Frosty

But it's indicative of a deeper problem with knowledge, the physical laws of the universe were just one example of a more general problem. We can describe what was and what currently is through both repeated measurement and inference, but we have no way of saying it wont change tomorrow, these are things we're certain about to very high degress and we don't expect to change merely because we have no reason to believe it, but even that doesn't achieve absolute certainty. We currently don't have any reason to believe that the laws could change, it might make the universe very different and destroy all matter, but that would merely be unsuitable for us, it doesn't mean that it's not possible, the point is we don't know and our understanding isn't deep enough yet to claim these things strongly in the sense of having positive proof.

Depends how you define number, but the basic answer is yes some infinities can be bigger than other infinities, the infinity of all integers is a larger set than the infinity of the set of all the decimals. if you're interested in this kind of then I'd recommend subscribing to numberphile on youtube here - https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile This video in particular will answer your question in detail -

Well it has to be constantly reliable not the most reliable, if it's unreliable to any degree then you probably don't have the whole picture or whole understanding. It has to be testable and more importantly repeatable in order to probe for reliability, I'm not sure useful factors into it, it's generally speaking very useful to understand how reality works because you cannot reliably interact with it and achieve your goals unless you can understand and predict future events. The problem with objectivity is that it relies on being able to reliably test and confirm, we have no way so far to guarantee something is absolutely reliable, we know for example that the laws of physics work nicely and repeatedly but that's just an observation which so far has been true but we have no deeper understanding to be able to say it will always be true. When we adopt a scientific world view in order to test things we never arrive at 100% complete knowledge, we just arrive at descriptions of reality which work only under the conditions we test and observe them. As long as those measurements are independent of opinion or who is making them, then the truth is objective. I'd say that arriving at knowledge that we're certain or close to certain about is actually much trickier than saying if it's objective or not.

Very interesting idea. I test as INTJ and INTP with a very strong tendency towards INT and a very tiny difference between J/P which is why sometimes I'll come out INTJ and someone INTP. I find the J/P questions frustrating because how I approach something such as problems tends to be different depending on the type of problem, perceiving vs judging is something you can pick between circumstantially and so the nature of the questions asked determine how I fall there. I have no intention of reproducing myself (MGTOW) however if I hypothetically did it would be strong K type, high investment in 1 child, at most 2 children. And i think long term on the planet in general we need it to be no more than 2 in order not to use up all the space/resources. Just to be clear I voted NT, then both JK and PK. Looking through your post it seems like the J/P question might not refer to the Myers-Briggs test as the final criteria? I might have voted wrong in that case. When it comes to proactive vs reactive, I think proactivity is more stable long term and better for things like making my job in IT easier and planning for lots of things, from a practical standpoint is something I tend to strive for. However intellectually I know that predictable things like that are boring and uninteresting adn I don't know that I'd like to live in a world which was perfectly predictable and routine, reactivity gives rise to spontaneity and interesting differences, for example it's awful that we do have so much death, conflict and immorality in the world but practically everything interesting comes from it, we presumably wouldn't have a FDR community if the world was perfectly proactive. So I don't really know how to answer that question, I think I'm well suited for reactivity, I can adapt and solve new problems and changing situations quite fast.

It can be hard to judge other peoples knowledge, here at FDR everything seems to be questioned and rationally arrived at where as a lot of people are really open to lack of knowledge or mis-information because they just don't have that same philosophical interest and drive to learn. Sure you can tell what your child likes but that's oftne itself not enough, kids like sugar but just giving in to their cravings for it and feeding them it would be harmful so you'd need knowledge that extends past just how they react to cirumstances. Also a lot of the time damage that is done simply isn't very visible at first and we need external sources of knowledge such as studies to help us get more accurate knowledge. I wasn't aware of them experiments that gives me something to study that I'm sure I'll find helpful, appreciate the heads up. I think this is where I run into a problem because I don't really see any benefit to confronting her about this, I don't have any realistic expectations that it would end well, I suspect she'd just be really upset and confrontational with excuses like she was a single mother and did the best she could with what she has. Debating other topics with her really just proves to me that she has this mindset of getting an idea dogmatically in your head and then irrationally defending it, I've had very similar experiences debating religious people, they tend to hop between several pillars of argument that holds up their belief and when you knock one down they rely on another and forget you just knocked the last one down. It's frustrating, some people just don't like to change their mind.

