Philosophy and Quotes

There are two red flags to avoid almost all dangerous people: 1. The perpetually aggrieved ; 2. The angry.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead, or at least going for a walk.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

Peterson

Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know

Tucker/Buchanan

"How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific." Reaction to Carlson's question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what we are dealing with here is not a demonstrable truth but a creed not subject to debate. Yet the question remains valid: Where is the scientific, historic or empirical evidence that the greater the racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of a nation, the stronger it becomes? From recent decades, it seems more true to say the reverse: The more diverse a nation, the greater the danger of its disintegration. Even as we proclaim diversity to be our greatest strength, nations everywhere are recoiling from it. Again, where is the evidence that the more Americans who can trace their roots to the Third World, and not to Europe, the stronger we will be?

unknown

"The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'."

Peterson

Discover what the critical assumptions, presuppositions, systems of thought, and foundational reasons for your beliefs are.

Tucker

20 years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls. The 2016 platform demanded that all 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States be "incorporated completely into our society through legal processes that give meaning to our national motto: e pluribus unum." It was a stunning shift. It was now democratic party orthodoxy to give illegal immigrants, all of whom entered the country in defiance of US law, the right to vote. If you had a problem with that, you were betraying the fundamental promise of the country. The change was purely a product of political calculation. Democrats understood that the overwhelming majority of immigrants voters would vote Democrat. Surveys showed they were right.

This terrible scene of the 20th of April none of us can ever forget. I have written it under the influence of violent emotion. Since then I have revised the recital; I have read it to Conseil and to the Canadian. They both found it exact as to the facts, but insufficient as to effect.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Sowell

Discrimination 1a - having a solid understanding of the facts. Differentiating or judging someone at the individual level

Peterson

A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real

Haidt

A key change has been the shift to a subjective standard. It is not for anyone else to decide what counts as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it feels like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reports that an event is traumatic, or bullying, or abusive, his or her subjective assessment is increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them

Parable

A woman in a hot air balloon realizes she is lost. She lowers her altitude and spots a man fishing from a boat below. She shouts to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man consults his portable GPS and replies, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude. She rolls her eyes and says, "You must be a Republican!" "I am," replies the man. "How did you know?" "Well," answers the balloonist, "everything you tell me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you're not much help to me." The man smiles and responds, "You must be a Democrat." "I am, replies the balloonist. "How did you know?" "Well," says the man, "You don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it's my fault."

Haidt

America is the promised land. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's amazingly better than any other place in many aspects. Sure there are microaggressions, there are inequalities, but to hell with them! Just charge ahead, get an education, and get a job, and you'll be successful.

Sowell

Discrimination 1b - judging a person by the group they belong to. Not as good but still based on some facts; The use of group data to make individual decisions in the absence of information

Peterson

Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act

Tucker

Again and again, we are told that change is entirely good. Change itself is entirely virtuous, our leaders explain. Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language. It's called diversity. It's our highest value. In fact diversity is not a value. It's a neutral fact, inherently neither good nor bad. Lost in the mindless celebration of change is an obvious question: why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don't hang together simply because. They need a reason. What's ours?

Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

Albert Einstein

Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

.... any scientific inquiry must start with the assumption that it could be wrong. Falsifiability—the ability of a proposition to be proven false—is a necessary component of the scientific method, which begins with a hypothesis, tests it via experiment, and either verifies or nullifies it based on the evidence. Faith, in contrast, begins with a definitive conclusion believed to be correct—such as "Jesus is the son of God" or "Muhammad is Allah's messenger"—and then works backward, cherry picking pieces of evidence (or perceived evidence) in an attempt to support it.

Ali Rizvi

Bill Clinton

All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by US citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.

Sowell

Discrimination 2 - unequal treatment and the reason for anti discrimination laws

Sowell

An anecdote cannot explain, or should not be used as the basis for explaining, a general pattern

If something is losing money like the post office, we're inclined to say f*** it. But that's not the purpose of government. The purpose of government is to pay for things that the market doesn't support

Andrew Yang

What is it that you think is true? Why do you think it is true? How did you determine that reason justifies it?

Anthony Magnabosco - three most important SE questions

Love does not consist of gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Betteridge's law of headlines

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word "no"

Pinker

Anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist

YouTube

Approach to a constructive debate: 1)Acknowledge up front in a straightforward yet low-key manner that you and the other person have honest differences in your viewpoints on some of the issues to be addressed. Both parties should adopt a calm, cordial and accommodating posture toward the other, without abandoning your own perspectives and opinions on the matters to be dealt with. 2) When disagreeing with a point made, pose your response in the form of a question, rather than a hard edged statement of position. ("Well, the question about your point that concerns me is . . .") This is less likely to trigger a defensive, emotional response from your discussion partner, and make them more likely to consider on opposing perspective. 3) It is very difficult to change peoples' minds, especially when it comes down to controversial subjects. So, instead to just reciting a litany of defensive positions in reply to your opponent, if he makes valid points, acknowledge their validity even if this translates into a small change in your stance on the matter. 4) Be patient and wait until the other individual has finished their point, even when a persuasive, important thought crosses your mind. And refrain from responding in an emotional, conspicuous mode when your opponent comes forth with an especially troubling statement. This is a tough assignment, but it really defines a true professional when it comes to debating.

Pinker

As countries get richer, they become less vulnerable to Civil War. Their governments can afford to provide services like healthcare, education, and policing and thus outcompete rebels for the allegiance of their citizens

Joseph Goldstein

As we are about to act, or win thoughts or emotions are pre-dominant, do we remember to investigate and reflect on our motivation? Do we ask ourselves, "Is this act or mind state skillful or unskillful? Is this something to cultivate or abandon? Where is this motivation leading? Do I want to go there?"

Pinker

Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. In many walks of life this is a serviceable rule of thumb. Frequent event leave stronger memory traces, so stronger memories generally indicate more-frequent events: you really are on solid ground in guessing that pigeons are more common in cities then orioles, even though you were drawing on your memory of encountering them rather than on a bird census. But whenever a memory turns up high in the result list of the mind's search engine for reasons other than frequency — Because it is recent, vivid, gory, distinctive, or upsetting — people will overestimate how likely it is in the world.

Moral authority leads to economic authority, leads to loss of moral authority, leads to loss of economic authority (political realignment)

Balaji Srinivasan

fee-for-service medicine is way better than insurance. In general, you only want insurance for catastrophic things, you don't want it for routine things. You don't pull out your car insurance to pay for gas, and it's the same with healthcare.

Balaji Srinivasan

Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle,[1] derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose.

Baptist and Bootlegger Coalition

Haidt

Basic social psychology says the more diversity you have, the more important it is to Try and find, trying to emphasize, and create common interests, common bonds, common identity. Then you can talk about the more difficult stuff.

Dalio

Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. Ask them to point to the evidence that supports their point of view. Remember, it is not an argument; it is an open exploration of what's true.

Haidt

Being prepared for tribalism doesn't mean we have to live in tribal ways. We don't use all of our minds cognitive tools all the time; we draw on our toolbox as needed. Local conditions can turn the tribalism up, down, or off. Any kind of inter group conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on. Traitors are punished, and fraternizing with the enemy is, too. Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism. People don't need to track group membership as vigilantly; they don't feel pressure to conform to group expectations as closely. When a community succeeds in turning down everyone's tribal circuits, there's more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there's more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas. So what happens to a community such as a college when distinctions between groups are not trivial and arbitrary, and when they are emphasized rather than downplayed? What happens when you train students to see others - and themselves - as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero sum conflict over status and resources?

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins

Benjamin Franklin

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Bertrand Russell

David Foster Wallace

Blind certainty - A close mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment that is so total at the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up

Ryan Bourne of Washington Examiner

Booker's proposal is entirely different. Being solely a public scheme, it amounts to pure redistribution — transfers from taxpayers to those on low incomes. As such, it has little to offer conservatives. The argument it will encourage saving or show children the power of investment is bogus. Saving is about deferring consumption — sacrificing today to fulfill other goals tomorrow. But this is pure taxpayer support: taxing or borrowing to take from Peter to pay Paul, with no sacrifice on the part of those enjoying the rewards.

Our flexibility is not up to the required rate of change. We literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born.

Bret Weinstein

Our flexibility is not up to the required rate of change. We literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born. By the time we become adults, we live in some different context.

Bret Weinstein

The magic of the West comes by way of liberal ambition restrained by conservative discipline. And either going away would not be a good thing.

Bret Weinstein and Douglas Murray

The magic of the west comes from the tension between those who aspire to changing things for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all

Brett Weinstein

Haidt

But how identity is mobilized makes an enormous difference - for the groups odds of success, for the welfare of the people who join the movement, and for the country. Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be immobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together and shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

Tucker

By 2016, the same politicians and intellectuals who had once acknowledged a need to enforce the border and protect workers now disavowed their old views and suggested those who still held them were racist. In the 2016 democratic platform, the party reframed immigration from a debate about economics to the next frontier in the struggle for civil rights and social justice. Any references to the effect of immigration on American citizens were deleted. According to the Democratic Party, the goal of immigration policy was to ensure the well-being of immigrants.

Ben Shapiro

Diversity is great as long as we all have a common goal, but if we don't, diversity fractures pretty quickly

But why emphasize one's victimization? Certainly the distinction between offender and victim always has moral significance, lowering the offender's moral status. In the settings such as those that generate microaggression catalogs, though, where offenders are oppressors and victims are the oppressed, it also raises the moral status of the victims. This only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence. Their adversaries are privileged and blameworthy, but they themselves are pitiable and blameless.

Campbell and Manning

Microaggression complaints have characteristics that put them at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response. But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one's own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor - tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all. Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether. A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization. ... Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood because the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.

Campbell and Manning

The emerging victimhood culture appears to share [dignity culture's] disdain for risk, but it does condone calling attention to oneself [as in an honor culture] as long as one is calling attention to one's own hardships - to weaknesses rather than strengths and to exploitation rather than exploits. For example, students writing personal statements as part of their applications for colleges and graduate schools often write not of their academic achievements but instead - with the encouragement of the universities - about overcoming adversity such as a parent's job loss or having to shop at thrift stores

Campbell and Manning

Bill Burr

Celebrities insult your intelligence by telling you to get out and vote, masquerading their boosting for Democrats behind a thinly veiled statement about the "importance of voting". It's like yeah "oxygen is one of the most important gasses in the atmosphere"

Peterson

Clearly people can go too far on the right and they can go too far on the left. People go too far on the right when they start talking about ethnic cleansing and racial superiority, we've kind of boxed that in. When they go too far on the left is a much more difficult thing to determine conceptually. I think they go too far when they start talking about such things as equality of outcome which is an absolutely catastrophic doctrine.

Peterson

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

The idea of having a nuanced perspective, and this is particularly driven by social media, is so far gone now, that you can't even have a conversation.

Colin Noir on Joe Rogan

As your island of knowledge increases, so does the shoreline of ignorance

Common quote from the field of physics

Haidt

Common-humanity identity politics: practiced by MLK, Jr and Pauli Murray where practitioners humanize their opponents and appeal to their humanity in other ways. "If my brothers draw a circle to exclude me, I will draw a larger circle to include them."

Peterson

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Civic conversation in America is dysfunctional in part because we have so many such outrage exhibitionists. These folks strip inartfully phrased remarks of context, ignoring the speaker's intentions and imputing the least charitable possible meaning. This sets them up to display umbrage with the ostentation of a peacock. Though widely reviled, such displays are nevertheless widespread, on the left and right, as even many strident critics are only bothered when their own tribe is targeted.

Conor Friedersdorf

Patrick Allitt

Conservatism favors cautious and Prudential changes rather than opposing them at all costs. Conservatism is skeptical about radical changes and prefers to stay with what is familiar and what has withstood the test of time.

