Matt D

In the case of the math problem, one doesn't solve the math problem in order to solve the math problem; one solves the math problem because it makes him happy. Is it logical to say that being happy is the only possible intrinsically motivated activity? I would say no, because happiness is not an activity. In that case, I think we could define intrinsic motivation as the desire to do something which will make us happy during or after the activity without any further steps between the activity and happiness. What do you think, jpahmad? Were you intrinsically motivated to post this?

Hey, I apologize for the late notice. If anyone wants to join our group dream analysis we will be having the first ever call on Skype in exactly one hour (4pm EST). If you'd like to join or just listen afterwards, send me a reply/pm request. Thanks!

Ditto. If anyone reading this is having trouble finding a meetup or a skype call to join send me a private message. I'd be happy to help connect you (or point you to someone who can) since meeting like minded people has personally been the most rewarding part of Freedomain Radio for me.

Hi Daniel. I too was from a republican background -- the radio was always tuned to Rush Limbaugh growing up in my parents' house. How did you find out about Stefan and FDR?

^ This would be a good video for the poster to watch. I didn't realize there were so many Christian FDR listeners. Stef has recently mentioned more than once the commonalities of what he's trying to achieve and what Jesus was trying to achieve. I definitely understand the argument that leftists are more of an immediate threat to us because they advocate the use of force against us. "A statist can send me to prison, but a Christian can't send me to hell." I'm not actually surprised when I hear of someone converting from atheism to Christianity. For a lot of people who don't focus on philosophy like we do here, Christians appear to be happy people -- they have a community and a moral framework which can be very appealing (In my opinion FDR offers both of these things AND real intimacy). I would MUCH rather there be more Christians who have converted to Christianity than who who were raised as Christians. To me that means fewer children who will be indoctrinated into a belief system (which I absolutely agree is a form of child abuse). I don't have proof for this but I suspect that if you're a Christian who was raised as an atheist, you would be more likely to let your children decide what they want to believe.

Joel, I think I know what you were feeling regarding the mix of enormous terror and sadness and anger. I'll share with you a similar story I have. I confronted a middle-aged man who I saw spank his child on an airplane. I'm shaking with anger even thinking about that incident. This guy spanked his toddler while standing up halfway through the flight because the kid was playfully punching him on the shoulder and wouldn't "listen". Everyone within ten aisles observed what happened however most just became suddenly interested in the magazine they were reading. I stared straight at him until eventually he couldn't ignore my glare and uncomfortably climbed back into his seat. Once the plane landed I waited outside the gate and followed him to baggage claim. It was their that I tapped him on the shoulder and said I "can see your children love you but I think there are better ways to discipline them than spanking." He denied ever having spanked his kids and began to get extremely angry at me. I insisted that I knew what I saw. At that point he went over to his child and asked him if he had ever spanked him. The child just stared at him with a terrified dumbfounded look, which the father took as agreement. Then the father said to me "You don't know what you're talking about; I was beaten as a child, so don't tell me what spanking is." Other people around us were watching the interaction intently. One heavy-set black woman said casually, "I hit my kids." Seeing there was nothing more I could do I walked out of the terminal. The biggest worry I had was confronting in a way that would not lead to greater violence being inflicted on the children. I intentionally waited until the father was separated from his children to confront him man-to-man. But unfortunately, he chose to use his kid as a human shield from his own actions. It's vile, but predictable. I'm still glad I did what I did because the child will never forget what he saw that day.

Welcome! I've been to Lisbon. I felt that Portugal was a tranquil place. Do you like it there?

I would argue it's only bizarre if you desire protection for children. After all, who is more knowledgeable about child brutalization than police officers? ...."No ma'am, you're doing it wrong. Let me demonstrate how my father disciplined me." Disgusting.

Hi Mark, I called into the show recently to ask about personality types. (First caller on December 19.) If you haven't watched Stef's video on Nature v Nurture, that's a good place to start. I also recommend this resource on behavior genetics and affect. http://www.personality-project.org/revelle/publications/AR.html

Michael, Welcome, brother. You are among friends. I appreciate your vulnerable honesty. Emerged may be too passive a word -- the reality is you survived an environment filled with predators. And yes, your toxic upbringing almost certainly damaged you psychologically. The good news is that your soul was not crushed, and that you can reclaim it with introspection, therapy and self knowledge. It's a journey you will not regret. I look forward to your participation in the community.

Darius, you said that very well. Thanks! Indeed all fears are not created equal. I think you are saying that a fear of rejection cannot occur if we have sufficiently worked on ourselves because those who reject us are not worthy of our fears! Other kinds of fears, like walking into a lion's den, are rational and will produce a justifiable emotion. I can understand why telling someone that his or her fear is irrational would be disorienting for that person. We rely on our fear to process danger and if that feeling is in fact dysfunctional we would rather deny than believe we are broken and unable to function (in the wild this would be a certain death sentence). I think it's important to point out to people that their emotion processing ability is not broken but rather locked in a dungeon. I look forward to watching the next videos in the series.

Darius, Do you think that our unconscious fear of rejection, say with regard to public speaking, is in some cases affected by a rational, instantaneous assessment of our present circumstance (e.g. who is in the audience) or do these deeper emotions inevitably follow from past trauma like neglect? Another way of asking this would be once we have dealt with our abuse and gone through therapy / self discovery, how reliable is our 'gut feeling' fear for predicting the danger of a given situation? Great video!

