Snafui

I know I do not have a PD... interesting that that is not available.

You cannot reason with the irrational... you cannot change a belief, only an idea... So, how do people change? Epigenetic alteration via nature: a change in environment from surplus to scarcity. Cut the freebies and they will have to focus on reality as it is and not their delusional what-if scenarios. Part of the 'r-leaning' mentality is that things must change--it is a biological drive to try and change the world but what can one change when there is peace and prosperity? Reality itself must be wrong because something must change. They have been looking to change reality because their hobgoblins, nothing more than figments of their imagination, only exist when they alter data (lies), believe what is not true (delusions), and brand capital as sin (justification to cheat, rob, and steal). They are attempting to make their version of reality a reality to justify their existence--this is mass delusion. A mass delusion that is being supported by the MSM. But when you build a house on sand it will eventually collapse... and when it does it will be brutal to watch--be prepared.

I think Stef was referring to what education cost until the State took it over.

How do you go from r to K? Eat less... r/K is an epigenetic effect where environmental abundance promotes r and restriction promotes K. If you look to diet restriction on a personal level you will note change. Restriction of all freebies will turn a society toward K. And... children are designed to question their parents--that's why teaching children philosophy at a young age would prevent a lot of heartache as they would learn how to question properly.

One of my many self-made bookmarks: "To shush the noisy. To see them driving home. And to hear the silence of the library." -Conan the Librarian

This information has been known for a long time. First thing I noted in the article is that both Harlow's Rhesus Monkey experiments and Bowlby are not mentioned; both did extensive research on this decades ago. Proper socialization only develops from a healthy attachment to your mother; in the absence of a mother's nurturing, via daycare/schooling, a person develops a warped sense of security, an inferior sense of self, improper attachment(s), and various neuroses. Consider when the rise of mental health issues started? It was within one generation of the push for women to go to work and leave their children with daycare and early schooling. Again, this has been known for a long time. But what makes this so sickening is that this push was done after the research was known. Anything that benefits the State is promoted while anything that benefits Individualism is silenced.

When you confront a belief with facts the belief usually gets stronger. Were the planet to enter an obvious, demonstrable Ice Age where glaciers cruise Sunset Strip they will still blame "fossil" fuels for warming.

Trolling is what your dad does to teach you how to deal with the real world--how many people that cannot deal with trolling have poor relationships with their fathers?

While shirgall touched on it I think a critical word is missing, finish maturing. The brain may finish maturing around 25 but chronological age is not a bedrock to base individual development. Experience helps people mature but many are sheltered from experiences that foster any sense of responsibility which is the very thing that aids maturity. This more than likely includes having children. While waiting to have children shows benefit I have serious doubts that waiting until after 25 as a standard is in the best interest. We are constantly fed stories of poor parenting due to young age but you don't hear about all the people that matured due to having a child. Negative news sells better than positive, right? So, consider this thought experiment on our current society: If birth control did not exist would this change maturation rates? Would the change to views on reproduction steer society in a different direction? Whom do you think would be most affected by this?

My apologies on taking so long to respond but it took a while to find a book buried in a box, Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene and now that I've found it: Were you taught to read with phonics or whole-language? Phonics utilizes brain mechanisms as they exist helping you absorb new words and information efficiently; whole-language impairs your ability to read novel words and information because it is counter to brain functions: Several generations struggle with reading due to the whole-language approach which is still an improperly tested model where the child does learn to read but comprehension suffers; studies saw the former and ignored the latter. Most people that have the issue you are describing were taught this method--including me. The solution is lessons on phonics (doing this with a partner will also help you learn better). I taught my children, then my step-daughter, and I was working on it with my grand-daughters. Although my grand-daughters were too young to grasp the graphemes, they were learning the phonemes and it showed in the way of improved speech. And if you were taught phonics it may have been improperly taught--some schools try to teach both systems which makes it worse than teaching one or the other. So, you might just need to relearn phonics as a refresher; akin to rehashing fundamental drills in any sport one plays.

Coursera: Learning How to Learn could help out, too.

As far back as you can look into public education you will find it a disaster. The primary factor is basing education on averages which is the worst method possible: Chronological: You cannot generalize for age because individuals start puberty at different rates and have different paces through puberty. Puberty onset can vary large window and this stage of development affects mental development as well as areas of the brain may, or may not, be ready for advancement nor have the capacity to handle certain subjects. Pedagogical: You cannot generalize academic ability because people learn at different rates due to genetic factors that most refuse to even acknowledge. Top students are dragged down to the average and the below average never catch up. Also, this inanity continuously brings the average down which is why test scores keep going down generation after generation. Physiological: You cannot generalize to physical maturity because not everyone develops these attributes homogeneously. This can affect what the student will want to learn. Psychological: You cannot generalize motivating factors due to mental maturity. Also, you cannot generalize methodology because there are different learning styles and combinations to those styles. The reason public education fails, and has always failed, is because it is geared toward education as if people were not individuals. This was born of The Industrial Age mindset: that a student could be manufactured. We are still early in The Information Age and we will see a lot more change to how education is going to be handled. So, the public system, which gains increasing support due to failure, is not the most likely place to see healthy change. Public schools are fighting tooth and nail over this already so expect to see an ever increasing resistance as we move forward.

Yes, it substitutes for personal responsibility.

Think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where if you are not satiated in basic biological needs first? But this is just a list of what can cause emotional reactions within the individual when those areas are threatened. They are not in a specified order.