Patrick Allitt

Conservatives don't oppose change. Change is inevitable. But they favor caution and respect for the past when adapting to new circumstances

Tucker

Consider the inner cities. 30 years ago conservatives looked at Detroit and Newark and many other places And they were horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in the poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and disorder became universal. What caused this nightmare? Well, liberals didn't want to even acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from the disaster in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had an explanation for inner-city dysfunction, and it made sense. Big government. Decades of badly designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what conservatives called a culture of poverty that trap people in generational decline.

Conservatives have to listen to the left sometimes, and I think sometimes they have aspirations that are worthy of entertaining. But then you have to solve a problem within the framework. What's your frame work? What are the principles by which you solve problems? See, I can name my principles. I can name the questions that I ask before I saw a problem: how much does it cost? Is that sustainable? Am I in fringing on anybody else's rights when I do this? Am I adhering to the basic notions of checks and balances; and the rights of states and localities to make their own decisions that might fit their populations the best? It seems that the first thing that the left proposes in solving a problem that we both perceive to be a problem is the first thing that kind of sounds good.

Dan Crenshaw

Debate is fine. Gridlock is fine. Remember these are laws being discussed, being pushed that affect every single person in America, not just half.

Dan Crenshaw

One approach to a productive conversation is to not try and change the other persons mind, but the land on accurate disagreement. Curiosity

Dan Harris summarizing Braver Angels credo

Pinker

Diversity of thought is the version of diversity that matters the most, as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike

Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science. Try to draw a straight line, or a circle, "freehand." Unless you have considerable artistic talent, the result will not be impressive. With a straight edge and a compass, on the other hand, you can practically eliminate the sources of human variability and get a nice clean, objective result, the same every time. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results. It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that are designed to be resistant to human error. The organization of methods is also under severe selection pressure for improved reliability and objectivity. The classic example is the double blind experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects nor the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which subjects get the test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody's subliminal hankerings and hunches can influence the perception of the results. What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of scribblers, working independently on the same problem, will all arrive at the same answer. This unrivalled objectivity is also found in geometry and the other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux and controversy.

Daniel Dennett

Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are engaged in a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them. It is a matter of life and death. Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes, meals from mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It matters to them that they not be misinformed about these matters--indeed nothing matters more--but they don't, as a rule, appreciate this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions and gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. The difference between how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few other species--some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds--shows signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false belief"--getting it wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but they lack the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear. That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.

Daniel Dennett

The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself--nothing is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it a privileged status in the truth-seeking department--as if the institutions and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.

Daniel Dennett

Modern capitalism, as much as communism, although in a much less obvious and direct way, is a corrosive force. And I don't even mean that in a bad way. I'm not attaching a value judgment to it necessarily. When I say corrosive I'm referring to the way that it slowly works to dissolve differences into homogeneity . And the way that it works to create people who have tastes and fashions, but not identities. To many people in the developed urban world today, the simple question of "Who are yo?" can provoke a lot of anxious sputtering. At best maybe you'll get a quote from some existentialist philosopher about the fluidity of identity. If you put that same question to the peasant farmer or the tribal herder... you better pull up a chair. He knows exactly who he is. Exactly where he fits.

Darryl Cooper

[My family] never let politics turn into "I disagree with you, so now I hate you"

Dave Rubin

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume

Tucker

Democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: You don't have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them

Trump

Democrats voted repeatedly for physical barriers before I was elected president. If a wall is immoral, why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don't build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside

Claudia Goldin

Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don't expect them to take that chance very often.

Let's also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy: a tantrum that says, 'I want it the way it was,' or a dance that says, 'Look, something new.

Don Draper

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems

Donald Kingsbury

One can't help but notice that at the moment job retention is a problem in the White House

Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan

Lock is the residue of design

Douglas Murray quoting another

Tucker

During the unpleasant moments while writing my book, I drew inspiration from my spaniels, Meg and Dave. Their cheerful single-minded focus on squirrels reminded me that complexity is usually the enemy of contentment

Peterson

Economic inequality is not in itself an evil. It's practically impossible to avoid in any kind of economy that isn't imposed from the top down by totalitarian means. If you really want to reduce inequality, the most effective ways are violent revolution, pandemics, mass mobilization warfare, and state collapse. So be careful what you wish for. The moral imperative is not necessarily inequality, but some of the concomitants of inequality

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' ... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Yes, and we could find a use for Gimli's axe and the bow of Legolas, if they will pardon my rash words concerning the Lady of the Wood. I spoke only as do all men in my land, and I would gladly learn better.'

Eomer, The Two Towers, pg. 427

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?

Epictetus

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket

Eric Hoffer

Naval Ravikant

Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The tools for learning are abundant. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.

I don't trust people's answers in general. I don't trust individual story, the way I think about the world is in structures. I think of people is contingent on their structures. I think of myself as a product of context.

Ezra Klein

Peterson

Fair enough, but you have a type I and type II error problem. And one error is that you don't call students what they deserve to be called. The other error is that you call students what they want to be called, even though they don't deserve it. What you're trying to do optimally is to minimize both of these errors, and to do that you have to take a middle route [which requires some method of discerning]. And what you've decided to do ( and I'm not criticizing you) is to allow for 100% of one of those errors because you think it's a less significant error, and you might be right, but it's not as if you're acting in an error-free manner; you've just decided to minimize one form of error at the expense of the other. Because I would say you're allowing attention-seeking and somewhat narcissistic undergrads to gain the upper hand over you and your class.

Philip Tetlock

Found that from predictions of world events: there was 80% confidence in the predictions, and less than 40% were correct - "often mistaken, never in doubt"

Edmund Fawcett

Four key liberal beliefs: society is always in conflict; undue power — of the state, wealth or oppressive majorities — has to be resisted; human progress is possible; and everyone deserves society's respect, whoever they are; After 1945, liberalism spread its benefits and protections to many. Now, liberalism looks too much like privilege. In a word, liberalism needs to become democratic again; Acceptable speech is bound to be fought over. What's socially acceptable or unacceptable to say in public shifts. Think of blasphemy. Think of the word "****". The fight now is over demeaning stereotypes and views that endorse them. Unacceptable? Some think yes, some no. Liberalism rightly sets a high bar against laws limiting speech. But legally permissible doesn't mean socially acceptable. If talk of some kind becomes odious in society, it's not for liberals to make society change its mind on behalf of free speech.

When I'm weaker than you I ask for freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles

Frank Herbert, Dune

Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to more obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around

Friedman

Educational bureaucrats claim that vouchers would destroy the public school system, which, according to them, has been the foundation in cornerstone of our democracy. Their claims are never accompanied by any evidence that the public school system today achieve the results claimed for it - whatever may have been true in earlier times. Nor do the spokesman for these organizations ever explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from non-governmental, competitive schools or, if it isn't, why anyone should object to its destruction

Friedman

If Red Adair's income would be the same whether or not he performs the dangerous task of capping a runaway oil well, why should he undertake the dangerous task? If your income will be the same whether you work hard or not, why should you work hard? If there is no reward for accumulating capital, why should anyone postpone to a later date what he could enjoy it now? How would the existing physical capital ever have been built up by the voluntary restraint of individuals? If there is no reward for maintaining capital, why should people not dissipate any capital which they have either a cumulated or inherited?

Friedman

Majority rule is a necessary and desirable expedient. It is, however, very different from the kind of freedom you have when you shop at a supermarket. When you enter the voting booth once a year, you almost always vote for a package rather than for specific items. If you are in the majority, you will at best to get both the items you favored and the ones who opposed but regarded as on balance less important. Generally, you end up with something different from what you thought you voted for

Friedman

Much special interest legislation is undesirable, but it is never clearly unmistakably bad. On the contrary, every measure will be represented as serving a good cause. The problem is that there are an infinite number of good causes. Currently, the legislator is in a weak position to oppose a good cause. If he objects that it will raise taxes, he will be labeled a reactionary who is willing to sacrifice human need for base mercenary reasons - after all, this good cause will only require raising taxes by a few cents or dollars per person. The legislator is in a far better position if he can say, "yes, yours is a good cause, we have a fixed budget. More money for your cause means less for others. Which of these others should be cut?" The effect would be to require the special interests to compete with one another for a bigger share of a fixed pie, instead of their being able to collude with one another to make the pie bigger at the expense of the taxpayer

Friedman

The Interstate Commerce Commission illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g. low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about "the public interest," "fair competition," and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress or state legislature to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials "to do something.". The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes it's toll so that even initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so family established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.

Friedman

The benefit an individual gets from any one program that he has a special interest in may be more than canceled by the costs to him of many programs that affect him lightly. Yet it pays him to favor the one program, and not oppose the others. He can readily recognize that he and the small group with the same special interest can afford to spend enough money and time to make a difference in respect of the one program. Not promoting the program will not prevent the others, which do him harm, from being adopted. To achieve that, he would have to be willing and able to devote as much effort to opposing each of them as he does to favoring his own. That is clearly a losing proposition.

Friedman

Pinker

Government is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off. Criminal punishment is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice, but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters

The minimum wage law requires employers to discriminate against persons with low skills. No one describes it that way, but that is in fact what it is. Take a poorly educated teenager with little skill whose services are worth below minimum wage per hour. He or she might be eager to work for that wage in order to acquire greater skills that would permit a better job. The law says that such person may be hired only if the employer is willing to pay him or her the minimum wage per hour. Unless an employer is willing to add a certain amount in charity to the market price that the person's services are worth, the teenager will not be employed. It has always been a mystery why a young person is better off unemployed from a job that would pay a minimum wage per hour than employed at a job that does pay the amount that their skills are worth

Friedman

There is a political bias in favor of special interests. Government budgets are determined by adding together expenditures that are authorized for a host of separate programs. The small number of people who have a special interest in each specific program spend money and work hard to get it passed; the large number of people, each of whom will be assessed a few dollars to pay for the program, will not find it worthwhile to spend money or work to oppose it, even if they manage to find out about it.

Friedman

Socialism, intellectually bankrupt after more than a century of seeing one after another of its arguments for socializing the means of production (centralized planning and nationalization) demolished - now seeks to socialize the results of production (welfare programs and regulatory activities).

Friedman quoting W. Allen Wallis

Chief Justice John Roberts

From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they're going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Peterson

Further, on attempting to equalize outcome: what about disabilities? Disabled people should make as much as non-disabled people. OK. On the surface, that's a noble, compassionate, fair claim. But who is disabled? Is someone living with a parent with Alzheimer's disabled? If not, why not? What about someone with a lower IQ? Someone less attractive? Someone overweight? Some people clearly move through life markedly overburdened with problems that are beyond their control, but it is a rare person indeed who isn't suffering from at least one serious catastrophe at any given time - particularly if you include their family in the equation. And why shouldn't you? Here's the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique - and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.

Conservatism, in general, is a reaction against change; particularly the type that is comprehensive in intent, abrupt in methods, and disappointing in results

George Will

Tucker

Gore and DiCaprio and Hillary Clinton and the rest feel fine about flying on private planes because not because they're hypocrites, but because they're entirely sincere. They care deeply about carbon emissions, much more deeply than you do. Caring deeply is the only measure that matters. That's why their consciences remain untroubled, no matter how many times they violate the standards they demand of others.

Again, the paradox: places that make the most progress toward equality and diversity can expect to have the "lowest bar" for what counts as an offense against equality and inclusivity. Some colleges have lowered the bar so far that an innocent question, motivated by curiosity, such as "where are you from" is now branded as an act of aggression.

Haidt

In other words, as progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.

Haidt

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I've been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it's not at all clear how it will turn out. And it's still not clear how it will turn out, but it's not looking good.

