to be. They had no intention of changing just a life of 'trying'... As a defensive neurotic person not willing to stay that way, it was a real cautionary tale.

I don't want to bullshit myself out of a good life....anyway

Maybe you should pause therapy, read a bunch of books on how it works, and then go back with deeper appreciation for the "type" of work involved and asked of you.

If you're lazy and like binging tv Could also watch the old HBO show "In Treatment" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0835434/

(season 1 and 2 are the best and a nice set of varied patients in each) if you want a well-written fictionalized sense of how therapy could be, how different patients bullshit themselves emotionally until theyre sick of themselves and their trust in the therapeutic bond helps them change. Each character has a real arc, about 5 characters each doing weekly sessions.

You can pirate/stream it /buy it in a few places I think. The only downside is unrealistic expectations because most therapists are'nt that emotionally skilled/ attentive and most patients don't reveal their symptoms, absorb insights, or go that deep in 8 sessions. It's idealized and strangely fun to watch for two people talking, but it helped me believe in the process before I invested in real life.

P.S. if at some point you don't bring it all back to childhood, you have wasted your money. In my opinion CBT and the rest of the "thinking" based stuff are bandaids, playing whack-a-mole with symptoms that will rear back in new forms.

Also, once therapy helps you get the initial emotional bond with yourself, you can better help yourself, self-help books etc go a long way when you can actually feel and intuit the messages better. None of those resources make sense or will help you at all while you are cut off from your body and unconscious self.

Thats the best bang for your buck in my opinion, read a bunch to prepare yourself on how it works under the surface, spend all the time in therapy feeling things you may have repressed, avoided, talked your way out of, then leave therapy better able to sort out which resources you can use (The books I've found have been more profound for me than therapy but I wouldn't have known which subjects to search for or been "emotionally available" enough for the words and insights to reach me)

this is also just a nice intro book and super short https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Therapy-Generation-Therapists-Patients/dp/0061719617

(the pdf is floating around libgen / web if you're feeling cheap) good luck

EDIT -- also you sound really stiff, why don't you watch some School of Life youtube videos just to get a better grip on the emotional rhetoric involved. Videos like this one always get to me...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fG9-W-OwCs

u/59petunias · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Depends what you mean by "modern" - within the last thirty years? I can't speak for non-fiction but 80s fiction was very much up its own backside, so I wouldn't bother with the majority of it.

I can't think of any modern non-fiction that springs to mind as something I'd recommend; most of the big best-sellers seem to me to rely too much on a formula (find some obscure or forgotten nugget of past history/technology, spin it into a thrilling tale of lone hero against forces of human and natural obfuscation, and finish with triumphant victory of new theory/field/better mouse-trap).

That being said, I did enjoy Jacques Barzun's 2000 [From Dawn To Decadence] (https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060928832); I can't say I agreed with all of his conclusions, but I did enjoy the broad sweep of history and the chance to see a French-centric perspective as a change from the usual England and America-centric one you generally get in such historical reviews.

Also it's a brick of a book in the original hardback and gave my wrists good exercise in building up strength merely holding the damn thing to read it :-)

u/SincerelyOffensive · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

This is a great idea. Please definitely post your list when you've got it compiled.

In addition to some of the other books that have been recommended, I suggest the slightly more unconventional 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for a rather interesting look at a period in ancient history that I think is generally poorly covered. ("There were some civilizations like Egypt and Sumer, and they rose and fell, and look, it's Aristotle!") It really helps contextualize a lot of the ancient Mideast - who coexisted and what their relationships were, not just who was the Big Dog one after another.

It will also help break up the monotony of all the other books reading the same, because it's not organized like a traditional history book: instead it's organized almost like a play, with a cast of characters, a "prologue" and "epilogue," and several "Acts" describing key sequences of events! Despite that, the author is a pretty well regarded archaeologist at GWU, and it was published by Princeton University Press.

u/hypnosifl · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

>Companies that make robots and 3d printers are not massively valued on the stock market despite the very low long term interest rates right now.

My sense is that the private sector is typically not very good about investing in the development of technologies that aren't likely to pay off in the fairly near-term future, that's why basic research, and many really novel technologies like the internet, are often government-funded in their early stages. There are some exceptions like AT&T's historical Bell Labs but that kind of thing seems rare enough to be more like an "exception that proves the rule"--see this article which notes "Companies have moved away, however, from the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC model that afforded research scientists in the private sector more time (and funding) to focus on research that may not have direct application, at least in the short term."