A fundamental flaw is the belief that you can change a person's mind--especially when they come from an irrational, emotional view of a belief. Rational people respond to logic; irrational people cannot. Four areas of human needs that when threatened, whether real or perceived, will cause an emotional reaction: Hierarchy: First access to food, shelter, comfort, sex Territoriality: Can't know who are without knowing your place--physically Identity: Acceptance/rejection of who we are as an individual to placement within the group Temporality: Perceptions on life and death; how one processes loss of ones around them The four areas listed are what you are trying to argue with to a person that is having an emotional reaction to a perceived threat. And the people protesting are delusional in all four of those areas. So, until the foundation of a delusional belief in those four areas collapses you cannot change their mind. Also consider how those four areas are manipulated by media? How much brainwashing are you trying to overcome? Now picture Sisyphus...

There is a much easier way. When a house is overrun with vermin leave no scraps for them to eat.

I stopped bothering. You cannot teach the irrational to be rational by argumentation; they need the school of really hard knocks to get it through their skulls.

Preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen - JENNIFER A. DAVIS AND GORDON G. GALLUP JR. State University of New York at Albany How's this for an argument on committed relationships lead to healthier children? This information is new and may, or may not, hold up over time. Although, I didn't see a public argument against it--which would mostly be people with pitchforks and torches because this could bring a lot of parties to a crashing halt. (Insert scratched record sound here!)

The way I put it: r's eat the seed crop until the K's get too grumpy to deal with it any longer.

"Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture." -Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science by Tom Sorell, opening line in the preface. "Scientism is the belief that science, especially natural science, is much the most valuable part of human learning -- much the most valuable part because it is much the most authoritative, or serous, or beneficial. Other beliefs related to this one may also be regarded as scientistic, e.g. the belief that science is the only valuable part of human learning, or the view that it is always good for subjects that do not belong to science to be placed on scientific footing." ibid, Chapter 1. The issue of Scientism is where some have raised science to the level of deity. Certain buzzwords are heard and people fall down to praise at the alter of science whether it turns out to be true or not--an item is bad for you one day and good the next. Do you know people who guide their life by the most recent study? There are mantras, "the science is settled," "correlation does not equal causation," "a study says," "my doctor said," "9 out of 10 doctors agree," and so on. They are just logical fallacies. Have you noticed how emotional people get when a supposed science based belief is shown to be false? Science, not as a field of study per se but as an entity, e.g. using it as a term like government or society, is also contributing to the confusion. The book above conflates science as a subject and an entity quite often which was a bit confusing at first. Scientism is just another tool for those with political power having its own Inquisition. Have you seen the latest witch trials on "climate deniers?"

Only one thing made me twinge... it's a proof of ethics. This one word in the title causes more confusion for people out there than anything in the book because they miss that one foundation to what is being presented. [edit:] At the beginning you say it's a system of ethics--I forgot that part when I typed the above. That's what had made me twinge. I was tired last night when I typed the above, sorry.

On the one hand I agree that these studies are flawed as mentioned by others above--and I can also safely say I don't know a lot of people from the upper classes that have time to partake in studies like this! But subjectively, and clearly anecdotally, having been raised in a household that has assets into eight digits, this rings true. (I, nor my siblings, had access to these assets--not even for college--before I get asked.) Perhaps these studies cherry picked people from households like mine: My parents, and their friends, often used the law as a guideline for how much they could get away with. So long as it could be tied up in court to waste the other person's money they knew they could do what they wanted in breaking any contract. If you had real power, the contract would be broken intentionally so that it would force a renegotiation for greater gains. These never went to court because, "remember that favor I did for you (or more likely your kids)? Well, now I need you to make this disappear." And it would. Or at times a mysterious, completely out of the blue offer would be presented where they receive rather high end price tagged items for doing quite minimal work--a lottery for the rich and powerful as it were. My father, and again those like him, had sex with other women and the wives didn't care so long as the money, homes, jewelry, cars, and fur coats kept coming. The line of thinking from these women was, "oh, dear, you might get him for a night or two, but I'm keeping him and his money." It was common knowledge that the worst response to "the other woman" was to be bitter about cheating and get a divorce. They understood that some young, athletic "bimbo" could come along and entice their men into bed--just roll your eyes and say, "that new Mercedes convertible is beautiful, red please!" And these men would go and buy it. This would be one of the reasons that not every rich guy trades in for the trophy wife. It was a truly sick environment.

I cannot recall where the recommendation came from for Aristotle's First Principles by T. H. Irwin, and after searching these forums it was not here. Has anyone read this or have some insight on it? For me, so far, it seems a bit off because it's as if he is arguing that for realism to be valid you must validate your arguments before arguing them, i.e. since you cannot validate your perceptions upfront your whole argument is therefore invalid. I'm wondering if this book is a waste of time... and money.

When preparing a quick lesson for my daughter on why it is called Thanksgiving* I re-read Bradford's history on the Pilgrims and I realized a detail had been missing: They couldn't tell one group of Indians from another. Since the Indians were new to the Pilgrims, they saw the Indians as the "they all look alike" concept--which is normal. Most people have difficulty figuring out the heritage of any given person even when they are common to them let alone when new. So when they came into contact with violent, aggressive Indians and then peaceful, helpful Indians they were quite confused. They didn't understand that there were different tribes. Cherry-picking the history is why you get the two different views of our "ancestors." (Not that I care that much but I find it humorous to point out to people that most of my ancestors came to the U.S. after the Civil War--why should I get the tab? And the one line of heritage that didn't? Cherokee....) *Just in case someone is curious: It was because man's arrogance led to a failed socialist experiment where most died but "God in His wisdom deemed that man should work..." even in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:15).

Blue paint will stop their weapons! (Celts) We can block bullets with meditation and proper training! (Boxer Rebellion) Flowers will protect us! (French)