Harris

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Harris

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

Harris

Peterson

Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted

Peterson

How shall I educate my people? Share with him those things I regard as truly important. (Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie). That is to aim for wisdom, to distill that wisdom into words, and to speak forth those words as if they matter, with true concern and care. That's all relevant, as well, to the next question and answer: what shall I do with a torn nation? Stitch it back together with careful words of truth. The importance of this injunction has, if anything, become clearer over the past few years: we are dividing, and polarizing, and drifting toward chaos. It is necessary, under such conditions, if we are to avoid catastrophe, for each of us to bring forward the truth, as we see it: not the arguments that justify our ideologies, not the machinations that further our ambitions, but the stark pure facts of our existence, revealed for others to see and contemplate, so that we can find common ground and proceed together.

Have priorities set out so that the turning points in your life become clear. And to add to that, when you get married or have a lifelong commitment to someone, and you have kids, then the first question we ask is "Is this good or bad for our family?" So, if it's bad, we won't do it, and if it's good we will. And my dad said to me "Don't forget your always check that everything's good with Deb; at every point."

Hugh Jackman on Tim Ferriss

I Asked God I asked God to take away my habit. God said, No. It is not for me to take away, but for you to give it up. I asked God to make my handicapped whole. God said, No. Your spirit is whole, your body is only temporary I asked God to grant me patience. God said, No. Patience is a byproduct of tribulations; it isn't granted, it is learned. I asked God to give me happiness. God said, No. I give you blessings; Happiness is up to you. I asked God to spare me pain. God said, No. Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me. I asked God to make my spirit grow. God said, No. You must grow on your own! , but I will prune you to make you fruitful. I asked God for all things that I might enjoy life. God said, No. I will give you life, so that you may enjoy all things. I asked God to help me LOVE others, as much as He loves me. God said...Ahhhh, finally you have the idea.

I Asked God

Van Jones

I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym

John McWhorter

I have a bone deep suspicion of rappers and rap fans being indignant more for the pleasure of it and not because they want to solve a problem. And I think where that comes from is from reading civil rights history and seeing that while we look at a tape of the I Have a Dream speech and people clapping, we see that what those guys really did was hard, roll-up-the-sleeves work on crafting their policy so that it could actually get passed, working with legislators. What they did was hard work. It was about the head and not the gut.

Peterson

I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat

Dalai Lama

I'm Tibetan, I'm Buddhist, and I'm the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.

Pinker

I'm a strong believer in examples because abstract descriptions really don't lead to comprehension

Jonathan Rauch

Identity politics can be defined as political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest

Tucker

Identity politics does make for effective electoral politics, and that's the point. There's no faster way to mobilize voters then to stoke their racial fears, while promising to deliver for their particular tribe. It's irresistible. At the moment, the coalition of identity groups has held together because it is united in single purpose against white male power. But rapid demographic change makes this unsustainable. When the traditional scapegoat becomes insufficient, various factions will turn on one another. Chaos will ensue.

Pinker

Identity-protective cognition causes people to cling to whatever opinion enhances the glory of their tribe in their status within it.

Peterson

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

Peterson

If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely

Solzhenitsyn

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Hitchens

If people are determined to be offended - if they climb up on their ladder, precariously balancing on the top rung, to be upset about what they see through their neighbor's bathroom window - there's nothing you can do about that.

Pinker

In politicized debates, people don't so much care about the truth, as they care about what belief will earn them esteem amongst their peer group

Prager

In the 21st century, during an ongoing culture war between American conservatives and liberals over opposing cultural, moral, and religious ideals, Dennis Prager claimed that Americans are actually in the midst of the Second Civil War, albeit not necessarily violent. While acknowledging that extreme partisan politics on Capitol Hill, accompanied by related commonplace verbal and occasional physical acts of aggression in the streets, are tearing apart the fabric of American society,political and social commentators point to the fact that culture wars cycles are imminent to the process of replenishing American values, and the first such cycle started after George Washington's retirement,and that Americans have to find "America's middle again and return to civility.

Peterson

If you could be a person that you admire how would that look. How would you configure yourself. If you could be the noblest person that you could be who is adopting the maximum amount of responsibility. And you need a strategy to put that in place. You need a meaning to offset the tragedy of life, and you find that meaning by adopting as much responsibility as you can.

Pinker

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. It takes nothing away from the enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't

Obama

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be - you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman - if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now

Tucker

If you were looking for someone to tell you how to live, you'd screen candidates based on the success of their own lives. You'd be looking for people who were happily married over a long period, with well-adjusted children who respect them. You'd want to know if they had stable, honest friendships. Sanity would be a key requirement, so you'd check that too. A cheerfully self-deprecating sense of humor might be one sign of emotional health. Com self-confidence might be another. If you found a person like that, you have a role model. Have you ever met a professional feminist who fit that description? It's a serious question, not a dig. There are surely happy feminists out there, living on goat farms in Oregon and making organic soup. It might be worth asking them the secret to their contentment. But they're not part of the national conversation. They're not on Twitter at midnight enforcing codes of behavior on the rest of us. They're not giving dating advice to teenage girls and Cosmopolitan magazine. They're not running the women's studies department at your daughter's college. The people who are might be the single unhappiest group in America. Not one of them has a personal life you'd care to emulate. You wouldn't want to have dinner with them. They are neurotic, miserable people.

Peterson

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don't lie.

Tucker

In perhaps the most Orwellian statement written since Orwell himself finished 1984, Google explained the decision this way: "part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. " In order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, Google fired James Damore. For the crime of sharing his alternative views. At no point did the company rebut any of the points Damore made. The fact that he made them was enough. Damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.

Tucker

In places, the 2000 democratic platform sounded similar to what Donald Trump would advocate just 15 years later - punishing employers who engage in a pattern and practice of recruiting undocumented workers in order to intimidate and exploit them. In a single presidential cycle, everything changed. In 2004, gone were concerns about protecting US workers, stemming a torrent of illegal border crossings, or punishing employers reliant on illegal workers. Instead, the 2004 democratic platform called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants and a path to citizenship. The 2008 platform went even further. Now, not only did the party demand an amnesty for current illegal immigrants, but it also called for an across-the-board hike in immigration visas for both family members and skilled workers. The Democratic Party now endorsed unrestrained mass immigration.

Geoffrey Miller

In the political sphere, virtue signaling can be really toxic if a bunch of people get together and they say "this is an issue where I'm going to demonstrate what a good and kind and concerned person I am about issue X" by advocating a new policy, or intervention, or law that doesn't actually address the problem in any pragmatic way, but is sort of symbolically associated with expressing concern. And that's where you get real problems. I have a lot of respect for human instinct when it comes to managing our affairs in small groups. I don't have a lot of respect for our instincts in terms of scaling up to manage large scale social policy decisions.

Nietzsche

In the sciences, one seeks knowledge and nothing more - whatever the consequences may be

Tucker

In the spring of 2018, CNN interrupted it's ongoing coverage of the Russian plot to undermine democracy with a breaking story. According to several sources, Trump's interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, may have once endorsed the principle of meritocratic hiring. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, apparently said out loud that diversity was less important than "having the right person for the right job. " CNN made it clear that this was a scandal, if not a threat to the country. Skills-based hiring? In 2018? The network ran this ominous chyron beneath the coverage: "Zinke angers many by saying it's more important to find the best people. " Washington erupted. Zinke's spokeswomen did her best to quell the fury. She assured reporters that the rumors were false. Secretary Zinke, she said, absolutely does not hire employees on the basis of their skills or abilities or experience. Instead, Zinke uses criteria like genetics and physical appearance to make the call. Ryan Zinke believes in diversity.

Peterson

In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain's sacrifices are rejected. He becomes jealous and bitter - and it's no wonder. If someone fails and is rejected because he refused to make any sacrifices at all - well, that's at least understandable. He may still feel resentful and vengeful, but knows in his heart that he is personally to blame. That knowledge generally places a limit on his outrage. It's much worse, however, if he had actually forgone the pleasures of the moment - if he had strived and toiled and things still didn't work out - if he was rejected, despite his efforts. Then he's lost the present and the future. Then his work - his sacrifice - has been pointless. Under such conditions, the world darkens, and the soul rebels.

Haidt

In-group favoritism, that is, partisans' enthusiasm for their party or candidate, used to be the driving force behind political participation. More recently, however, it is hostility toward the out-party that makes people more inclined to participate. In other words, Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party's candidate but by hatred of the other party's candidate. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. "They" must be stopped, at all costs. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it's almost as if they are holding up signs that say, "please tell me something horrible about the other side, I'll believe anything!" Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability

Mine

Individual neo-Nazis and present day communists are more dangerous than those in the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, because they've had the opportunity to learn from their atrocities, yet those beliefs still persist

Naval Ravikant

Information is everywhere but its meaning is created by the observer that interprets it. Meaning is relative and there is no objective, over-arching meaning

Peterson

Intolerance of others' views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.

Tucker

Is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true of neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody's even allowed to ask the question.

Sam Harris

Islam is at a very different moment in its history. It's as though we're encountering the Christians of the 14th century, armed with 21st-century weapons

There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true,because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.

John Stuart Mill

Peterson

It is also the case, of course that all outcomes cannot be equalized. First, outcomes must be measured. Comparing the salaries of people who occupy the same position is relatively straightforward (although complicated significantly by such things as date of hire, given the difference in demand for workers, for example, at different time periods). But there are other dimensions of comparison that are arguably equally relevant, such as tenure, promotion rate, and social influence. Introduction of the equal pay for equal work argument immediately complicates even salary comparison beyond practicality, for one simple reason: who decides what work is equal? It's not possible. That's why the market place exists. Worse is the problem of group comparison: women should make as much as men. OK. Black women should make as much as white women. OK. Should salary then be adjusted for all parameters of race? At what level of resolution? What racial categories are real? There are more than 500 separate American Indian tribes. By what possible logic should "American Indian" therefore stand as a canonical category? Osage tribal members have a yearly average income of $30K, while Tohono O'odham's make $11K. Are they equally oppressed?

Peterson

It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights

unknown

It is much less common for the media to provide a description of the perpetrator of a racial crime or dispute if the perpetrator is not white

Smith

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self love

Peterson

It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.

Haidt

It's great that we have refrigerators, antidepressants, air-conditioning, hot and cold running water, and the ability to escape from most of the physical hardships that were woven into the daily lives of our ancestors back to the dawn of our species. Comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs, too. We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk.

Friedman

It's not what you don't know that's the problem, it's what you know that ain't so

Is a person what he or she is, or is a person most properly understood as what they could become? I think it's the latter. And our conscious upbraids us for failure to move in that direction.

Jordan Peterson

Sam Harris

It's very hard to put a boundary on this problem. It's amazing to see how ill equipped we are to deal with it, because the moral imperative to help these terribly unlucky people is really compelling. If you shine a spotlight on any individual family with kids about whom there is no reason to suspect a commitment to Jihadism, of course you want to help these people. They are but for a role of the dice... that would be me and my family. Who am I to keep them out on some level. But if you just look at the fact that some percentage of any population drawn at random from a Muslim-majority country will be committed to views that are antithetical to the values of Western civil society- freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom to apostatize- it becomes very difficult to see what we should do about this

Voluntarily expose yourself in measured doses of what you're afraid of (the essence of CBT)

JBP

The cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future.

James Clear

Create more than you consume

Jeff Bezos

If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting.

Jeff Bezos

If you see the restriction of abortion as undue government intrusion and force on a woman, especially on those with little means and major health risks, then wouldn't you be immoral not to stand up? If you see abortion as taking a real human life, then I would fully expect you to speak out as well. ...Second, the court didn't seize control over the abortion issue. Quite the opposite, actually. They gave it up. The opinion states, "the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives." The Dobbs ruling is not an abortion ban. In fact, from what I can find, it doesn't even frown upon the practice. This was the justices handing us the keys with an apology note: "Found this in a drawer, belongs to you. Sorry for keeping it so long."