As a matter of history, do you think it's typically true that the companies most involved in technologies that end up having massive economic effects, like the personal computer, are massively valued more than say 10 years before their impact becomes obvious? (leaving out examples of companies involved in major new technologies that were already very profitable for other reasons before the new technology was developed, like IBM long before the personal computer)

u/arikr · 7 pointsr/slatestarcodex

This is one of the most positively influential videos I've ever personally watched. Hope you enjoy it too!

A summary might be:

>If you do not know the steps to your goal with high confidence, then do the following:
>
>You can imagine that you're looking at a map, and your distant goal is somewhere on the map, but the map is blurry / not yet revealed all the way to your distant goal
>
>So then identify what options you *do* know the steps to (the ones that _are_ visible on the map), and then pick the option from those that is most novel
>
>This is because the more novel it is, the more likely it is to reveal large and unexpected portions of the map, potentially including the part that gives you a visible path to your distant goal
>
>So when uncertain, identify the most novel thing you know how to do/achieve, and repeat that, and that's likely the best (albeit very roundabout!) route for getting to your distant not-yet-visible-path goal.

Other things along the same lines:

u/phylogenik · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

With the weather finally cooling I've started jogging / slogging again -- does anyone have a good sense of how I might best assess my 'running form' to improve efficiency + performance & prevent injury? I've run on and off throughout my life, but never with any formal instruction, so there's always the lingering thought that I'm selling myself short or slowly degrading my joints or something. I think I'm pretty good at adhering to common running cues (neutral spine, relaxed shoulders, short stride, soft strike underneath body) but otherwise who knows.

Also pretty sore after my runs, and just discovered "percussive massage guns" as a recovery tool. The popular ones are quite pricey, but I've found that you can rig up an equivalent tool using a <$5 t-shank adapter for any old jigsaw / compatible reciprocating saw. Has worked really well for me so far!

u/electrace · 7 pointsr/slatestarcodex

>Obviously the fee wasn't large enough to create a sufficient incentive for many parents to pick up their children on time, but introducing it gave parents the impression that the fee made it okay.

I think that's the point. Or at least, that was the point in Predictably Irrational, the first time this example was given in a pop-econ book (to my knowledge).

In theory, any fee should increase the incentive. In practice, the small fee offset the social pressure that they felt to pick up their children on time.

>This isn't evidence that incentives don't work; it's evidence that badly-designed incentive schemes don't work.

It's evidence that not all incentives work. Introducing a tiny fee was a tiny incentive, and it didn't work.

u/Rev_JulesWinnfield · 4 pointsr/slatestarcodex

I've been lurking on this sub for quite a while under a number of accounts and I'm constantly surprised that so few people here are familiar with Gigerenzer's work. He's made a lot of progress undoing the damage done by Tversky and Kahneman's Heuristics and Biases Program and I think anyone intrinsically interested in human rationality will immediately see the value of Gigerenzer's work in this regard. The paper I linked is a must read for anyone who is familiar with T&K's work and might be wondering how the narrative that they constructed could be described as "damaging" to society.

EDIT: Just hijacking my own comment to list a few book recommendations. From another comment:

>The first is a textbook, but mostly because of its density, rather than difficulty. The other three are a bit more tailored toward people with less background knowledge but you might still prefer one of those if the content sounds interesting. Lots of people enjoyed "Risk Savvy", but I'd choose the one with a table of contents that speaks to your interests.

Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions

Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty

u/greatjasoni · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Reading a bunch of Nietzsche and then psychology. He can be interpreted in support of that position too, so you have to be careful how you read him. Find some secondary sources and check them after coming up with your own interpretations so you're not too off base. Fundamentally he hated nihilism and saw it everywhere, and was trying to find ways around it. If you struggle with it at all, he's the go to guy. He gets the fundamental problem down really well. His solutions are a bit untenable, as he had this idea of creating your own values. That's pretty much impossible because you're biologically and culturally programmed to have specific arbitrary values and there's nothing you can do about it. That's where the psychology comes in, as you learn what they are and what to do with them. Specific books that helped a lot:

Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of Idols

I'd also read some Kierkegaard for good measure. The west of western philosophy builds up to and later refutes Nietzsche's ideas. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas and Hegel are probably the biggest people I can think of that he is responding to, so you'd want to be familiar with the gist of what they were saying or Nietzsche won't make much sense. After him you can go to Heidegger who expanded on a lot of his ideas. There are tons of good overviews of this stuff online if you don't feel like wading through primary texts for months. You just need to know enough to get the references.

Psychology books:

Interpretation of Dreams Freud;
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker;
Man and His Symbols, and Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious by Jung; Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson

Also a book I really liked was Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield. It's mostly psychology with a little christian apologetics tacked on, but it lays out a phenomenological case for what is real and what isn't in a way that's simple and unique. I think about that book pretty much all the time.