Objective just means based on facts and not opinions. We can consider something objectively true if we can find evidence of its truth which is not contradicted by other evidence, reason or logic. How or why that truth is established isn't really relevant as to whether it's objective or not. You have to be careful with questions like "workings of the universe" and "weave this truth into the very fabric of reality" as these are metaphors and aren't talking about anything specific that we can objectively test or confirm. I sort of get where you're going but these questions are just too vague and that's probably because we don't know enough about reality and how it works to be able to even ask well formed questions about its nature. This is why I tend to value science over philosophy because it tends to increase knowledge over time by actually gathering data and making inferences, philosophy just kind of stagnates. I believe that the NAP is an objective principle, it's objective because it's universal to everyone and its truth is not reliant on peoples preference or opinion, it's also not contradicted by anything I'm aware of. You can specifically rule out personal and subjective preference with a careful definition of aggression, that it has to be unwanted. It sort of just becomes a tautology, people don't want aggression against them that they don't want, and so it's pretty much true by its own definition. I actually don't have a problem with that, some people do seem to, all systems of reasoning we have at some point have to reduce to certain irreducible ideas which are tautologies that the rest of the reasoning is built from. The judge of whether any particular system of ideas is accurate or useful is the degree to which it comports with reality. From the NAP you can extrapolate a list of human behaviors which are violations of the NAP and these behaviors define a set of morals of how we can behave in ways which universally avoid harm. I consider this type of reasoning to be the basis for secular morality, Stefan formalized this as UPB.

This kind of female fantasy always makes me laugh, not only is it completely absurd and immoral to start with, but who do they think would even build these camps or act as the guards. I would seriously love to see a bunch of these feminists attempt to build a basic fence much less an entire camp, the very thought that they can somehow leverage men to do the building for them and then take the same men and throw them into the very camp they built, it's just hysterical. This is why no one takes it seriously, because men built society they live in and continue to build, maintain and improve it, all so they can have the privilege of doing a safe job of writing about how crap men are. What we should really do as a response to these kind of people is ban them from using anything ever created or invented by a man and see how long they can last, we can make it a reality TV show, how feminists are so empowered and how they don't need men and how they can build a camp to keep us in - that is some real entertainment right there.

32 and I think I've been watching FDR for about a couple of years.

Yeah I made the stupid mistake of getting into trouble with a woman who was bad for me, even after learning some self knowledge and getting better at spotting red flags, slowly falling for someone under the right circumstances gives you that haze, I had a good friend to help me be more objective but I still proceeded in the end with the knowledge that it was silly but i'll take the risk and accept the responsibility, didn't work though, silly really. Yeah none of it's is particarly good but the moving was disruptive, the suicide attempt was only an attempt because he was rescued not because he didn't go through with it, it was a car in a garage with the engine on and the garage nailed shut with 6" nails, it took the fire dept to cut the door off, he was pretty close to not making it. Again not making excuses but as I understand it he was a bit chemically unstable and ended up on meds after the attempt to help keep him more balanced, I don't know the details though. She didn't date anyone else really, probably the most messed up thing that occurred was she wrote to some guy in prison (I have no idea why, some weird program) and after many years of that it became romantic with the guy, he got out and they tried to have a relationship during the period we were in foster care, it only occurred to me many years later that those 2 things might be related, there was some time between them things occurring but it was certainly less than a year. I've never confronted her about that and I'm pretty sure she'd deny it and say it was a coincidence. I always protested moving, she claimed it was for convenience with respect to schooling and things like that, but we were on benefits and that's all paid for by the school, she's continued to move after all 3 of us (me and my bro/sis) moved out, so it's obviously some compulsion she has, she see's it as normal and probably doesn't even understand it's bad for children growing up. I think she feels like she did an OK job given the circumstances, single mother on benefits with no support from family and not many friends to speak of, all 3 of us went to Uni, so it didn't crash and burn but certainly there's a lot of mental baggage there for me and I suspect my brother and sister. I don't see most of my issues as problems which is why I don't seek any kind of therapy for them. It sounds like you had relative success with your parents which is good, although I assume you have some kind of emotional attachment to them and see them fairly regularly? That's not the position I'm in right now I have no desire to see them or build bridges because I'm just detached from it. I had a discussion with my brother about this last night and I was explaining this thread to him, he may even have found and read it, but anyway I think my conclusions so far is what I've put before, that ignorance of the damage you're doing is a reasonable reason to forgive, I think that she's just not aware of a lot of these more complicated topics of how moving around harms children's growth and things like that, it's just not something that occurred to her, she's not incapable of learning but she's generally not that smart and certainly not in any way philosophically inclined. I guess also motivation is the other factor for this, why you make decisions and that would require talking to her about a lot of difficult things and honestly I don't see there being any positive payback for me in doing that. It was supposed to be more of a general thread about the topic of holding people responsible and it got more personal than I intended, that's not a problem emotionally, I was just more interested in the more general application of these ideas which then I was obviously going to apply to that relationship I have with my mother but also how I can judge my own and others relationships in future. Either way I feel being able to talk out loud (type) and get feedback is helpful, I have a much more balanced opinion on this now which takes into account more of the subtleties, rather that noticing the outcome is bad (or less than ideal) and then fully blaming your parents. As my brothers partner pointed out during our discussion, they were only raised by probably fairly irresponsible parents themselves. Appreciate the people who took the time to read and reply, it's become a bit rambly.