Jefferson Shupe

state control over abortion allows us to better coexist. That unity that I spoke of? We don't need to be united on this. Whether it's a mid-term abortion that we feel we cannot tolerate—"Not in my name, not with my tax dollars, and not in my back yard"—or the restriction of that abortion, you and I have options. An obvious one, if it's important enough to you, is the ability to move to a state that better fits your culture, sensibilities, and nuance. We can enjoy an environment that is more stable. New York won't need to worry about Texas influencing its decisions in this arena, and vice versa. We can be confident that we are right, and at the same time allow other states to be different. I'm not advocating for having only like-minded communities, but moving is an option. We would do well to embrace the "laboratories of democracy," to let each state come up with its own approach, and to crane our necks over state lines to copy our neighbor if what they're doing seems to be working for its people. From the start, we were never intended to have our state boundaries blur together into nothing more than orderly divisions of American land. It was okay for us to be different from each other, with only a few important things binding us together as a nation. We have gotten used to pushing decisions higher up the political ladder, which empowers us, as individuals, less. This approach of putting all our eggs in one basket can be a problem, especially on something this divided. It's the kind of thing that's subject to frequent change when the other side inevitably gets back into power.

Jefferson Shupe

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.

Jeremy Bentham via Patrick Grim

Biden is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long walk in the woods

Joe Rogan

"..I was a kid reading the newspaper, actually, in Italy ..The government of Tuscany — there's a problem with vipers. These are little poisonous snakes, and the government of Tuscany said, "We'll get rid of the vipers. We'll give a bounty of 1,000 lire per viper, and that'll clean up the viper problem." Well, these dirty farmers of the Casentino found out that they could raise vipers. At 1,000 lire per viper, they could raise a lot of vipers fast, and the supply would overwhelm the demand. Stories of well-intentioned ideas that have unintended consequences that rank this. There's cause and effect. That fits in lovely."

John Cochrane

As is so often true in life, the intensity of our attachment to the first amendment seems matched only by how little we actually know about it

John Finn

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

John Maynard Keynes

That alone doesn't help anybody. If their endgame is to say America is a racist place and always has been. It's deep in the fabric and this is one more thing that shows that. And then you break for a commercial. And that's it? I'm not sure that's what civil rights is supposed to be.

John McWhorter

...it is owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.

John Stuart Mill

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

John Stuart Mill

The Declaration of Independence arose from natural law, but it was a unique natural law—one that embraced the universal equality of mankind and not just that of a select group. This was a truly revolutionary idea that arose from dual influences of the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment.

Johnny B Davis

A party of progress or reform and a party of order instability are both necessary elements for a healthy political life

Jon Haidt quoting John Stuart Mill

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics. Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline--a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly "like" posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the "Retweet" button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own "Share" button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. "Like" and "Share" buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions--especially anger at out-groups--are the most likely to be shared. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action.

Jon Haidt, WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.

Jon Haidt, WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

Reform will save capitalism. It will save democracy. By showing that we recognize that there is collateral damage to the systems that we use to gain wealth and to gain power. And if we can reform those systems meaningfully for the people who suffer most terribly under them, we save it. But if we can't, the bastille gets stormed.

Jon Stewart on Joe Rogan

"The worst number of political parties to have in a country is one," he says. "But the second worst number is two."

Jonathan Haidt

When the academic world works it's because it puts us together in ways that cancel each other out. That's what makes university smart, generators of knowledge... unless we stop dissent. What if we say, "On these topics, there can be no dissent. And if any professor comes up with any research otherwise, we're going to destroy them. "?

Jonathan Haidt

A centrist approach that may actually work doesn't exactly make for a fiery campaign speech: What do we want? Incremental improvement! When do we want it? In due course!

Jordan Peterson

A husband and a wife owe each other a certain amount of categorical respect. Sort of independent of the individual personalities. If you have decided to devote your life to someone and vice versa, they are now in a category that deserves a certain amount of respect to maintain the relationship over time. Maybe you've taken a shot in public, and you're really angry about it, but you don't notice it because you want to think that you're better than you are, and that that sort of thing is not supposed to upset you. So you don't say anything about it, you don't do anything about it, and you don't fix it. And that's a mistake. It's much better that you can say to your partner, "Look, we were out to dinner and you said something snarky which I didn't think was appropriate. Now, I might be hypersensitive, and touchy, and immature, and maybe you hit me in a weak spot. Or maybe you're playing some power game. Why don't we figure that out."

Jordan Peterson

Aha, so, well the overwhelming proportion of people in prisons are male. Now do you want to equalize that? Just out of curiosity. What about bricklayers? About 99% of the people employed in that trade our mail. About 3/4 of the humanities and social science educators at universities are female. Are we going to equalize that? Men work longer hours, they work more dangerous jobs, they're more likely to move, they're more likely to work outside.

Jordan Peterson

All economic systems produce any quality. Advantage tends to accrue

Jordan Peterson

I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought. Because if it's not free, it's not thought. And mostly you have to think about hard things, because if it's not hard and everything's going alright, you don't have a problem. When you have a problem, you have to think. And when you have a problem, thinking it's going to be troublesome. You're going to think things that upset yourself, and upset other people. It's part of what will necessarily happen if you're thinking

Jordan Peterson

If you don't confront malevolence, if you don't understand it, then you let yourself completely open to it. If you confuse your naïveté with goodness, and people often do that - you know, "I couldn't harm anyone" is generally shorthand for "I couldn't if I wanted to" - which isn't an indicator of strings, it's an indicator of lack of ability. If you have no theory of malevolence, and no familiarity with it, you're an easy target. You're a pushover. You can't defend yourself. And that means that people who are like that, or forces who have that nature, you have no defense against him. And there's nothing moral about that.

Jordan Peterson

It's very helpful for people to hear that they should be competent and dangerous and take their place in the world. Why dangerous? There's nothing to you otherwise. If you're not a formidable force there's no morality in your self control. If you were in capable of violence, not being violent isn't a virtue. People that teach martial arts know this all too well

Jordan Peterson

Men are task driven and an individual's competency at that task orders them within a hierarchy Evolutionarily speaking, men vote on the most competent for the task and women peel from the top in selecting a mate.

Jordan Peterson

On studying and system 1 thinking in general: All of these sub systems in you that would like something aren't very happy to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by. And so they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions nonstop

Jordan Peterson

The postmodernists are technically correct - there are a near infinite number of ways to perceive and interpret a finite number of phenomena. The thing that's interesting about the claim is that you can use it to mount an assault on any interpretation of anything whatsoever, because there is a tremendous variability in the number of interpretations that you could bring to bear on a given situation. Then you can instantly jump to the conclusion, or expound to the proposition, that none of those interpretations should be privileged among any others. Now that's actually wrong. And this is why postmodernism is correct in its central assumption, but incorrect and its secondary assumption. The reason that it's wrong is that just because there are an infinite number of interpretations of the world, it does not logically follow that there are an equal number of viable interpretations of the world. You might ask what constitutes constraints on the viability of an interpretation of the world. The way that evolution solves the infinite number of potential interpretations is by killing every single thing that interprets things badly enough to die. It's taking 3.5 billion years of evolution to produce creatures of our sort to interpret the world well enough to live for approximately 80 years and to have some reasonable chance of propagating during that time. 3.5 million years and that's the best we've been able to do. It's a very complicated problem and evolution solves that problem by producing a tremendous number of variants and then killing almost all of them.

Jordan Peterson

The reason you have the right to free speech isn't just so you can say whatever you want to gain a hedonistic advantage. You have a right to free speech because the entirety of society depends, for its ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future, on the free thought of the individuals who compose it. The free market argument in relationship to thought. We have to compute this transforming horizon. Well how do we do that? By consciously engaging with possibility. And how do we do that? Well it's mediated by speech

Jordan Peterson

We are all the beneficiaries of the atrocities of history. But you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not just call it all chaff

Jordan Peterson

You shouldn't be nicer to your children than the world will be. That's the 'devouring mother' from a psychoanalytic perspective

Jordan Peterson

Sowell

Just as people with racial bias or prejudice may fail to discriminate when the cost of doing so is too high, someone with no racial antipathy at all may still discriminate by race if rates of crime, disease, or other undesirable characteristics differ from one racial group to another and alternative ways of sorting out individuals are more costly or less accurate. Indeed, members of the same group may discriminate against other people like themselves for this reason, as when black taxi drivers avoid picking up black male passengers after dark. In short, race may be used as a sorting device for decision-making, even by people who are not racists. That employers may be reluctant to hire young black males because these employers are aware of what a high proportion of them have been arrested or imprisoned, even if these employers have no antipathy to black people, as such, and readily hire older blacks or black females.

The whole world had not seemed big enough to contain Alexander the Great. Then suddenly, in an instant, a coffin was sufficient

Juvenal

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Viewed either as a weapon obstruction or a safety net to save the country from the radical policies, depending on whether you serve in the majority or the minority. But what is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires federal policy to be broadly supported by senators, representing a broader cross-section of Americans. A guard rail, inevitably viewed as an obstacle by whom ever holds the Senate majority, but which, in reality, ensures that millions of Americans, represented by the minority, have a voice in the process.

Kyrsten Sinema, 1.13.22

Tucker

Less than a year into his term, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for the transcendent achievement of not being George W. Bush

Pinker

Many on the left encourage identity politicians and social justice warriors who downplay individual rights in favor of equalizing the standing of races, classes, and genders, which they see as being pitted in zero-sum competition

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. / It's absolutely true. The future might be bad. We never know the unintended consequences of an action. But does this excuse us from doing the wrong thing now? No, it does not. We can handle what the future brings.

Marcus Aurelius / Ryan Holiday

The moment you wake up ask yourself: Is it going to bother me today if matters that are being fairly and properly attended to are criticized by someone else?" No, it is not. Because we have done the work, we've done the research, we've gotten on the same page as our spouse, we've made the decision. Which is enough! Besides, the people you compare yourself to, he notes, what do they really know? He says look at the decisions they make, the things they are tempted and distracted by. Why would you let their opinions matter to you? It can't bother you that people disagree...especially those people. Trust yourself. Trust your process. Do your job. Let come what may.

Marcus Aurelius/ Ryan Holiday

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Mark Twain

The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why

Mark Twain

Peace if possible, truth at all costs

Martin Luther

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

One is not to question, and people can be quite explicit about that. For example, in the "Conversation" about race that we are so often told we need to have, the tacit idea is that black people will express their grievances and whites will agree—again, no questions, or at least not real ones.

McWhorter

Peterson

Men and women aren't the same. And they won't be the same. That doesn't mean that they can't be treated fairly..... If it means equality of outcome then it is almost certainly undesirable. That's already been demonstrated in Scandinavia. Men and women won't sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them to do it of their own accord. It's 20 to 1 female nurses to male, something like that. And approximately the same male engineers to female engineers. That's a consequence of the free choice of men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences--you can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure, and tyranny, but if you leave men and women to make their own choices you will not get equal outcomes

Trolling is, by your performance, you're turning a 3rd-party, by exploiting their weaknesses, into an unwitting performer on their own. When you are calmly causing someone else to have an extreme reaction, exploiting their innocence and naïveté.

Michael Malice

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.

Milan Kundera

1). You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you. 2). You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is. 3). You are 100% correct. In this unlikely event, you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don't really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It's only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.

