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Finally after 2 years of Trump bashing Sam Harris has done a conversation with the (not quiet committed to actually being a...) Trump supporter Scott Adams. It's a pretty good debate actually, recommend you give it a listen, Scott Adams is a great mind (if a bit docile). Sam has disabled comments on his website so I added The Untruth About Donald Trump to Sam's Tweet thread. Please retweet, heart or share it if you're a Twitter user. Tweet threads can be a surprisingly effective way to get a message in front of a lot of eyeballs.

Ha! I was gonna start a thread about this exact topic. Listening to the podcast right now, halfway in and I'm completely triggered by Sam. Was he always this much of an idiot? I have read everything he has ever written and watched all of his debates and considered him one of my heroes a few years back. Now he's just a petulant loser in my eyes. Was he always like this? If so what does it say about me that I used to admire such a person? I watched a couple of minutes of his most recent Joe Rogan appearance and he literally looked like a homeless person (see pic). Did he also get a stroke or something? At this point it would be his only saving grace. Scott: Trump is a master persuader. Sam: No he's not! He didn't persuade me! Scott: But he's the president against all odds. Sam: Doesn't matter! He's a liar and morally bankrupt! Scott: How do you know he has no morals? Sam: Because of the things he says! Scott: How can you trust the things he says if he's a liar? Sam: [autistic screeching] Sam's level of debate is abysmal. WTF.

Working with a therapist who is skilled with setting personal boundaries and teaching you to do the same (Drew Davis who commented before me would actually qualify or can put you in touch with someone who is if he can't squeeze you into his schedule) will enable you to answer these questions for yourself. It's very clear you do not have this ability (please don't take offense, I'm still developing it), and therefore, your romantic relationships will almost definitely harm more than help you. I would avoid romantic relationships until you've developed this skill. If you work hard it will come sooner than you think.

Like I said, if the goal is to equip people with the ammo to defend against the lies of the mainstream media or something like that, it is useless by Stef's own previous core assertion: that people do not determine their sociopolitical ideologies based on reason and evidence adn therefore they cannot be argued out of those beliefs through reason and evidence. It's like equipping people with NERF ammo. We may want to fire it off, we may run out and re-stock, but we're going to be forever firing it without significance because it's just NERF and has no capacity to inflict impact on the enemy.

Naturally, we get callers into the show like that guy a couple weeks ago who talked with Stef for a pretty long time about the virtues of stability in Christian families and then made up a bunch of bullshit about spanking being fine and how the studies were flawed (when he didn't seem to know that there were close to 100 studies collated) and couldn't retrieve his sources, etc. He also accused Stef of conflating terms in order to tie 'spanking' to 'hitting', when he was doing the exact same thing, trying to conflate it to 'swatting' a fly. Is this person participating in philosophical discussion, or is he just a right-winger who likes that FDR has been home to criticism of the left? In 2006-2012, maybe even into 2014, Stefan would argue that you can't change a person's mind with facts and reason when it comes to issues of freedoma nd politics because they are just acting out their family traumas in broader society. But lately, there's hardly any discussion on personal freedom issues and a whole shit ton of podcasts/videos in "The Truth About..." series detailing an exhaustive chronology and collation of facts and reason. So has Stefan recanted his position on that issue in the past couple years? I've heard him recant about participating in politics and accepted that it could be useful and valuable at this point in time with this particular candidate (Trump). I have not heard him go back on his claim that facts and reason do not change people's minds though. If someone is a conservative, and Stef is going to enter the political realm and produce videos to criticize the left, the right will join in and follow. But they wont be imbued with principles and philosophy, and as soon as the worm turns and criticism is targeted against the right, those people will turn on FDR, Stef and "philosophy".

Definitions are not inconsequential crap - it's how we set forth clear meaning to words. How can we have a rational discussion if the words we use to communicate with have different meanings? The implied claim that forums is not part of social media was incorrect, according to the definition.