Also check out this book on religion. This book is dense and cuts right into the philosophy of each religion. A grounding in all the major religious philosophies does wonders for this kind of thinking. Buddhism only goes so far. Assuming you're a westerner I'd learn as much about Christian philosophy as possible, since most of your values (probably) come from there. It's a very dark religion and people have been thinking about these exact problems for a very long time. The book of Ecclesiastes and the book of Job in particular are insightful. The meditation practice of Christian monks also comes to the same conclusions as the Buddhists but with a little more philosophical sophistication. Read "The Cloud of Unknowing" if you're interested in that.

I think the gist of the position is just to take your own values seriously, since they're the fundamental makeup of reality. Your reaction against them is just a language game. The rest of the philosophical construct is just a way of refuting that language game. Eventually you get to the point where the thought process seems a bit absurd to you (since you spent hundreds of hours painstakingly figuring out why), and you wonder why you had any issue in the first place.

u/tombsheets · 9 pointsr/slatestarcodex

That was more likely to be in American Nations and not in Albion's Seed, which covers only British immigration and is, as I remember it, more anthropological than political.

From a summary by Woodard:

> NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

From skimming this wiki page, it appears there were multiple rounds of immigration, and that the Dutch who live in Michigan moved 200 years after those who settled New Amsterdam.

u/zsjok · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

inspired by but not the same.

Also Turchin expanded sdt but it was developed by Jack Goldstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldstone

Basically he incorporated sdt into his analysis of historical societies and state breakdown and tested it with historical data.

The best book to start with Turchin in my opinion is this https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288193

Its a non math book which verbally lays out his theories and mainly focuses on historical empires but I think its necessary to fully understand Ages of Discord

Its easy to understand and absolutely profound, for me the most important book i have ever read

u/dark567 · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

The True Believer is good. Just go in with the understanding that this covers a lot of what make negative social movements as well(i.e. Nazism) win as well.

u/Gen_McMuster · 8 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Your last point is pretty reminiscent of ordinary men though this is definately easier to pull off when your exporting the jackbooted into communities they dont have ties with

u/nickel2 · 5 pointsr/slatestarcodex

> High-skilled 2nd-gen immigrants are indistinguishable from native blue tribers.

Sure... if you know New Haven and you see that comment about "sketchy crowds" you might guess she's prejudiced against more than "white trash."

>Okay, but at this point, what's the difference between your position and plain racism? Like, you're not demonstrating any evidence for this position (like the HBD folks do), you're not admitting other races are superior to whites (East Asians), you're just saying other ethnicities are probably evil when they aren't dumb. Or at least, that's what it sounds like to me.

I'm OK with being called racist. At this point it's clear to me that blue-tribers consider that to be the worst non-violent crime, worse than lying or cheating. Not so for me. A little prejudice is adaptive. That's why it's so common.

Of course they don't have (incontrovertible) evidence for their position, nobody's gonna get funding for that kind of thing these days (GWAS results will bring this whole argument crashing down in less than a decade). BTW I don't really read any of them besides Cochran-Harpending as those two are the only people of this time who actually know what they're talking about and are willing to write about it. Stephen Hsu too though he only writes esoterically and rarely gets into technical details on any topic. Emil Kirkegaard is decent too though not nearly as sharp or credentialed as Cochran. The co-authors of this essay are competent as well (from the GxE research I've seen by some of them) and clearly have some balls to throw out even the more haphazard hypotheses in public.

There are plenty of studies showing correlations between Euro ancestry (in Latin America, African-Americans, other places) and various life outcomes. There are studies showing it's not mediated by skin color so it's not because of colorism (independent assortment is a thing).

Not saying anything about superiority in any sense. I'm basically certain this is gonna be the Chinese century at this point (and am reading up to prepare for it). US upper middle-class may be too far gone. Economists tend to point toward the individualism-collectivism axis (1, 2) as a reason for the "Great Divergence," and these days Americans are all a bunch of conformist cowards while the Chinese are hungry as shit. I don't think of whites as the "master race." In fact, I think we've gone through 200 years straight of moderate dysgenics; not enough to explain the Asian-Euro IQ gap (and the Japanese went through their demographic transition a while ago but still score higher) so maybe we have an edge on some other factors, but it's going to be tough to stay competitive.

The idea that we should have a prior in favor of no difference is ridiculous. Only possible if you're heavily invested in social justice over truth normatively. It's been long enough with low gene flow and the differences in social structure all over the world (gene-culture coevolution) are manifest if you know any history.