Mills' Trident

Haidt

Minimal group paradigm experiments show that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it's also the story of groups competing with other groups - sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning the competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the tribe switch is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the groups moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team's narrative. You can see this in the pseudo-tribal antics that the company college football games

Haidt

More scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multi racial society. It has become increasingly clear that I identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around it's common enemy. What we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as a representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire west. As the extremes pull more people from the political center, these ideas become mainstream, and the result is a clash-of-civilizations narrative turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sowell

Moving to a welfare state would mean going from an economic system in which most people are paid by those particular individuals who benefit from their goods and services - at rates of compensation determined by supply and demand involving those consumers, employers, and others who assess the benefits received by themselves - to an economy in which incomes are in fact distributed by society, represented by surrogate, third-party decision makers who determine what everyone deserves

Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Pseudo-truth and pseudoscience will not withstand the test of time. It takes a lot less energy to displace BS than it does truth.

Nassim Taleb paraphrased

It's a slippery slope. It's only a matter of time before the bottom 51% vote themselves everything which is the top 49's

Naval Ravikant

You can never conclusively say all swans are white. You can never establish final truth. All you can do is work with the best explanation that you have today, which is still better than ignorance, but at any time a black swan can show up in disapprove your theory and then you have to go and find a better one. Incompleteness Theorem: No formal system, including mathematics, can be both complete and correct.

Naval Ravikant

4 rules of The Economist

Never try to silence views with which you disagree. Answer objectionable speech with more speech. Win the argument without resorting to force. And grow a tougher hide.

It's true that words change all the time, but it's an organic, bottom up, viral process. It's not something that an interest group can engineer, first of all, because you've got to get buy in from several hundred million English speakers

Pinker

People want the future to be a lot more predictable than it really is. And I'm just the bearer of bad news; there's a ton of randomness in the historical process. Most of the things that we study in history - the great empires and great powers - are complex systems, and they behave in the way the complexity theory predicts. They can look as though they were in equilibrium for a long time, and then this relatively small perturbation comes along and then the whole thing can fall apart. Because it's actually not been in equilibrium at all, it's been on the edge of chaos. There's tons of uncertainty and not much calculable risk.

Niall Ferguson

Pinker

No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed buy the rest.

Tucker

On MAGA teens: Well it's hard to remember the last time the great American meme machine produced a starker contrast between good and evil. It was essentially an entire morality play shrunk down to four minutes for Facebook. On one side you had a noble tribal elder - weatherbeaten, calm, and wise - he seems like a living icon. You can imagine a single tear sliding slowly down his cheek at the senselessness of it all. And on the other side you had a pack of heedless sneering young men from the South, drunk on racism and white privilege. The irony was overwhelming - the indigenous man's land had been stolen by the ancestors of these boys in MAGA hats, and yet they dared to lecture him about walls that were designed to keep people who look very much like him out of their country. It was infuriating to a lot of people. At the same time, it was also strangely comforting to those who watched it from Brooklyn and LA. The people who run this country have long suspected that middle America is a hive of nativist bigotry, and now they had proof of that. It was a cause for a celebration of outrage, because there's nothing quite as satisfying as having your own biases confirmed.

Sam Bowman

On Paternalism: Fat people couldn't possibly be making the same kind of trade-off that everyone else makes when they eat, choosing that the costs of fatness are worth the benefits of eating enjoyable food.

Peterson

On culture: what we inherit from the past is willfully blind, and out of date. It's a ghost, a machine, and a monster. It must be rescued, repaired and kept at bay by the attention and effort of the living. It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential. But it offers a great gain, too. Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter. The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity. Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to say that culture should not be subject to criticism

Since the 70s, there have been a number of efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun into the English language. None of them have caught on. Languages do change, but generally not quickly, and not by deliberate engineering. When it comes to things like articles, pronouns, there is just a natural resistance: they're learned early, they're highly frequent, they're distributed across millions of people conversing with one another. That being said, there are more respectful and less respectful ways of addressing people and that will probably continue to change

Pinker

Peterson

On gender pay gap: But there's multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that's not the only reason. If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality..... There's a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men..... I'm saying that is one component of a multivariate equation that predicts salary. It accounts for maybe 5 percent of the variance. So you need another 18 factors, one of which is gender. And there is prejudice. There's no doubt about that. But it accounts for a much smaller portion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim

Peterson

On hierarchies: There's this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it's almost unbelievable..... And it's part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn't...... I'm saying it is inevitable that there will be continuities in the way that animals and human beings organize their structures. It's absolutely inevitable, and there is one-third of a billion years of evolutionary history behind that ... It's a long time.

Haidt

On many issues we think student protesters might be on the right side of history, and we support their goals. But if activists embrace the equal-outcomes form of social justice - if they interpret all deviations from population norms as evidence of systemic bias - then they will get drawn into endless and counterproductive campaigns, even against people who share their goals. Instead, we urge students to treat deviations from population norms as invitations to investigate further. Is the deviation present in the pipeline or applicant pool for the job? If so, then look at the beginning of the pipeline more than at the end of it, and be willing to entertain the possibility that people of different genders and people from different cultures may have different preferences.

Patrick Allitt

One of the Great Society programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children , had intentions which were clearly benign. The idea was to prevent the suffering of children whose mothers weren't married to make sure that they didn't suffer from malnutrition or neglect. But look at the unintended effects of this program; it's now created an incentive to young women to have babies and to not marry, because if they marry they don't get the money from the government, and if they don't have the baby they don't get the money. What they need is to have the baby and to not marry; then they become pensioners of the government. So family break down actually becomes a worse problem rather than a diminishing one. It's an unforeseen consequence, and perhaps one that was difficult to see before the program was introduced

Sowell

One of the most popular, and most fallacious, explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives is greed. But when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay buy one dime.

Peterson

One of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is that you want to start thinking about it like a psychologist, or like a scientist, because compassion is actually definable. The easiest way to approach it is to think about it in Big-5 terms, because it maps onto Agreeableness, which you can break down into Compassion and Politeness. The liberal types, especially the Social Justice types, are way higher in Compassion. It's actually their fundamental characteristic. You might think, 'well, compassion is a virtue.' Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child, hey great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way. We don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that can lead to violence, because it certainly can. The other problem with compassion - this is why we have conscientiousness - there's five canonical personality dimensions. Agreeableness is good if you are functioning in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally for example among your children, because you want all of them to have the same chance, and even roughly the same outcome. That is, a good one. But the problem is that you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. As far as I can tell, you need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue. It's also a virtue that is much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. And you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion too. It's like: 'straighten the hell out, and work hard and your life will go well. I don't care how you feel about that right now.' Someone who's cold, that is, low in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness, will tell you every time. 'Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your ******* job or you're going to be out on the street.' One might think, 'Oh that person is being really hard on me.' Not necessarily. They might have your long term best interest in mind. You're fortunate if you come across someone who is disagreeable. Not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness because they will whip you into shape. And that's really helpful. You'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it. You'll feel like, 'Oh wow, this person has actually given me good information, even though you will feel like a slug after they have taken you apart.' That's the compassion issue. You can't just transform that into a political stance. I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism, because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. And so, we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the past fifty years. We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be. But we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case. On top of that, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them, and so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking. A lot of it is being expressed as political opinion. Fair enough. That's fine. But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion

Tucker

One place notably unaffected by demographic change is any neighborhood policy makers happen to live in. The people making immigration policy tend to not be affected by it. Barack Obama's new ZIP Code in Washington is less than 8% Hispanic. The suburbs across the river in Virginia become more Spanish-speaking every year. Obama approves of that. He sees it as a sign of progress. He doesn't want to live near it. Diversity for thee, but not for me.

Peterson

One thing to understand about hierarchies is that they dispossess people so that they stack up at the bottom, so you need people to speak for the dispossessed, and you need people to speak on behalf of the hierarchies. There should be a constant dialogue between the two because you want to keep your hierarchies functional, and intact, and healthy, but you want to make sure that they don't alienate people who are not succeeding in the hierarchies, because then they stack up at the bottom and that's hell for them, and it's not good for the stability of society in general

Sowell

Oppression is a virtually perfect political explanation of income differences. It validates whatever envy or resentment may be felt by people with lower incomes toward people with higher incomes. It removes whatever stigma may be felt from implications of lower ability or lower performance on the part of those with lower incomes. It locates the need for change in other people, rather than imposing the burden of change on those who wish to rise. Moreover, it replaces any such burden some task with a morally uplifting sense of entitlement

Haidt

Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word violence refers to physical violence. The word is sometimes used metaphorically, as in I violently disagree, but few of us, including those who claim that speech is violence, have any difficulty understanding the statement "we should reduce incarceration for nonviolent offenses." However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents' words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence

Pluralism of values: there isn't just one thing that we value. There are a variety of things that we value both in ethics and in life in general. In life we value pleasure, and human interaction, and achievement, and contact with reality. In ethics, we value human flourishing, but also commitment per se, and also justice per se. Every attempt we've considered and tried to override into a single unifying value - Every view of ethics is trying to maximize based on one thing - every utilitarian view, every Kantian right-based view. Every view in terms of a succinct set of rules, every one of these has turned out to be a failure. No utilitarian view can do justice to our sense of commitment to other people or to our sense of justice. On the other hand, no Kantian view can except that consequences can matter. No single set of rules seems adequate to the irreducible plurality of incommensurable things that we value.

Patrick Grimm

To counter postmodernists, there's nothing mere about semantics or language, But what philosophers want to explore, or understand, or expand, are the concepts that are expressed in our words.

Patrick Grimm

Pinker

People affirm or deny takes on the main political issues to express not what they know but who they are.

Peterson

People are always looking for new tools to operate in the world. If you invent a new tool, like a new word, then people will pick it up just as fast as they possibly can. But the words that are being invented right now are not good tools, and that's why people are not using them, And so now what we have is the use of force to ensure those words are adopted

Pinker

People are by nature illiterate and innumerate... They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence. They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group on to any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, and black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.

Courage is in shorter supply than genius

Peter Thiel

Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.

Phillip K. Dick

Haidt

Pick your battles: The world as it is is vastly safer today - crime is down, accidents are down. Rights for all groups, from African-Americans to gays, have experienced incredible progress. If that's the trajectory, pick your battles. Things are generally going well. But the Internet now exposes us to 100 different little things each day. So, campus activists should decide "are we going to Protest the dining hall today? Are we going to protest someone who wore the wrong type of earrings today? Are we going to protest someone who used the word that I don't approve of?" And the answer should always be no! Pick your battles! You look ridiculous To the rest of the world with the sorts of things you're protesting. So don't diffuse your activism on little things

Why do languages talk about the physical world in crazy ways, such as: after dark when we mean after light, or underground/ underwater when me mean surrounded by ground/ water? There is a "theory of physics" embedded in our language: - a concept of space in our prepositions - a concept of matter in our nouns - a concept of time in our tenses - a concept of causality in our verbs

Pinker

Sowell

Politicians are likely to be responsive to laments of student debt, especially in election years. However, many or most of the discussions of such issues ignore the larger role of costs and prices in general, and proceed as if anyone whose desires are constrained by economics should have those constraints removed by government - which is to say, by shifting those costs to someone else, namely the taxpayers. Among the students who graduate from college owing a debt for their education, the median debt is roughly the cost of a modestly priced automobile, and no one thinks that the debt incurred in buying an automobile is so crushing that taxpayers must subsidize the purchase of cars

Denzel Washington

Positive change in the black community starts in the home. If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets. If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your place of residence

Pinker

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.

While skilled immigrants pay far more in taxes than they use in benefits, the opposite is true for unskilled immigrants. We need a course correction, a policy that will attract immigrants that will pay more in taxes than they use in benefits

PragerU - Ryhan Salan

Peterson

Problem number two, and this may be a consequence of my ignorance, which I'm trying to rectify. But, Mohamed was a warlord ... and I don't know what to do about that fact.