I wouldn't say Stefan is doing Pro-Trump videos as such, mostly refuting the M.S media. That missile strike on Syria and the comments on that guy Bill Mitchel(silver hair hunger games style) sub-tweeting someone, could sense the tension imo, could see Stefan was pissed. Though if they were going to do the "right"/sensible(how to articulate I don't know) thing during the election they didn't really have a choice. All those 4-D chess memes.... It would be interesting to get more of an Irrationalist perspective like Scott Adams more often. From looking a little bit at Greek mythology, many concepts motivations are covered implicitly kind of sounds occult like, but can see it copied and articulated in modern culture. C.G. Jung — 'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.' I tend to view the forum as a potential place to gather and share information(trader principle) on Philosophy, Psychology, Current Events. Articulate thoughts with greater precision. Something more interesting then video games. Get a dialogue going and not a casual conversation, I know when I first posted the forum was not particularly welcoming, I'm patient with people prefer to acquire some productive or interesting knowledge(If everyone picked a genius and quoted passages could really harvest some information, a Blue Harvest). I resist impulses I have to put the knife in and twist(Not productive), though if they're just plain cruel or trolling(unproductive) why not? I'm fallible, sometimes not even twist. Determinism and Freewill, plus derivative threads seemed to come up a lot in the past. Try to suppress it with signature. Lot of inconsequential crap as well, like arguing over the definition of social media. Kind of annoying, that perhaps the full potential of the forum is not reached, as a tool could be great to dissect various sources of information.

Sorry to be a Negative Nancy, but has it occurred to you that this subject is completely pointless and irrelevant? As far as problems in the world, and in my life, the potential of voluntary slavery in a stateless society is so insignificant, I can hardly muster the energy to think about it for more than a few minutes. Let's say it's true, that in a stateless society, some people would engage in voluntary indentured servitude -- what could that possibly mean to me or to any of us? How would that knowledge change our behavior? Should we stop fighting statism and irrationality because of some unknown potential for people to enter into self-destructive contracts, hundreds of years in the future?

With all due respect, I only address questions that I regard as serious. In the climate of armchair-theorizing that this topic seems to draw out of the wood-work, this decision is my call.

Entropy may be confusing. I get that. But it is a most important topic that NeoDarwinism in particular disregards at its peril, especially with regards to genetic mutations. Makes no difference to me. If you regard these conversations as a popularity contest, that's your problem.

There is no direct evidence that personality is genetic. Period. And the conjecture that genes "influence" personality is sufficiently vague so as to not really explain anything at all. What is missing is an axiomatic framework to bring it all together, much like what Isaac Newton provided for physics. What is an "axiomatic framework?" It is a set of working assumptions to guide our thinking, which is analogous to a corporate mission statement that informs an organization of its priorities. For example, my assumption that life is pervasive throughout the universe anywhere that the conditions are right, focuses my efforts on the sort of evidence that I look for. The notion that genes/DNA determine anything is contrary to that assumption, because it is an extension of the dumb-luck hypothesis, and acts in violation of the laws of entropy. Another way of restating this... if complexity can arise and persist across time on Earth, it then follows, given the pervasiveness of the same atoms and molecules everywhere, that complexity will arise and persist across time anywhere that the conditions are right. And this then compels me to ask how genes/DNA might play out in such a scenario.

Here is a clip that might interest you. Can you identify the mechanisms that "determine" how these guys do what they do? If you're following current conversations in quantum physics, you'll realize that there's something going on, something that our smartest people are having trouble wrapping their brains around: https://youtu.be/FzcTgrxMzZk

What's with my 3 posts being held in moderation since yesterday? And there's no pattern to it, which ones go hidden and which get posted. We give adult donations to be controlled like children. This forum is clearly not one for freedom of expression. It would seem that it's features are a means of controlling content that is inconvenient to Admin. Clever. Let's see if this makes it through....