We could fix almost all of those issues if they were rational and relied on science and evidence for their world view, almost all of the feminist and social justice warrior rhetoric is anti-science, the denial of any sexual dimorphism outside sex organs and things like that, it leads to a terribly skewed world view and most of those problems you list.

Oh sure there's a component of customer satisfaction I think is what you're saying? She has a motivation to handle customers in a positive way. Given he was already at the til and paying I'm not sure that's the case, I don't think any overly positive interaction is going to occur there because of his value of a customer, and besides it's fairly easy to detect feigned interest in some subjects like the complexities of RPGs. Unless by accessories you mean his junk...total other thing.

I'm just speaking for my own personal preference for it, for ages I went looking for women who had an interest in typically male dominated things, things that I was interested in because then I'd have some things in common with the person I was dating, I always though that was really desireable and I never quite understood why. I went into an electronics store the other day and overheard a female working behind the counter speaking to the customer in front of me and she was discussing skyrim (a fairly popular RPG for PC and consoles) and I kind of smirked to myself, there's something very novel about that to a geek like me, especially if it's sincere. I've never been able to pin that down, what is it about that which is so appealing. Open to theories but no it's not propaganda of any kind.

I agree that we don't want to condone behaviour and it's important that when you do make a mistake and someone points out the reasons why, that we're able to improve and avoid the mistake in future, that is absolutely not in question. However I do make a distinction between condoning a behaviour and holding people responsible for that behaviour, in most warps of life we treat people differently depending on if they're capable of understanding the consequences of their actions, we treat minors differently, same with people with mental health issues, sadly we often treat these things as binary (on or off) rather than a scale, so someone on trial for murder can be found to be insane and will be sentenced differently, but there's no scale of understanding there. I want to stress again that I'm not trying to find excuses for her, I know that it's super tempting to believe that's what I'm doing but I'm not, I'm genuinely not decided on the issue and I've so far err'd on the side of caution and held her completely responsible for these actions, but I've been met with arguments that it might not necessarily be fair to hold that strict standard but rather it's more nuanced. What sparked my interest in the topic started with my mother which I explained for context but I think there's a larger and more general discussion to be had about the topic which is more what I'm interested in. Sure, but some of these choices might have been made say out of impulse without thinking about it, which is something we can reasonably hold you accountable for, and some of those choices might have been made because you were ignorant about the outcome, in which case we can still educate and correct future similar decisions but we surely cannot hold you accountable to the same degree. And even if we could argue that we hold you accountable regardless, like we assert you should have had a deeper understanding of women before you made your choice, doesn't that also depend to what degree you had access to resources to educate yourself? She's never been particularly critical of my father, she's pointed out some of the obviously bad things he'd done in the past which I can confirm, but otherwise it would be really easy for her to spin him as the bad guy as she's one of my few sources of information for him and she's refrained from doing that. Now that could be because he was a lot worse and she'd rather not admit to marrying someone like that, but my gut tells me that since it's so socially accepted that women are the victims in these circumstances that this kind of manipulation of the truth isn't required. I think the break up was fairly mutual they argued a bunch shortly before they separated, I know my dad was depressed and from what I've been told somewhat chemically imbalanced as he attempted to take his own life so there was obviously stressors from both sides, I think he was a lot unhappier than she was and ultimately he was the one to walk out. She moved more than twice actually, we moved when I was about 10 for the first time, my mother strongly wanted to travel and they moved out their house and took a fancy camper van around europe for probably 3-4 months during which time we were home schooled. When