Peterson

Proceeding on, if all that left of you isn't much, and you're left with a state of being that is wretched, don't fret. There's a way to move forward, and the way to do that is to plan as if the way you could use your time is veridical with how you will. Today, and tomorrow's actions should reflect your desires; in turn your desires should reflect volitions you're capable of. So don't lie to yourself about what you're capable of.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

Peterson

Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peterson

Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to "identification with the devil," the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience - is adoption of "God's place" by "reason" - is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration - impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown - constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Richard Feynman

Rare capabilities routinely become widespread when exponential technologies are in play. The trailblazers on the edge tend to be brilliant and career minded and highly non-murderous, but as the trail gets worn down and the tools get simpler, lower levels of skill, expertise, and long-term dedication will be needed. And at some point, freshman undergrads will have homework assignments that the entire field couldn't complete today. Suicidal mass murderers - the ones who hit those Chine schools with knives, the Las Vegas gunner, the German suicide pilot - all use tools designed by people smarter than them. Rack killer hit the limits of his technology, but there's no reason to think they hit the limits of their ambitions. We need to worry about this group as massively deadly technologies become widespread because, again, their death tolls reveal the limits of their technologies, not the limits of their blood lust.

Rob Reid: Making Sense, Special Episode

Artificial intelligence in genetic engineering aren't necessarily a problem, but their evolution in an environment of intense competition among nations is

Robert Wright

If it's easier to evaluate an attribute, then that attribute is more likely to influence the subsequent decision. But what makes an attribute easier to evaluate? It really boils down to whether we have good reference information. Do we have a reference point - some basic expectation of what the value should be?

Ryan Hamilton

A Stoic says, if I'm going to take heat, I might as well take heat for doing the right thing. If I am going to be unlucky, I might as well be unlucky while trying to do something I'm proud of. If I'm going down, I might as well go down swinging.

Ryan Holiday

Are you, as an American, able to really sit and think about what it has been like for black people in this country—not just during slavery, but much more recently? Are you familiar with the history of redlining, lynching, poll taxes, jury nullification, Jim Crow, police harassment and brutality? Have you, as a German, really studied the Holocaust? Or as a British or French or Dutch person, do you understand the viciousness of colonialism? As a Turkish person, have you honestly looked at the Armenian Genocide? As a Chinese or Russian citizen, can you wrap your head around the extent of the enormous human suffering and loss during your revolutions in the 20th century? Horrible things have been done by good people. Horrible things have been done by bad people while good people looked on and told themselves it wasn't up to them to stop (or that it wasn't really that bad). Horrible things are still happening, the legacy of these things is still very much alive. It's not just race or nationality either: Doctors need to wrestle with the opioid crisis. The church with homophobia and abuse scandals. Former bullies need to wrestle with their school yard behavior. Football with concussions and player safety. Academics with their support of left wing dictators. Hollywood with the blacklists. Parents with the mistakes they made with their own children. And on and on.

Ryan Holiday

Herd immunity doesn't require 100% participation—whether it's against a virus, a panic, or plain old ignorance. It just requires enough.

Ryan Holiday

Life isn't short. We just waste it. We waste it wishing for things to be otherwise. We waste it waiting for it to be over. We waste it by ignoring what's in front of us. We waste it resenting, complaining, rejecting. Now is now! It can never be anything else. Now is your life. Live it. Love it. That's all you can do. You won't get anything else. You won't get another moment. Never wish away a minute of your life. It's a gift...should you choose to accept it.

Ryan Holiday

Reading isn't just about pouring inputs into your brain. There has to be a filter. There has to be a back and forth. You have to continually put the information up to the test, examine it, see how it applies to your life, ask yourself how you might use it, what it is prompting you to think.

Ryan Holiday

the philosophically inspired founders believed very deeply that liberty from the state was always intended to be checked by private virtue. What Stoicism is, properly understood, is a voluntary system of self-restraint. A framework for unsolicited courage. Self-directed education. An uncoerced commitment to treat others well. And this is most necessary in a free society when one has the choice to do otherwise.

Ryan Holiday

Society improves when we ask questions. Wrongs are righted only when subjected to scrutiny—what is not challenged remains comfortably ensconced in orthodoxy masquerading as tradition. Don't be complacent. Don't be credulous. Be empowered to subject your reality to interrogation and demand answers accordingly.

Ryan Holiday (12/22/21)

If the male/female binary is a social construction, then it logically follows that the belief that one can identify as either of those entities is a derivative of a social construction.

Self

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm's length. Obituaries aren't really about death; they're about life...Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live. So try that. Read the obituaries this morning. Not to be depressed but to be inspired. By people who were not so different from you—who struggled like you struggle, who feared like you fear, but who did great things in their time here like you can, and who died like you will. Then close the obits, and go live. Go do the things you hope are one day written about in your own obituary.

Ryan Holiday (2/4/22)

Our legacies are finite. Our names are not written in stone, but in sand on the shores of time. Get over it.

Ryan Holiday (3/25/22)

So soak in this wonderful weather...and catch yourself if you start looking forward to summer. Because you're wishing away the present—you're wishing away a season of your life. And as we've said before, you should never, ever do that. That's the purpose of memento mori—"remember that you will die." It's purpose is to make you value every minute, every day, every season.

Ryan Holiday (4/20/22)

And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things...the world needs them too." The world needs these types for many reasons. First, because a diversity of opinion is, in the aggregate, better than homogeneity. Second, because the obnoxious and the shameless and the evil do more for us than we think. They remind us of what virtue is. They give us something to struggle against. They prevent us from becoming complacent. They illustrate the terrible costs of being like them. They are, as Marcus Aurelius's famous passage about obstacles was written about, the adversity that shows us the way. By all means, fight against them. By all means, denounce what they represent. Just don't buy the fantasy that they can ever be made to disappear. They can't. And they shouldn't. We need them. And they need us.

Ryan Holiday (4/5/22)

​Seneca was constantly pointing this out, especially in regards to the most precious resource we have: Time. Stop, he advised, and "reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations..." Suddenly, you don't feel so rich do you? In fact, you look a little bit like a mark. You've been conned and robbed and had your pocket picked. Not a few times but constantly. Worse, you allowed it to happen! No one is rich enough to sustain this very long. Each of us is on this planet for an uncertain but finite period. You're going to let them take from this small pile of minutes and hours with impunity? You're going to leave the safe unlocked? Leave the door wide open? And for what? Soon you will be broke and dying...and you will rue the day you allowed yourself to be so abused.

Ryan Holiday (7/18/22)

Aristotle's famous metaphor of the "Golden Mean"—the idea that virtue usually sits between two vices. Courage is somewhere between cowardice and recklessness. Confidence between crippling self-doubt and blinding arrogance. Hard work between workaholism and laziness. Generosity between parsimoniousness and profligacy.

Ryan Holiday (9/21/22)

The inscription on the Oracle of Delphi is, "Nothing in excess." In Islam, there's a saying, "Every praiseworthy characteristic has two blameworthy poles." And central to Buddhism is the "Middle Way." In fact, each of the commandments in the Eightfold Path is about finding the right amount in the critical areas of life (right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right finances, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration).

Ryan Holiday (9/22/22)

A Spartan warrior was once spoken to of surrender. He picked up a mouse by the tail and watched it claw and bite at him. "When the tiniest creature defends itself like this against aggressors, what ought men to do, do you reckon?" he said.

Ryan Holiday (Daily Stoic, 3/2/22)

The Christian right cares about you up until the moment that you're born. Then they have all sorts of ideas that are antithetical to human well-being

Sam Harris

The trouble with Mormonism is that we know too much about Joseph Smith. The origins of Mormonism or not sufficiently shrouded in the mists of history So as for it to get the treatment that Christianity, in Judaism, and Islam get, Which is a free pass on all these questions in miracles

Sam Harris

What do you think it's not what's important here. It's always how you think. It's how you reason. It's the fact that your available to good chains of evidence and argument. And if you're not available to those things, you are simply not in touch with reality in an ongoing way. And you're an unreliable witness to every subsequent event. All you have is dogmatism if your views are not on the table to be modified by new evidence and new arguments. If a reliable chain of reasoning and evidence begins to push up against the boundary of some leftist shibboleth, you just reap a storm personal attacks, and lies, and there are no rules.

Sam Harris

I have no doubt that transgenderism is a real phenomenon. It's not just made up. It's not just a product of culture. It's not just a social contagion. But is there a degree of social contagion riding on top of a real phenomenon that we have to grapple with.

Sam Harris on Megyn Kelly

It seems like there should just be a comprehensive inventory of everything we wish we had in the current circumstance and didn't, and figure out why that was the case. Also to figure out what the government can only do effectively; it seems the free market incentives are just never going to be there - for instance, the ability to produce an anti-viral that if all goes well, only a tiny percentage of us are going to need to use only once in our lives, the market doesn't incentivize investing billions of dollars in that, but clearly that's the kind of thing we need in these circumstances

Sam Harris talking to General Stan McChrystal about pandemic durin Social Cohesion conversation

We're now monetizing everyone's confirmation bias and addiction to outrage.

Sam Harris to Matt Taiibi

I can't aim at liberty without aiming at liberty for all others

Sartre

Naval Ravikant

School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.

We should cherish the body with the greatest care, but we should also be prepared, when reason, self-respect, and duty demand the sacrifice, to deliver it even to the flames.

Seneca

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

Seneca

Peterson

Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

Peterson

Shouting someone down as a means of protest = undeserved access to power.

The first human to hurl an insult instead of a stone founded a civilization

Sigmund Freud

Pinker

Since the world is the way it is regardless of what people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to develop explanations that are true.

Peterson

Social constructionists say that gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender reassignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman's body or vice versa. The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored, or rationalized away with another apalling postmodern claim: that logic itself - along with the techniques of science - is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system

Ben Shapiro

Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.

Haidt

Some college orientation programs include training in intersectional thinking along with training and spotting micro aggressions. By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others' levels of privilege, identify more distinct identity groups, and see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors of acts of aggression. They've learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent. The combination of common-enemy identity politics and microaggression training creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a "call out culture," in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly "calling out" the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender - in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy. Call out culture requires an easy way to reach an audience that can award status to people who shame or punish alleged offenders. This is one reason why social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on.

Peterson

Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here's the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it's not the world that's the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. If the world you were seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying where you are.

Instead, they see Wang's America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning

Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control.

Steven Barnes

My default is not my destiny, my decisions are

Steven Furtick

Stop fighting your future. Stop fighting every time something you don't agree with comes your way, getting offended. This current offense is your future wisdom. How will you learn a new point of you if you don't listen to anybody? Stop fighting your future.

Steven Furtick

On Deterrability: When Dick Cheney shot his friend, he was not arrested or punished for aggravated assault. It was an unintended consequence, and we don't hold him responsible, perhaps for negligence, but certainly not for aggravated assault. Why? Because, as we say, accidents will happen. Holding people responsible for accidents, or punishing them as harshly, will not reduce the probability of accidents.

Steven Pinker

The search for truth works. It develops vaccines, it hasn't been smart phones, it puts people on the moon. It has results which suggests that there really is some reality that we are collectively approaching, most notably through our science.

