ragdoll

LOL This is hilarious Although, I do sort of agree with him. Most of you guys on the forum seem depressed about not finding an already virtuous person to share your life with but I think that you should do as Stef suggests and find women that can think and then try and make (for lack of a better word) them virtuous. Neither me or my wife were virtuous people in a lot of ways but we both had some virtuous values and shared an ability to reason. And years later into both of us pushing each other to become better and more virtuous people we are drastically better people than we were before we got together.

definition of subjective: subjective. existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought (opposed to objective ). pertaining to or characteristic of an individual; personal; individual: a subjectiveevaluation.​ ​Looking at that I would say that everything is subjectively valued by each individual and at the same time has an objective value that is based on something outside of the individual. Which, I think is very similar to what Kevin Beal is saying.

Doesn't the article itself suggest that the only thing wrong with Round-up is that it kills your gut bacteria? That combined with studies that I've read showing the efficacy of probiotic treatments on autistic patients seems to suggest that we should all just take some probiotics and try and eat right.

Yeah, life is great. Once you get away from this depression you seem to be going through you'll most likely realize that even us 1% that lived a shitty life can break out into "the good life" with some work. Also, alot of your assertions are very random and don't make a whole lot of rational sense. Like when you say that people must want to have children to be happy. Some single women I have known have chosen to have children so that they can have someone that loves them but I've never heard of a husband and wife deciding to have children to "make them happy." Wouldn't 99% of people being happy actually be empirical evidence saying that you should have children? Say you have a 99% chance in black jack to win $10 and a 1% chance to lose $100. Do you take that bet over and over or not?

Your sources are 20 years old. Dr. Flynn says in the video I posted that after taking culture into account we may very well all have the same potential. Which is what we and current science are suggesting. I think that the real issue here is that you don't believe in evolution and thus think that said differences in races are unchangeable. Please let me know if you have changed your stance on evolution but until you have done so I don't believe a rational discussion on this issue can amount to anything productive.

I'm not sure what theory you're talking about but I would like you to address what SAL9000 and I wrote in response to this topic. There have been a few studies published that suggest that you can change your brain's mass depending on your habits. Again, leaning towards what SAL and I have said already. And like I said on your last topic about evolution, you should look at how rapidly we can change a dog's entire physical makeup in a few generations if you think that evolution has to be this weird slow change that takes place over millions of years.

The books you cited were wrote 20 years ago. In the past 5 years it has been very well established that DNA is only a raw baseline for the environment to mold. SAL9000 described how it works accurately as far as I understand it but he left out the fact that the environment turns on and off genes as well. So theoretically high IQ genes could potentially be turned on or off by the environment. Dr. Flynn also explained this fairly well in Stefan's interview of him here:

Well I think you're confusing FDR's end goal. I would assume that FDR wants to expose the greatest amount of people possible to philosophy and thus reasoning and peaceful parenting. So they really have no need to get all of their subscriber's (people who are exposed to FDR already) to view each individual video. They instead want to put out as much trending content as possible in order to gain new potential podcast viewers. And they accomplish that quite well. Looking at their stats, description text, tags, wpm, subtitles and whatnot they seem to be doing everything as good as you can do it. I'm not sure if their default tags provide any value to SEO or if they actually water it down but I'm sure they've A/B split tested it.

I'm super pumped about the upcoming entrepreneurship series that Stefan mentioned at the end of the most recent call-in show! I'll be starting a new business this summer so this will be especially helpful for me. I've learned something useful every time entrepreneurship has been brought up during a call-in show in the past 1200 episodes (my wife and I are working through the episodes backwards). Anyone else as pumped for this as I am?

I will go ahead and reiterate that you should look at what we can do to dog breeds. Drastic changes in a species can happen fascinatingly quick.

I don't think you can be vain about stuff you haven't done. You saying that about Andrew Jackson and then saying that no one would appreciate you living a similar life seems like a self-defeating statement. I also do not believe that your description of being "in love with building a story like that" could be true because you are not even convinced that you want to build a story like that. It is certainly not your duty to save the world. You may potentially choose to but being smart most definitely does not make you responsible for the world. Philosophically, you cannot discover your potential because each time you achieve your potential you can then reach a higher potential. The first caller on 2928 Irrational Optimism as Vanity covered that human condition a bit. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is why Stefan's humility is almost certainly not "deceiving." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect And it hasn't been my experience that success drives away relationships but living life morally certainly does.

I don't know, that's why I wrote "Does anyone have any ideas as to why these two subjects are/were "blind spots" for me?" The only thoughts I have about it are that christianity is fiction and most of my family were always getting me different fantasy and sci-fi books.

You should definitely call-in to the show about this dude.

It's possible that I associate it with family or christianity. But I only talk to one of my family members and we've both been atheists since we were young. We were raised by preachers though and I've always considered the whole christian experience to be fairly traumatic.

Would +1 if I could. This definitely seems on the money. And I think the best motivation to make the world a better place for me is my children. You not only can make it a better place for yourself but for your children and their children etc.

I think that it's a blind spot because I've heard his argument for magic being madness a few times now and I can never remember it when I try to analyze the argument for myself. It just doesn't "stick" and that's pretty atypical. Something similar happened when I was trying to figure out how to incorporate philosophy into writing. I basically would blank out and not be able to think about the issue.

Thank you to everyone that has replied! It was very helpful. I had some sort of block about writing philosophy into fiction before this post but you all have helped greatly in alleviating said block. This seems so obvious now that it's amusing that I didn't understand it at first. Any more tips on how to do this effectively would be appreciated. I also have a block when it comes to understanding Stefan's theory on magic in fiction. For whatever reason, I can rationally understand his argument but after a day or two passes I couldn't tell you what Stefan's stance on magic in writing is. It's quite the "blind spot." Does anyone have any ideas as to why these two subjects are/were "blind spots" for me?

Sorry, I've only seen it on youtube. Well said!

I just remembered something else that has helped me a ton the past year with staying away from games and embracing productivity:

I would love to open a discussion on how to incorporate philosophy in fictional works. If anyone has any ideas/methods on how to do so or prime examples of philosophy being conveyed through fiction that they would be willing to share with me, I would greatly appreciate it.

How many views this has, compared to alot of TED talks, is sad but telling.

My cycle of playing games is probably similar to a recovering heroin addict that has struggled with his addiction throughout his entire adult life. The only thing that really helped me quit playing video games for 16 hours a day was the thought "this is a waste of time" replaying in my head at a faster and faster rate as I played games over quite a few years. That and the idea that I could just "play" life like I play games. Understanding the concept of gamification helped a bit as well. I've been successfully gaming for an hour or less a day (currently I don't play anything) for 2 years now so switching over to real life experience building is certainly possible.

Add me to the list of people looking forward to a good reading list! Here's the books that I've managed to write down/buy as he mentions them: John Bradshaw workbooks (which I haven't been able to find) Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" John Brockman's What is Your Dangerous Idea Nathaniel Branden's The Psychology of Self Esteem Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training Gabor Maté’s In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts Peaceful Parenting (there's 2 or 3 books by this name and I'm not sure which one Stefan recommends) It seems like there's been dozens of others mentioned but these were the ones that interested me or my wife enough to buy them.