it must be said, even if its not what everyone wants to hear, that the fear-mongering corporate news media, who carpet the world in content that is deliberately designed to elicit a primordial brain-stem stress response, have probably contributed to this problem. whether they turn on the tv or they are sitting in the classroom, kids of all ages have it drilled into them that their country is evil and racist, that they are guilty almost implicitly for having white skin, doomed to a life of hardship if they have black skin, and also that the world is coming to rapid apocalypse which is completely the kids and the kids familys fault. i am not making a statement about whether any of that is true; what is undeniably true is that kids are being injected with this stuff 24/7 and its not good for them.
when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.
exactly. the equation has changed. people who dont fit in are now even more fucked. everyone is obligated to play this high stakes game that nobody asked for and that wasnt filtered through any kind of intelligent societal deliberation. nobody seems to be worried that kids make the rules in public schools, they bully each other viciously and kids who graduate from the system cant point to the country of portugal on a map. its full blown insanity.
But most of them become very skilled in navigating the social media landscape, which is what actually matters to them.
And the people that don't fit in will usually put more energy in other ways to express themselves and have a much higher chance of becoming Truly Interesting People, if they make it through that pressure cooker.
It's tough and I'm glad I'm not a part of it, but it's not the end of all cohesion in society that some make it out to be.
That's kind of the issue. A lot of them are committing suicide. Many more end up permanently scarred. Mental health issues are no joke. The author, Haidt, will himself recommend the concept of anti-fragility. Which is essentially toughening kids through gradual and manageable amounts of adversity. Yet even he sees no value in social media for this process. In other words, social media is not a net good for kids. They don't end up more well-adjusted as human beings.
Dealing with school bullies and other unpleasantness is a useful skill for adult life.
Dealing with the social media rat race is merely a "skill" to become a good little consumer to generate more "engagement" for the social media companies later in life.
they will be skilled at something although im not sure it will be anything to do with socializing. and saying that outcasts will just be more likely to blossom because of it is just speculation.
at a certain point in history man began to eat plants and adopt a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. there were many people who were made sick by eating plants and very little meat or fat. very, very sick. there are still echos of it in the population today. was it a positive thing for all the skills of the past to be thrown away and a large chunk of people to be sacrificed because they werent compatible with the new way? sometimes a societal shift eliminates an entire class of people. youre wrong because you try to paint it like its zero sum for all classes of people. in reality, if it is zero sum its only because what we lose in sacrifice we gain in progress. can you believe this has been going on for ten thousand years and still it doesnt really have a name?
this is political dogma. there is a strain of dogma asserting that behavior is 100% nurture. if they accept the idea that breeds of dog have certain traits then they would be forced to reconcile with the hypothetical concept that different races of humans have different inherent behaviors or ways of thinking. people complain about science being under threat but i never see people talk about this particular dogmatic landmine that threatens to destroy any scientist who dares to approach that region of genetics. the fact of the matter is that you can never create a complete and perfect atlas of the human brain or genetics without touching this topic -- as a person who suffers from diseases that are tangential to these areas i would very much appreciate less dogma and more progress...
Yep. It's stifling fore sure. Even the guy who discovered DNA (Watson?) got some awards retracted because of saying that. You definately can't trust any research showing that behavior is not heritable or that there are no cognitive differences between races.
One study even found clear differences between races but then wrote a conclusion saying the opposite! They justified that by discovering another variable they'd forgotten to control for that they guessed might have been responsible for the difference instead of race.
wow that was really long but i read almost all of it. a lot of it is just going into details that are necessary to condemn him without committing libel, i feel like. the most impressive bit is that he became the CEO of a publicly traded company with totally fake CV and no education and was paid more than a million dollars. and now he works at a gun shop literally across the street from the old bike shop, peddling lies about being in the special forces.
it always astounds me how stupid people are. when i was 14 i had a buddy who was really into cycling and he told me that lance armstrong, a national hero at that point, was a liar and a doper. it seemed insane to me and i just brushed it off. and then a long time after that, it was in the headlines. in retrospect it was completely obvious. there are a lot of things like that. here is something that will seem insane to you but will be in the headlines in a decade or two: saturated animal fat doesnt cause heart disease. it will be fun to think back!
I'm going to push back on the Lance Armstrong bit. As you point out, anyone who followed racing at the time knew that the top tier were all doping or at least some if you wanted to pretend your hero was clean. Here is a retrospective article about its pervasiveness [1]. But, it does not take much intelligence to figure out that a banned substance, EPO, that did not have a test until 2000 was being used in the 90s. The reason why Armstrong is much more infamous is because the scale of the operation the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team was conducting and the leading role Armstrong played on the team and the success he had. That being said, putting ethics aside for a second, what they did is no different than the level of performance squeezing that teams like Ineos or Jumbo Visma do today. They weren't gaining by the lies themselves (like the person in the story) but to keep their methods hidden from other teams.
Reminds me of these here stories from Darrell Waltrip about some of the ways the NASCAR teams use to cheat back in his era lol very interesting bit of racing history that doesn't usually get talked about =p
I read it, I wanted to believe it but I will not endorse what’s in there (mostly because I am now much more cautious about cherry picked slick slightly against the establishment stories).
While here I will post a book that did change my life in a rather dramatic fashion [1].
Also a good functional medicine doctor is worth every bill they charge.
The diet-heart hypothesis promoted by Ancel Keys was based on bad science, cherry-picked data, and gross generalisations. The saturated fat used in his experiments was vegetable oil (margarine) and he extrapolated the results to animal fat.
The current theory is that heart disease is caused by vegetable oil and sugar.
The Paleo and keto enthusiasts demonize Keys as the root cause of the western world's obesity problem.