we arrived back in the UK we travelled north slowly looking for a place to settle and we ended up hundred of miles away from where our relatives lived. They broke up not long after settling down, after that we moved from where we were to a village close by but on the coast and stayed there for a few years before moving yet again into a town close by where we stayed throughout my high school and college years, even once I moved out to go to Uni she'd moved yet again, this time miles away several cities over. I hated moving as a kid I almost always lost access to my close friends and suffered the pain of being somewhere new and being the kid trying to fit into somewhere new yet again. If you're sceptical of the story then that's fair, all I can say is everything I've said is true to the best of my knowledge. Needless to say that my childhood was pretty messed up. It's actually not too hard to share, I tend to be fairly detached emotionally from it all, it feels almost as I'm describing things that happened to someone else, no doubt mostly due to my upbringing. This is actually a really interesting answer, I think that's a good way to help differentiate intent when doing bad things. My only issue with this is that if you're knowingly going to do something which heavily effects yourself then this judgement doesn't make as much sense. When you marry and have kids you obviously effect the person you marry and your children but you heavily effect yourself which is why I'm more prone to lean towards ignorance. That and because I know education especially for girls was much worse when my mother was at school (she's 63 now I think) and there certainly wasn't an internet with free flow of information and things like FDR, not to mention there was huge social pressure on women to find a man and settle down early out of school, women often didn't go on to further education for these reasons, they had children much more early. I think these things can be reasonably seen as contributing towards how someone might be ignorant towards philosophy, self knowledge and being aware of things like psychological markers and behavioural traits of bad people. I don't know that my mother expects anything of me any more, she moved away quite some time ago, we see each other at best once a year, she thinks that I must hate her, but I don't I'm just extremely indifferent about the whole thing, in my opinion I think that someone who raises a child to be like that kind of deserves the outcome they get, or maybe that's just an excuse for me to not go and see her because I'm lazy and don't want to spend the money on travel, it's hard to tell at this point. Back to the more general, thinking about this some more I know what I'm sure of, that I have at least some self knowledge and that I can and should absolutely hold myself responsible for the people I chose to be close to, there's just no way at this stage I could claim any kind of ignorance, but that's completely moot because I'm a MGTOW. I believe that we should retrospectively admit when we've made a mistake and correct for the future. But when it comes to judging others who I believe are reasonably ignorant I'm not so sure, I'm not trying to give people a pass, the only way I can come to terms with it is to imagine myself in their position with their level of education and options to learn and when I imagine myself in the position that my mother was in I'm not so sure. A lot of my own progress with philosophy and self knowledge has come from finding FDR, had I not had access to that who knows what I'd know now, I can't say for sure it's knowledge I would have sought out else where without some initial hook to get my interested.

I've been thinking about this kind of stuff recently, I think with some interest philosophy and researching this kind of thing you can become quite good at spotting red flags, I certainly was naive for a large part of my life but now I know better, although I'm sure if hidden well enough red flags might be impossible to spot. I struggle less with that issue and instead struggle more with accountability of those who aren't educated in this stuff, if someone simply isn't very smart and hasn't studied this kind of thing then it's not surprising when they ultimately fall for it, to what degree do we hold those people responsible, they're not necessarily knowingly making a bad choice, they may simply be ignorant, I started another thread about holding my mother accountable for her decisions to marry my father, I'm not sure to what degree it was a bad decision and to what degree it was ignorance. I find that it's a hard thing to judge what is reasonable to know, should it be a reasonable expectation that people are proficient at spotting red flags, what about if they didn't have the same level of education and access to knowledge that we have now?