Telsu, That's great to hear about your flip from socialism to anarcho-capitalism! Thanks for sharing your experience in that journey. A lot of times we assume the path from statism to philosophy is linear, but it sounds like you went in a kind of backwards circle if that makes sense.

Thanks for sharing! I've subscribed to your channel. I think you guys have a good dynamic; the back and forth really works for you. I would like to see some more outside studies or articles that you quote from and then discuss. A critique of popular "wisdom" in the media. If your goal is to get people lurking in the murky waters of the altstream to peer into crystal clear philosophical waters, this tweak would I think pique more interest. Cool project -- keep at it!

Cdc3rd: I hope you don't think we're ganging up on you but you had to have known what people would say if you came to an anarchist forum and tried to justify remaining employed by the military. Some questions I would like to challenge you on: If the funding of defense were to be voluntary then would the institution implementing the defense still be called a government? And would the area being defended still be called a nation? Does the existence of defense as a service depend on whether or not you think it should be supplied? In a free market situation wouldn't large-scale defense either be supplied or not be supplied depending on demand?

Hello, Happy that you decided to support the show with your brains and your nickels! Penn and Teller cover some interesting topics on their show but I don't remember the mention of Ayn Rand. Do you find that other pilots are receptive to libertarianism?

This post is in response to Stefan's 'Fuck Evil' elevator pitch for being good as well as podcast 2839 Death by Incentives: What Makes The World Go Round. For the people on this board, "Fuck Evil" is what makes us get out of bed in the morning. Yet, the rest of humanity is content to say "I don't really want to fight evil". Just like Freedomain Radio has done over the course of its near decade-long history, we have to get better at incentivizing good in the world; we have to figure out what will make others want to be good if we want to win them over the the side of true ethics. What I've been wondering for the past month is two-fold: 1) What examples are there currently in the world where being good is profitable? and 2) What are the barriers to making true ethics profitable (be they currencies of economic, social or physiological nature), besides the obvious gun of the government? I have my own thoughts but I want to hear from people on the board. More specifically, I'm wondering why we have credit scores but no one has invented a 'virtue score'. What if everyone involved in a community was given a score which could go up or down depending on the objective measure of virtue in their actions? We have the scientific framework to assess people on a moral level -- universally preferable behavior -- so what is stopping us from taking the assessment outside of theory and putting it into concrete measurements? As we know from physics and engineering, if you can't measure something it doesn't exist. For me this is inevitable in the course of achieving freedom, and we do it in our personal relationships without even thinking about it. Perhaps the expansion of incentives into the public domain has not happened yet because the world is not ready for it. But we have proved that at least a small portion of the world is ready for it. I've experienced FDR as very similar to a DRO. I'm much more likely to want to buy goods from people in this community than from everyone outside of the community. Any entrepreneurs out there looking for a really difficult but rewarding project?

Good that you posted on the board about this. This is really the heart of FDR, which doesn't mean it's a hard concept to understand... but it will take a lot of dedication and patience with yourself to implement. We 'vets' are still working through it ourselves. If you don't mind the poor audio quality and traffic distractions from back in 2006, these sum it up well: 450 - Libertopia // "Talk to the young"; "Be the president of your own Libertopia"; "Skepticism towards the innate value of the family" 183 - Freedom Part 4: Parents // "Freedom is recognizing where you have control and where you do not have control"; "your unconscious has integrity, your unconscious will absorb things and act morally because the unconscious is all about processing reality"; "if you can't apply [freedom] at the personal level you have no right to talk about it at the political level" "screw politics! it's about your life"

For those interested in personality, I'll be calling in to the show this Friday to talk about personality instruments like Myers-Briggs and Big Five. p.s. Kyle, we're a 97% match on OKCupid! I feel the sparks already.

Hi Dibble, Were I ten years older I think we'd hit it off smashingly. Regarding someone's comment about a dating site, I used to think there just weren't enough women in FDR for it to work but I've since reconsidered that assumption. Meetups are a good place to start if you have one near you. Location isn't that big an issue for me so it would be nice to open up the door to more options. I could see a subforum with these types of posts being useful to people. Dr. Love is in the house. *raised eyebrow*

Hi Cpl Ferro, Welcome to the Freedomain Radio boards! I share your sentiment - philosophy is the best way of preventing war of any kind. I don't know about bells, but there are a lot of podcasts. MD

Welcome, Patti. Is there one topic in particular you want to learn about? I assume you wouldn't have kept listening if you weren't grabbed by something.

http://8tracks.com/mdrake88/philosophy-playlist-part-2-of-4-atheism Philosophy Playlist Part 2 of 4 - Atheism "The second part of this four part philosophy playlist contains songs that relate to organized assault on reason, commonly known as religion. If the 'faithful' were to honestly ask themselves "Why do I believe in ideas that defy all logic and evidence?" they would realize that God is a way of avoiding uncomfortable truths about their social and familial structures."

This one has a conservative bent so it didn't make the cut. Nevertheless, pretty catchy. Btc friend - will you cut it out; your emoticon shades are out-cooling me...

Excellent! We'll be sure to add you. The conversation at Freedomain has grown large enough that it's possible to find other crazy, ahem, like-minded people just about anywhere in the world!