For books, try
* "Good calories, bad calories" - Gary Taubes
* The Paleo Solution - Robb Wolf
How do people manage to read modern science with a straight face? Is there anything more scientific - verifiable and reproducible - than our ancestral family tree relying on meats and saturated fats to live?
i am really interested in history and i have spent a lot of time looking for a good book on a certain topic or time period and sometimes not finding anything. it turns out that its really hard to find books that are completely objective, well researched and also written well. there is a scarcity of these kinds of books especially for modern history. and so the idea struck me that maybe i ought to write a short history book. but then i thought that that sounds like a pipe dream. anyway, for anyone who likes that kind of thing i would recommend the binladen book that was published recently. havent read it yet but i cant wait to. it turns out the invasion wasnt so misguided after all.
> The really sad thing is that people have discovered that "completely objective" doesn't sell very well.
"Discovered"? It's always been this way. Controversy sells. If it bleeds, it leads. Etc...
I remember, when first doing academic publications, my supervisor told me controversy sells. It was true then, it's true now, it was probably true when newsletters were printed in cuneiform on stone tables.
It may be theoretically possible to write history books tending towards objectivity through impersonal, collaborative, quantitative, semi-automated methods. See my other post nearby.
But also note what the goals can be: a "computed" summary vs clever, intelligent, wise insights. Note that some texts are built so as to include both: a flow of core analysis with quality commentaries as asides.
Not a good one. Objective history book would be a timeline. To add another thing interesting (eg cause and effect) is to make decisions and introduce bias.
> Objective history book would be ... decisions and... bias
No, not necessarily. From the events you go to the chains of events, the clusters, the trends, the teachings etc.
Similarly to experimental science, where you go from the protocols ("this happened there then") to the "laws".
The role of «decisions and bias» could be limited, with some similar quantitative, and maybe collaborative (aggregation of multi-agent contribution) approach that ranked the outputs through a computed importance.
youve completely lost sight of the forest. there are little granules of subjectivity like the ones you nitpick about and there are huge boulders of subjective nonsense that leave you with a giant bump on your head -- the kind that are caused by dogma like race/gender politics, religion, war etc. the absence of these is what is desperately needed. to wave away the boulders because of the granules is idiotic. ive read books that looked at war objectively, excised moral dogma from religion and omitted race/gender crusading entirely and its very good.
im building a house and i got a bid from a foundation guy. he wanted 40k for a job that costs 10k in material. and i can easily do it myself. once i finish the house i will be able to offer a full breakdown of just how much you can save by doing it yourself.
this is clearly the result of societal programming. i propose that we eliminate all of these words from the dictionaries. we dont need any of these words anyway.
ever since the neolithic society has had a habit of trying really hard to gaslight people about utter nonsense. and all we got for it was bread and penicillin.
i feel like most people assume people are dead when we really dont know. there could be flashes of experience after death due to mechanical agitation/disturbance. or maybe something else. and maybe the part of the brain that is needed to produce "experience" is a tiny little section that goes un-noticed when they look for brain death. its not very important so i havent looked into it. but i am afraid that if i die and i appear to die before my brain is inactive then i will have a captive body experience -- unpleasant on its own and very unpleasant if i make it to the autopsy. i dont think they even check for brain death or electrical activity before they start cutting you open. i simply dont understand people who choose to freeze their heads -- its literally the worst idea. i would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.
i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.
> would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.
I think the "service" you're after is called "cremation."
thats funny but i disagree and i dont think you have comprehended my comment. its the stuff directly after you die that counts because the window of post-death activity is probably not more than a day. you are man-handled in all kind of ways immediately after you die in a hospital. cremation takes a very long time at least in my part of the US. ideally i would have people on standby to inject me with powerful drugs and something to pump the blood to ensure any experience i do have is not unpleasant. then taken directly to a facility where my entire body would be instantly vaporized with explosives to make sure there is no suffering.
OK, you're right. From my experiences with relatives, it takes several days.
The problem with doing what you said immediately is "false positives." Up to the 1800s, being buried alive was a very common fear, probably because it really happened sometimes. They didn't have any way of measuring brain activity, even an imperfect one like we have now.
Perhaps, in the state between our last waking moments and death, it could be possible that we might have a spiritual realization about the way we've treated others and ultimately lived our lives. Perhaps, we are given one last chance to view the events of our life from a "higher" point-of-view, thus giving us a chance to reflect upon our memories and look back upon the actions we've taken throughout the course of our lifetimes.
I think you'd like the film Mullholland Drive (2001), it dealt with this theme in such a profound way, that to be honest, it completely transformed my whole way of thinking around death, life, hopes, fears and the essence of dreams. Would definitely recommend, by far one of the best films I've ever seen.
“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. If your frightened of dying, and your holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
this is horse shit. the overall well-being of children has been declining for decades. now it has reached its precipice and snobby NYT says its because of the virus. its just a way to deflect from the truth which is that we have created a culture that enables kids to be shitty. the inmates have been running the asylum for a decade plus at our public schools. the environment that kids grow up in now is one where nobody is in control of what they experience. i remember when facebook first came out and i saw all my friends invest into it 100%. nobody ever asked, wait a second, isnt this unhealthy? isnt creating a points system for socializing a bit unfair to the less popular kids? isnt it sort of crazy to give facebook all of this information? i did my part and never made an account but nobody else did their part and nobody ever asked whether or not it was a good idea to make facebook a default entity in the lives of our children. something that everyone uses "because" and you cant choose to opt out without serious consequences for you social life which is a huge deal at that age. that was the contribution of the millennials to the the environment for our children. good job! children need an environment that is deliberately and thoughtfully controlled. not micro-managed, but controlled. soon the damage will be so great that even the dumbest people will realize this finally.
when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.