Something I really like watching FDR for is that it's one of the few places of discussion that dare hold people accountable for their choices and ultimately their actions, and it seems to be unwaivering in the application to both men and women, and my experience in life has been overwhelmingly that people are much less likely to hold women accountable for their actions and so it comes more of a shock almost everyone when they are. Recently I've begun wondering to what degree we can hold people responsible especially with regards to something complex like relationships. The typical issue that occurs with call in shows regarding broken relationships is getting the person to admit they made a mistake with regards to who they let into their lives and holding them accountable for that mistake so they can make better choices in future. I generally agree with this position and I apply it to my own life with who I make friends with. It was only natural that I applied this to my own parents and have generally held my mother and father accountable for a less than ideal upbringing. Past about the age of 10 I was raised by my mother when my father left, we had moved far away from all immediate family so for a large part of my teen life onwards I had zero contact with anyone from my family, me and my brother and sister spent a few years in foster care in our teens when my mother failed to be able to cope, luckily my friends family took me in during this time so I wasn't with strangers. I had a discussion recently with my brother and he's more forgiving of our mother, he understands the idea of holding people accountable (especially that we should acknowledge that there's a lack of this with respect to women) but he's quicker to put limits on the blame for our mother and I think it comes down to what is reasonable to expect someone else to know or predict about another person when becoming involved with them. There's cases where people obviously lack empathy and you become involved because they're for example really attractive and we can squarely hold these people accountable for simply not thinking at all. But what about when someone isn't very well educated, doesn't have a lot of self knowledge, is under pressure in society to do act a certain way and isn't able to get access to knowledge and statistics we have now? I realise that this might sound like me throwing up excuses for her, these aren't things I believe they're things I'm considering as possibilities. Right now I'm in a place where I'm really indifferent about family and relationships in general, I have absolutely no incentive to go and visit my mother who moved away from where me and my brother live, or reconnect with our family who are even further away, I feel like if the conflict in my head regarding my mother and to what degree I should hold her accountable for my upbringing can be more lenient on her, I might be more inclined to visit her and move towards caring more about family. I don't feel like emotionally bothered about being a very indifferent person because that's just how I feel, but intellectually I know this is something that is probably caused by childhood issues and is sustained by avoidance of getting close to people and whatnot. It's difficult because emotionally not caring about this stuff from an intellectual standpoint is actually quite handy because people around me generally tend to find family interaction to come with just about as much bad as good, almost like it's a chore that they also enjoy. Anyway this is kind of rambling but I thought I better state the source of my thoughts first before I expand it into a more general discussion that we could potentially apply to everyone, acknowledging we made a bad decision and improving is super important, but when it comes to holding people accountable for the outcome, if that person is in some way ignorant then how do we weigh and judge that? On a more personal note should I bother making an effort to get back in touch with relatives and family when I feel indifferent, when it's likely that it's largely down to their own actions that I'm indifferent in the first place, isn't that kind of what a parent deserves if they raise a child in an environment where they isolate them from family?

Just came straight here from the female proxy violence thread, another great example of female proxy violence.

As a kid, all the time. These words may sound fairly familiar to anyone who was a young boy once: "I'm telling my older brother you said X" (where X is something horrible you didn't actually say) Dealing with someoen who is say 16 when you're 11 is not something you survive in tact if he genuinely thinks you were horrible to someone he loves, sadly it's the case that men so viciously defend those they love that the people they love can often manipulate that fact, it's a failing of men to see women as capable of this kind of degeneracy. As an adult, absolutely haven't had any kind of run in with female proxy violence, as a MGTOW I generally practice having extremely minimal exposure to women, in my working relationships it's purely kept as working relationships (I politely turn down all work related social events) and in my personal life I limit female exposure to female partners of my friends and 1 or 2 other women I'm relatively sure are sane. MGTOW is a great philosophy for really learning to navigate a toxic environment by looking inwards and changing your own behaviour to minimize your own risk, something extremely effective at avoiding female proxy violence and other female drama.

Exactly, it's only a rule of thumb but I do think it does generally act as an outward indicator of inward issues, I'd also go as far as to say that about tattooed people and more specifically heavily tattooed people, the science behind that does correlate deviant behaviour with increased number of tattoos. Anecdotally the only people i know in RL who are heavily tattooed have had really trouble childhoods and struggle with other issues, although the reverse isn't necessarily true. All the personalities pictured above are quite abrasive as well, if you happen to know who they are you'll no doubt understand.

Picture related.