Steven Pinker

Be strict of yourself and tolerant of others

Stoic epigram

Parable on Taxation

Suppose that once a week, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this... The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12. The ninth would pay $18. And the tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every week and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until, one day, the owner caused them a little problem. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your weekly beer by £20." Drinks for the ten men would now cost just £80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free but what about the other six men? The paying customers? How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share? They realized that £20 divided by six is £3.33 but if they subtracted that from everybody's share then not only would the first four men still be drinking for free but the fifth and sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fairer to reduce each man's bill by a higher percentage. They decided to follow the principle of the tax system they had been using and he proceeded to work out the amounts he suggested that each should now pay. And so, the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (a100% saving). The sixth man now paid £2 instead of £3 (a 33% saving). The seventh man now paid £5 instead of £7 (a 28% saving). The eighth man now paid £9 instead of £12 (a 25% saving). The ninth man now paid £14 instead of £18 (a 22% saving). And the tenth man now paid £49 instead of £59 (a 16% saving). Each of the last six was better off than before with the first four continuing to drink for free. But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got £1 out of the £20 saving," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got £10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a £1 too. It's unfair that he got ten times more benefit than me!" "That's true!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get £10 back, when I only got £2? The wealthy get all the breaks!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison, "we didn't get anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor!" The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next week the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had their beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important - they didn't have enough money between all of them to pay for even half of the bill! And that, boys and girls, journalists and government ministers, is how our tax system works. The people who already pay the highest taxes will naturally get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just might not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas, where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier. For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

Sam Harris

The God that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primate - lucky us - and he's got galaxy upon galaxy to attend to, but he's especially concerned with what we do; and he's especially concerned with what we do while naked. And he's created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity; and the test is this - can you believe in this God on bad evidence, which is to say on faith. And if you can, you will win an eternity of happiness when you die. And it's precisely this sort of God and this sort of scheme that you must believe in if you are to have any kind of future of politics in this country, no matter what your gifts

"Listen!" He's deadly serious. He leans forward on his stool, and though half the inn lies between him and the children, he seems to be whispering to them alone. "Life is a song, composed and sung by God. We are but characters in His song. Hildebrand doesn't think his song is beautiful. He's either going to kill his son or die himself. It's not beautiful to him at all. But that's because he can't hear it. He's in it. You can't hear a song you're in, right?" The children are squinting at the troubadour. "Right..," says William reluctantly. "So! If we could hear our own songs, if we could see God's creation the way God does, we would know it's the most beautiful song there is."

The Inquisitor's Tale, pg. 287

Isaiah Berlin

The idea of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy, and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will frustrate another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they were treated unequally.

Unknown

The absolute morality of views held 100 years ago cannot be judged by today's standards

Sam Harris

The center is described as a lack of partisanship almost by definition. Tribalism gets taken out of it. The identity politics gets taken out of it. You are among the people who want to reason honestly about ideas and world events and your view on one thing isn't reliably predicted by your view on some unrelated thing, but we see almost perfect correlation if we look at either extreme end of the spectrum. It should strike everyone quite strange that if I know your view on climate change, I can pretty reliably predict your view on gun control - two things which should not be related. It's a sign that people aren't thinking problems through based on first principles. They're joining a team. Putting on a jersey. In the center that would break down.

Peterson?

The concept of "microaggression" is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be "hate speech," instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.

Peterson

The dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and breeds them. And so then we watch that for six million years. We start to understand what it means to be the hero. We start to tell stories about that, and so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchies - the selection mechanism mediated by female choice - but our stories are trying to push us in that direction. And so then we say, 'Well, look, that person is admirable.' We tell a story about him. And then we say, 'This person is admirable,' and we tell a story about him. And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable. And then we start having admirable and non-admirable as categories. And out of that you get something like good and evil. And then you can start to imagine the perfect person

Sam Harris

The fact that every political decision is captured by the short-term needs of getting re-elected in 2, or 4, or 6 years - that's a disaster when you're talking about multi-decade problems

Peterson

The idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. We have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group - there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent. If you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the Kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. They were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the Kulaks was the death of six million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930's. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It's precisely this sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. Just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is

Unknown

The ideas of prejudice or stereotype are not negative in all contexts. In some contexts, we are luckily guided by our prejudices, which means that we don't have to think out each new situation from first principles. On all the really important questions we already know what we think and we can act decisively in a crisis rather than having to agonize from first principles. Prejudice is prejudgment, The answers which intuition and ancestral consensus supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge To arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason

Haidt

The key thing that we need to bring in discussions with prejudice and stereotyping is that people can't stop noticing base rates. So, yes, it happens; we should try to make it happen less. But, to assume that this shows malice or aggression, rather than the normal functioning of the human brain trying to make sense of a complicated world - Neural systems notice patterns. We can't stop them from noticing patterns, and this is something that is almost never said; this is something that when we were talking about prejudices and stereotypes in social psychology, we rarely talk about the effect of base rates; we talk about other processes that explain a lot less variance.

Sam Harris

The left believes there's an epidemic of police violence on men. Many people think there's too much policing on the black community. What you actually find in urban, gang-ridden areas is a failure of policing - under policing, the worst crimes never getting solved, and murderers walking free. There's an unwillingness of anyone in the community to cooperate with the judicial system to put the most dangerous people behind bars and you get an over-prosecution of petty crimes. It's just hard to argue that less policing is the solution here

Brandon Straka #walkaway

The left practices tolerance and diversity in a superficial way, with no regard to individual thought or personal belief: "If you express an opinion that's outside of what is their ideology, there is no tolerance and there is no diversity.

Peterson

The logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. There's so many different ways of categorizing people's advantages and disadvantages, that if you take that all the way out to the end you say 'Well, the individual is the ultimate minority' - and that's exactly right. And that's exactly what the West discovered. The intersectionalists will get there if they don't kill everyone first

Pinker

The media cover elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches. This steers people away from reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression.

Berry Belvedere

The misconception of a centrist is that of a squish, a mild, milquetoast moderate incapable of feeling the fire of conviction. The centrist oscillates between one position and another because he or she does not really hold any political beliefs. If we reconceptualize centrism as a procedural rather than a substantive position, if we can redraw the centrist as omnipolitical rather than apolitical, we can rehabilitate it. Here's what I mean. A substantive centrism doesn't work because it fails to make important comparative judgments about the worthiness of various political options. This type of centrism stems from an incapacity to settle on philosophical beliefs, from a failure to adopt a philosophical framework. More simply, this is the "has no beliefs" centrism. What's left is a pure pragmatism that is not grounded in any enduring values. This is the centrism that gets vilified, and rightly so; this is the centrism of the popular imagination. A procedural centrism, on the other hand, stems from the conviction that any sufficiently durable political framework is likely to produce solutions that are very much worth considering. This type of centrism registers an openness to the major political traditions, believing that the best response to a political problem could come from any of them. The first type of centrism is fundamentally committed to political success, which makes it so that ideas are always subordinated to the goal of winning. The second type of centrism is fundamentally committed to the truth, which is why, despite persistent pressure to polarize, the centrist of this variety will retain an openness to the solutions offered by the major political traditions. Far from relegating ideas to a second-class status, this approach honors them.

Sam Harris

The most insidious thing is to seize upon something that can be misconstrued out of context for the purpose of misconstruing it out of context, and then to hold someone accountable for that thing, rather than care about the totality of what they think on a given issue. Those efforts are always made in bad faith. I feel like the penalty for doing that should increase. We just haven't found whatever dial can be turned there. People do that with impunity and seem to always get away with it.

Pinker

The old stereotype of poverty was an emaciated pauper in rags. Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans.

Bill Burr

The one good thing that's come out of Donald Trump is that it makes people realize that you don't have to worry about offending 1 % of the people that you're making a statement to. If you were a president with a 99% approval rating of what you were saying, you would be the most popular president ever.

Tucker

The problem is, there are only so many rivers you can restore before you run out of high-profile victories. At that point, where does your movement go? And more pressing for the thousands of professional activists with children and mortgages, how do you raise money?

Tucker

The quickest way to control a population is to turn it against itself. Divide and conquer. That's how the British ruled India. If you wanted to run a country for the benefit of the people who lived there, by contrast, you'd do the opposite of this. You'd deemphasize racial differences. You'd understand that in a society composed of many different ethnic groups, tribalism is the greatest threat to unity and order. Of course there will always be racism, because that's the nature of people, and you'd work to discourage it. But you would resist using the existence of racism as an excuse for your failures. You would never, for example, blame an entire racial group for the sins of its ancestors. That would serve only to embitter and divide the population, and over time, wreck the country.

Peterson

We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias

Pinker

The standard formula for sowing panic: here's an anecdote, therefore it's a trend, therefore it's a crisis.

Yuval Noah Harari

The technology revolution can go in completely different directions. If you look back at the 20th century, you can see with the same technology of trains, electricity, and radio, you can build A communist dictatorship, a fascist regime, or a liberal democracy.

Friedman

The visible is a more potent political force than the invisible (Milton Friedman on steel industry lobbyists arguing against free trade in their industry, citing the impact, while ignoring other less visible, beneficial impacts, dispersed across the economy)

Lady Philosophy

The vision, or allegory, with whom Boethius speaks in his philosophical dialogue. She represents in human form the whole of true Philosophy, an idea of objective reality separate from the human race. She is immortal and spiritual as well as corporeal, and represents all the human thought in Philosophy up to Boethius's lifetime. She counsels and consoles Boethius, and teaches him the true consolation that pure philosophical inquiry can give. Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it

Sam Harris

There are many cases where being a white guy, looking a certain way, should put other people on their guard for a higher possibility of crime. If you see a couple of white guys with shaven heads, and the appropriate tattoos, standing in the parking lot of a black church, those guys suddenly become very interesting, because of their race, because of their haircuts, merely to be standing where they are standing, from a crime point of view. To tell anyone who's working in a store, or walking down the street, that they can't use those types of intuitions, which are driven bottom up by the statistical reality of crime in our world, is enforcing and encouraging a dangerous stupidity in people. And given our environment, we're there, where people feel like they can't act on intuitions which, in the moment, can be totally valid

Peterson

There are many things people consider good in the sense that they are kind of considerate but failed to deliver what's desired (like communism's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). Nature would appear to consider them bad, and I'd agree with nature.

Peterson

There is a powerful Marxist narrative that has run its course for about the past 130 years, that is predicated on the idea that there is an oppressed class and an oppressor class. That narrative seems to be affronted by the fact that the current system seems to be producing benefits across the board. It doesn't seem to be the case that these benefits are accruing only to the rich. Quite the contrary, the most dramatic improvements have been at the bottom among the extreme poor

Sam Harris

We should understand our society to be more like a fragile ecosystem where You can't just tear things up and put new things in and expect everything to function the same

Berry Belvedere

There is an assumption baked into procedural centrism: The major political traditions occupying the left-to-right spectrum regularly engage in intellectual activity that produces worthwhile ideas to consider. This happens in two ways: internally and externally. Internally, a tradition undergoes a kind of intramural combat that tends to produce good arguments and an increasingly refined ideological self-conception. Externally, when a tradition is pitted against a rival, both traditions enhance their positions as a result of being forced to meet this intellectual challenge. Take libertarianism. Within this tradition, there are internal debates had by libertarians that function as intramural discussions leading to appreciable intellectual gains. But libertarians also participate in external discourse: by engaging critically with other traditions, libertarians put themselves in a position to enhance their own position, and they give their opponents an opportunity to do the same. Meanwhile, the other traditions are engaged in the same intra- and extra-level developmental process. As a result of this activity, each tradition produces worthwhile ideas, forged in an intellectual environment that is conducive to reason. To think otherwise requires either believing that some traditions are malicious — and that their proposals are really pretexts for some nefarious ulterior motive, and that their adherents are pathologically deceitful — or that those traditions are incompetent, incapable of producing incisive analysis and worthwhile proposals. Which, not coincidentally, is how most people view those on the opposite side of the political spectrum in our polarized moment.

Haidt

There is no universally accepted definition of "critical thinking," but most treatments of the concept include a commitment to connect one's claims to reliable evidence in a proper way - which is the basis of scholarship and is also the essence of CBT. (Critical thinking is also needs to recognize and defeat "fake news.") it is not acceptable for a scholar to say "You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I'm sticking with it." When scholars cannot rebut or reconcile disconfirming evidence, they must drop their claims or else lose the respect of their colleagues. As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances.