For phenotypic evidence, see this behavioral econ study. The methodology is a little spare and the results not totally consistent but the fact that all the East Asian countries top one measure of dishonesty, including Japan, suggests to me it's not just a matter of comparative development. Or read this on the guilt-shame distinction. I don't know if that distinction carves reality at its joints and I don't know how you could end up selecting for honesty or "guilt," but it might be a thing. Or look at this on tax cheating. Self-reported ancestry is wonky (the type of person to identity with their English side and the type to identify with their Irish side are probably gonna be different), but maybe the Know Nothings had a point or two?

Also if you click through on that link next to "Big 5" in one of my earlier comments you'll find Nisbett notes that 2nd-generation immigrants converge some with NW Europeans on his novel personality measures but still differ noticeably. He still thinks the difference is environmental (I guess mediated by family), although I think he basically admitted the Ashkenazi-Euro gap was genetic at some point even though everything else is environmental which is kinda funny.

Or I can look at my own experience. The professors at my top 10 uni think the honor code is a joke. Don't think that was true back in the 50s. The math team at my high school got rocked by a massive cheating scandal too (why the hell would you cheat in an extracurricular of all things?). I know somebody who plagiarized an entire final project from alumni for a class in their major and is now going to a top 4 grad school in their discipline. I don't think they even know entirely why they're doing a PhD. Just "paid education."

In general my suspicion is that, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma that is life, NW Europeans tend toward playing C, while other groups tend to play D to varying degrees (more integrated immigrants are better but the gap will get smaller not disappear). You can fix that by just letting go of some freedoms (like honor codes), but it's a cost regardless.

As someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen and wants to raise my kids that way I would prefer for things to not shift toward a defect-heavy equilibrium. It might be hard to herd large masses of people with different preferences into one polity and still make things work.

I would think it would be smarter in the long run to stop pushing for the policies that are pissing people off than to try to suppress the response with moral haranguing. Tyler Cowen is a dilettante but it still might be worth it for you to read "The Complacent Class." The final passage is interesting and mostly references this book on the late Bronze Age collapse.

Pangloss wasn't right. All is not well with the world and Trump is not the worst of it. He is an epiphenomenon not a cause. The past half-century may have built the US and Europe into powder-kegs and the next 50 years are going to be far more interesting than the last. I don't have enough data yet but I have a bad feeling and I see rot.

u/SomeGuy58439 · 5 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Recommended reading: Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War where he spends quite a bit of time discussing this idea originally from Ibn Khaldun.

I'd translate loosely as "socially cohesiveness" / "tribal loyalty".

u/jaghataikhan · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

I'm not done with it yet, and some of it may be outdated, but I'm rather liking Paul Fussell's Class:

https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253

u/aeschenkarnos · 48 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Paul Fussell, "Class".

The specific styles of dress etc are somewhat out of date however the underlying principles of human class distinction (primarily, supervision and control vs self-determination) have remained current for the last few thousand years.

Here is a discussion I found that contains a lot of quotes from "Class", and also recommends another book, Michael Lind's "The Next American Nation".

u/SayingAndUnsaying · 4 pointsr/slatestarcodex

On Amazon, A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.

> This New York Times bestseller is a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership. Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Programme at Tufts Medical Center, offers and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: the very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lacklustre leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.

I read this a few years back and thought it was good.

u/yellowstuff · 1 pointr/slatestarcodex

Brown Medical School has a sleep lab run by Mary Carskadon, they have a list of relevant research here and here. Carskadon compiled The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreaming which sounds a lot like what you want, unfortunately it was written 26 years ago and never updated.

u/lkesteloot · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch radically changed the way I think about many things. It's one of the few books I've read twice (ten years apart). The physics part was interesting, but it's the philosophy of it that affected me.

Another book of his, The Beginning of Infinity, had quite an effect on me as well, especially the idea that all solutions have their problems, and that instead of regressing, we should push forward to find solutions to the new problems.

u/nullshun · 6 pointsr/slatestarcodex

> all the worlds religions and ethnicities should stop being jerks to each other. However, that seems unlikely.

It's very likely. It's been happening throughout history. It's happened while wealth inequality increased, as in the Pacification Process, when warring bands of relatively egalitarian foragers unified into larger, more stratified farming states.

> If we look at a lot of wars in the world we can see that its rich people (US Army) killing people with much less money.

I don't think wealth inequality causes that kind of violence at all. Except maybe indirectly, in that USA thinks they can get away with killing Iraqis, because Iraqis are too poor to defend themselves. And if you can force the rich to give away their money to the poor, surely you can just force the rich to not kill the poor.

Anyway, it's not that the rich hate the poor, for being poor, and so go out of their way to hurt the poor. If anything, this is an argument for more free markets. Allow the rich to benefit from "exploiting" (aka employing) the poor, so they won't want to fight the poor.