That would be OK if you suspected you were getting an honest answer, the problem is that so many feminists claim one thing for example being for equality, but the way they act and behave and the issues they go after actually demonstrate that this is not the case at all. A large number of feminists will accept that men have some issues but they wont' actually work towards them in any capacity, basically their actions betray their real feelings on the matter, which tends to be female supremacy.

Often when I hear short sound bite arguments about complex topics it's because something has been simplified and if that's the case then often simply repeating the argument back at them is sufficient, it's not a concise counter argument as such, but it's normally quite powerful to show them how their reasoning can be applied to arguments they disagree with. So simply saying "well you can just move away yourself", hopefully is enough to spark a discussion about how neither is privileged to demand that of the other and it brings you back to even footing again and demonstrates the need for universality in morality. In fact it's a great opportunity to further explain how moral systems need to be universal otherwise they lead to contradictory positions, and that something more sophisticated is needed.

I've never seen it and quite frankly it seems to go directly against a lot of the feminist ideology we see. There are branches of feminism which deny any kind of sexual dimorphism in humans and instead blame the differences on social behaviours, how women and men are treated differently. I have nothing against people being coached to be able to succeed at things, but we have to acknowledge that on the average men and women are biologically different in a very non-controversial way, different sized hip waist ratios, different height, upper body strength, ability to develop muscle, different ability at linear or multitasking thinking, we score differently on standard empathy tests, have different sex drives, the list goes on and on. I try not to tarnish all feminists with one brush but when one group deny these things and the other feminists groups do not in any way make effort to denounce their actions, then we have a problem.

A market with slaves is not a free market because slaves are people who are not free to negotiate their own terms, this breaks your definition of market freedom. The only possible way you could argue this wasn't the case is if you defined slaves as property to be sold and traded rather than human beings who are protected by the non aggression principle.

Remember that it's peaks in testosterone at certain weeks during developments of different parts of the brain that set these traits, femininity is also set but more so at different weeks so you can peak in testosterone or rather lack at different times during the same pregnancy which allows for sexual orientation and masculinity/femininity to be set differently, they're independent scales. Also it seems like lack of eostrogen isn't so much a mirrored cause for lesbianism in women, it's more related to over exposure to testosterone, again during specific weeks of pregnancy, it's also related to several medical conditions that case increased testosterone in women, the rates of gay men and women are different because the actual causes are slightly different in some cases. People absolutely do have a sexual orientation, it's something that's established by testosterone and is permanently set, changes in exposure after brain development has ended after certain weeks has no effect, the parts of the brain responsible respond to this during growth and it cannot be undone. Obvious social pressures can make people behave in different ways, but that doesn't change actual biological processes, if I put a gun to a straight persons head and force them to have homosexual sex they're never going to be gay, they might discover they were always gay or bi-sexual all along but suppressing it for whatever reason, but these are distinctly different things.

Economic markets becoming less free is just a specific example of a more general problem which is EVERYTHING tends become less free. The expansion of government to regulate more things and control more things seems to be a social issue we are unable to stop, I think it's largely down to lack of education, philosophy and discussions of morals and ethics do not take place in any educational systems in the UK that I'm aware of, so how can we possibly expect people to know any better, a small few seek out philosophy and these ideas typically much later in life when opinions are harder to change on things like ethics. I think eventually the moral arguments will win out but only when people are educated enough to understand them, I got a bit irate watching Sam Harris talk about libertarianism being something way off in the future that we're not ready for but the more I think about it the more I'm coming around to his position. Especially with regards to capitalism, one of the problems is that a huge number of people don't always act even in their own rational best interest, especially with regards to short sacrifice and long term gain. One thing sticks in my mind from many years ago now with the petrol (gas/fuel) protests in the UK where the flow of fuel to a large part of the country was blockaded in protest, most people when they couldn't operate their car were screaming to give into the demands of the people causing it, where as the government held out knowing that giving in would have adverse long term consequences for the use of these kinds of tactics. Same I guess with the more general "we don't negotiate with terrorists" even if it means people die, because it would invite more death in future. The rational thing to do is endure short term and reap the rewards of the benefits in the long run, but so many people would emotionally recoil at these tactics and give in the moment someone comes to harm. We're not mature enough on average to protect ourself against these kind of issues. We will be one day, but not in our lifetimes, not without people with higher IQs moving to the same self protected area and dominating the local populace enough to defend it.