Jesse Jackson

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.

Richard Grenell - US Ambassador to Germany

There's an overreaction if you complain about wanting secure borders or merely an orderly process. The more salient issue is not about whether you have a heart, it's about whether you have a plan... What can we afford? What is good for our country?

Harris

This is my claim: if we found a totally isolated people on a desert island and gave them The canon of Islam, the Koran, and said "Here, this is all you need to know. Live by these principles.", and then we came back in 1000 years, and they were living like ISIS, there would not be much basis for surprise. Now if we have them The poly Canon, the teachings of the Buddha, and then we came back in 1000 years, and they were living like ISIS, there would be a reason to be flabbergasted

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but other things are believed because they are asserted repeatedly.

Thomas Sowell

The best thing about a Harvard education is that you no longer have to be intimidated by anyone with a Harvard education

Thomas Sowell

Babies are born with a set of ready-made grievances against other babies born the same day

Thomas Sowell on divisive policies such as reparations

People always ask, 'What did he tell you? What did he show you?' I don't remember one thing we sat down and talked about specifically. But what he did was he was a consummate pro, he was an incredible father, he was an incredible person, and he showed me how to be a good teammate, a great person to the community, all those things. Not by sitting there and telling me how to do it, but by being that.

Tim Duncan on David Robinson

Is this the condition I so feared

Tim Ferriss on reflecting during "planned suffering" sessions such as fasting, temperature exposure

Martel: Life of Pi

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is a kin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation

Sam Harris

To even discuss the disparity in the crime problem is controversial. Your motives are impugned to even touch this topic, an yet, how could you possibly improve life for people in the black community if you weren't going to squarely focus on this disparity

Harris

To improve the conversation between two people who find them selves across from one another in an idealogical divide, the first thing is To restate the person's position in a way that they would except. If you can't meet that test, you're not really having a conversation, or you're certainly not having a profitable one. If you're going to be pretending to read someone's mind, and trying to find their actual motives for them saying what they're saying, But that they won't acknowledge, that's a different kind of conversation, a kind of a grappling match. You need to first interact with their actual view as they represent it to themselves.

Peterson

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

"To answer your question, I don't think there's an answer. At least not a simple one. What you're asking is: how are terrorists made? Poverty, hopelessness, misplaced religious fervor, the need to feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself... Take your pick" "D***, John, you almost sound sympathetic. " "I am. Up until the point where those motivations lead somebody to pick up a gun or strap on the bomb. After that, all bets are off. " "So what, you just switch off the sympathy? " "That's up to you, Jack, but part of doing this kind of work is the willingness to put on blinders. Deal with words in front of you. Every terrorist has a mother and father. Maybe kids, maybe people that love him. Hell, 60s how to seven he might be a decent citizen, but on that one day he decides to pick up a gun or plant a bomb, he's a threat. And if you're the guy standing between him and innocent lives, the threat is all you can afford to worry about..."

Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive, pg. 800

When I see anonymous sources, it doesn't mean it's not true. It just means I can't cross-examine it. There may be more to it.

Trey Gowdy

These seem like different, disconnected topics - much like with climate change you could say we've got species loss in the Amazon, we are losing insects, we've got melting glaciers, we've got ocean acidification, coral reefs dying. These can feel like disconnected things, until you have a unified model showing how emissions change all of them. In the social fabric, we have shorter attention span's, we have more outrage driven news media, we have more polarization, we have more breakdown of truth, we have conspiracy minded thinking. These seem like separate events and separate phenomena, but they're actually all part of this attention extraction paradigm, which the business model depends on.

Tristan Harris

If you just keep on running the clock on an extremely low probability event, it will happen

Tyler Cowen

Peterson

Understand that the purely physicalist world view, probably that of the 'New Atheists', isn't the only way to view the world. Why? Because we simply don't have the processing power to deduce the purportedly deducible nature of the world. Events in the world are rarely, X's cause on Y, therefore the current state of Y is because of X. Rather, X, and probably an enumerable amount of other variables—in a system, and beyond the scope of human perception, has led to Y. The jist of this being: Things are not always as clear as they seem.

If ever in doubt, the measure of the more righteous position is its willingness to subject itself to debate

Unknown

Society is great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit

Unknown

it's impossible to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.

Unknown, paraphrased by Ryan Holiday

We rarely feel our way into actions, but often our feelings follow when we act.

Unknown- YouVersion app

Haidt

Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous. This helps them stay within the good graces of their team.

But let us consider another Chinese wisdom: the word 'crisis' consists of two hieroglyphs - there are probably representatives of the People's Republic of China in the audience, and they will correct me if I have it wrong - but, two hieroglyphs, 'danger' and 'opportunity.'

Vladimir Putin

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Voltaire

Matt Ridley

We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason... On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Naval Ravikant

We feel guilt when we no longer want to associate with old friends and colleagues who haven't changed. The price, and marker, of growth.

Friedman

We require employers to discriminate against black Americans by requiring employers not to hire them unless their productivity is high enough to justify a minimum wage

Friedman

Well meaning advocates of minimum wage seek to assist the poor, but it does nothing of the kind. Those whose skills are not to the level able to justify the minimum wage are priced out of the market. Here is a law that, in effect, says employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.

Pinker

Western intellectuals, who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own society if even diluted 100 fold, have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam. Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some fit into a long history of western intellectuals execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies.

Sam Harris

When I hear Trump speak, I hear someone Very often getting prompted by his own miss statements To complete a thought in a way that he clearly didn't intend to. Which is to say that The thing he is now saying doesn't reflect anything that he believed or even thought about before. But he's saying it now, because the last phrase he spoke just launched him there. It's though he's speaking in verse and he's forced again and again to complete the Rhyme, but he didn't know what that rhyme was going to be and now he's stuck with it. And now he'll go to the mat defending that rhyme. But he's rhyming about policy, and about world leaders like Putin. This is a mind with no apparent purchase on the world

Unknown

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news

Tucker

When was the last time you heard an establishment figure decry the out-of-wedlock birthrate? Politics account for some of this. Unmarried mothers are a very critical part of the Democratic coalition. In 2008, Barack Obama won 74% of single mothers who voted. In 2012, he won 75%. Alienating these voters is politically risky for Democrats. It's been more than 20 years since a democrat running for president won the majority of married women in America. Unmarried women, by contrast vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. The last democratic platform to mention the importance of having a father at home was in 2000.

Mandela

When we dehumanize and demonize our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them

Geoffrey Miller

When you get the intersection of virtue signaling, and online witch hunt, and mob mentality, and let's have an auto da fe that destroys someone's career because I'm going to misinterpret this one thing they said, take it out of context, and then feed it to people who will reliably express outrage about it. Almost anything we say has the potential to be taken out of context by someone who may try to weaponize it and turn it into a career killing event.

Tucker

Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates the conversation. A woman makes $.77 for every dollar a man earns. The statistic is repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It's a talking point. Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time - and that's the only way you can measure it - the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas now earn 8% more on average than their male counterparts.

Tucker

White identity politics will be a response to a world in which identity politics is the only game there is. In a country were virtually every nonwhite group reaps advantages from being racially conscious and politically organized, how long before someone asks the obvious question: why can't white people organize and agitate along racial lines, too? It will be a simple argument to make. Soon whites will be a minority in America. They've got enemies, as the establishment often demonstrates, as well as interests to protect. Is there some rational reason, someone will ask, why they should be the only group in America not allowed to think of themselves as a group?

Haidt

Why did Yale students interpret the emails from Dean Spellman and Erica Christakis as offenses so grave that they justified calls for their authors to be fired? It's as though some of the students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

William Morris

Peterson

With regards to your second point, if the people that you were listening to aren't randomly selected from a population, then their opinions are worthless from the perspective of testimony because you don't know if you're dealing with a biased sample, And that's a big problem with the public consultation process that underlies this bill. And you can not appreciate that if you'd like, but it's standard practice in any polling institution or any body that's attempting to extract a genuine opinion out of a so-called community of people. And if that isn't followed, you can't tell if the information you're receiving is biased.

Robin Hanson

You are the conscious part of your mind, and you aren't necessarily in charge of it. So, instead of being the president or the king, you're the press secretary - you don't actually know why you do things, but you're supposed to make up a good excuse

Coleman Hughes

You can look on Wikipedia and see that the median household of French decent makes about .79 on the dollar of what the median household of Russian decent earns. Both of those households would be viewed as white, and they would probably view themselves as white, and you wouldn't be able to pick them apart. Yet, you have the kind of disparity, that if it were to be between blacks and whites, would be presented in the pages of the New York Times and other respected outlets and reflexively ascribed to racism.

Friedman

You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to determine what to do with others - you have A and B deciding what C shall do for D

Peterson

You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility. You just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the questions is, 'well what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion.' And the answer is, 'well, you're leaving out responsibility.' And then the questions is, 'Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility.' And the answer might be: 'Well maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life.' Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility. That's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself. You're useless. Easily hurt. Easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities. They're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants at least, then also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do. Men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan. And why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is low class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. Basically we give them the message, 'you're pathological and oppressive.' They often respond, 'fine then, why the tell should I play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any.' Then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self contempt and nihilism, and that's not good.

Sam Harris

You claim that I get my morality from a religious tradition. Ask yourself, when you pick up the Bible, or the Hebrew Bible, Or any holy book, and find ethical wisdom, What is that process like? You pick up Leviticus, or Deuteronomy, You find that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you're supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep - presumably you choose to reject that pearl of ancient wisdom. And you find another passage, the golden rule, and this resonates with you As a good operating premise as a good idea to live by. Now the guarantor in that instance, it's not the book, it's in your brain

Tucker Carlson

You wouldn't elect Trump unless you really wanted to send a message - happy countries don't elect Trump, desperate ones do - so what's the message? People on both sides, both of whom hated him, screwed up.

Sam Harris

Your emotional state has complete control over you as long as you're identifying with the next emotional thought that's arising in consciousness. If you have no perspective on the fact that you're thinking, then you simply become that thought for the period that it's captivating, and you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed - saying that angry thing, or committing a physical assault. It's exactly like being asleep and dreaming, and not knowing that you're dreaming. This happens to us, all of us, every night. We get into bed, and then suddenly a movie starts playing that we are totally identified with - we are one of the characters in it - and we are completely unaware of this change. And the most surprising thing about dreams is that we are not surprised when they arise. You know, we didn't have the expectation that we would stay in our bed for eight hours, apparently. We are not surprised that the laws of physics are being violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in the situation where we are fully captive to an illusory, seemingly sensory experience, but this is all some kind of hallucination. Identification with thought In the waking state has that character to some extent

Peterson

Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. You have to organize your values hierarchically or else you stay confused. This is true if you're an individual and it's true if you're a state. If you don't know what the next thing you should do is, then there are fifty things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them. You can't. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic. So there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy

I would not get rid of the filibuster, and it's not because my party is not in power right now I am. I think it is very important that our political system requires some kind of cross party accommodation oh, frustrating as it is for those of us who have policy ambitions. I think the contribution of that to the health of our political culture is essential.

Yuval Levin

It seems to me that having that kind of power in the hands of corporations is very, very troubling. I think we are only beginning to come to terms with how to think about the nature of that power. What is that power? Is it economic power? Is it cultural power? Is it political information power? The power involved is enormous power over, as you say, the public square, and there's no solution that I've seen that strikes me as a comfortable path forward so far.

Yuval Levin

Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don't feel like 'news'. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can't handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

Don't complain about your partner to coworkers or online. The benefits are negligible and the cost is destroying a bit of your soul.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

Don't punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in you will want to join in the fun of righteously destroying somebody. Resist this, you'll only add ugliness to the world. And anyway, they've already learned the lesson they're going to learn and it probably isn't the lesson you want.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life