12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson:

On Quora, anyone can ask a question, of any sort—and anyone can answer. Readers upvote those answers they like, and downvote those they don’t. In this manner, the most useful answers rise to the top, while the others sink into oblivion.

Some useful answers rise – and so do some bad ones. Some great answers sink into oblivion. This is well known, yet also contradicts the claim that the most useful answers rise. JP is overstating the wisdom of the mob.

Quora tells you how many people have viewed your answer and how many upvotes you received. Thus, you can determine your reach, and see what people think of your ideas.

Their viewing and voting patterns do not tell you what they think. It omits why they like things – their reasoning, their thoughts. It also leaves you with no way to tell if they're being honest (you can't spot dishonesty through votes and view).

As of July 2017, as I write this—and five years after I addressed “What makes life more meaningful?”—my answer to that question has received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133 upvotes), while my response to the question about aging has been viewed by 7,200 people and received 36 upvotes. Not exactly home runs.

JP's goal is popularity. He judges a home run not by what he thinks of what he wrote, but by what other people think. His stated goal – his criteria of success (a home run) – is to get views and upvotes, not to please himself.

My goal, when I write, is truth. I don't judge ideas by popularity. I go by arguments. If someone has a criticism – even one single criticism from one person – I'll consider the reasoning and address it or change my mind. But if a thousand people downvote me without giving any arguments, I don't regard that as making any difference intellectually.

The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list. They commented on and shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing this list out and keeping it as a reference. Simply phenomenal,” and “You win Quora. We can just close the site now.” Students at the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to me and told me how much they liked it.

JP is a second-hander (see The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand to understand the term more). He's judging his work by the opinions of other people instead of by rational evaluation of the content of the work. He's concerned with who thinks what (social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand called it) instead of what the rational arguments about the material are.

If I were sharing a success story like this, I wouldn't quote reason-less praise. I'd be concerned with the rational benefit of the popularity. Did it get me any questions or criticisms I learned from? Did the audience have enough intellectual merit to help me improve the ideas? It's nice if people like you're work and they're helped, but that must not be a creator's primary motivation or reward. Yet JP focuses on it.

I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.

JP writes this like it's 99.9th percentile quality, when he's only demonstrated 99.9th percentile popularity. These are completely different things which JP blurs together.

Quora provides market research at its finest. The respondents are anonymous. They’re disinterested, in the best sense. Their opinions are spontaneous and unbiased. So, I paid attention to the results, and thought about the reasons for that answer’s disproportionate success. Perhaps I struck the right balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar while formulating the rules. Perhaps people were drawn to the structure that such rules imply. Perhaps people just like lists.

Market research is the wrong approach to truth-seeking. Who cares if people like lists? JP should be considering if lists are the best way to present his work – according to his own judgement about the issues themselves.

JP seeks to figure out what people want to hear, in what format, instead of creating original work and structuring it as he thinks best fits the content.

JP is better than this. He is, in various ways, an original and independent thinker. He does good work. That's why this error stands out. It's an internal contradiction he has, which conflicts with some of his very substantial virtues and makes things harder for him.

I started reading the new book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson.

In the forward by Norman Doidge, he states one of JP's themes:

if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.

This is an anti-overreaching view.

The liar's paradox is an ancient philosophy problem about confusing sentences like, "This sentence is false." If you say it's true, it contradicts itself. If you say it's false, then it seems to be true. People have identified that part of the issue making things weird is that the sentence refers to itself.

To understand it more clearly, I recognized that the sentence is shorthand and wrote out the implied words. It means: "The final, completed evaluation of this sentence is false." In other words, it's asking you to evaluate if the sentence is true or false, and then compare what you come up with to see if it matches "false".

This reveals that it's, in a way, referring to the future. This is a better explanation than the self-reference explanation. Consider the sentence, "Joe loves philosophy; he'd never be an altruist." In this sentence, the word "he" refers to Joe. That's self-reference because the sentence refers to a part of itself; but this self-reference is harmless.

You're supposed to evaluate if the sentence is true or false. And to do that, you're asked to compare two things:

1. The final, completed evaluation of this sentence

2. false

But (1) doesn't exist yet at the time you're evaluating the sentence.

At the time you're first evaluating the sentence, (1) is undefined. That's the problem and the source of the "paradox".

Sometimes when you read a sentence, you can't figure out what something means until you finish the rest of the sentence. That's OK. It can be due to forward references or the need for context. The problem is that you need to already know the evaluation of the liar's paradox sentence (from the future) at the time you're creating the evaluation.

In terms of lisp computer code, we could write it something like this:

(equals? (evaluate self) false)

But what is "self"? It's (equals? (evaluate self) false). And what is the "self" in there? It's (equals? (evaluate self) false). Each time you expand the self to its meaning, you get another self that needs expanding to some meaning, and you can never finish expanding everything. So the sentence is poorly defined.

Or we could look at as ruby code with a blatant infinite loop:

def liars_paradox()
  return liars_paradox() == false
end

This is no more paradoxical than any other non-halting program like one that loops with while true.

(This problem has been solved before, e.g. this link makes the same point as my lisp code answer. I don't know how original my English language explanation is. I reinvented these solutions myself rather than reading them.)

I tried 3 weeks (9 meals) of Blue Apron to compare to Gobble (which i used for several months). These services deliver a weekly food box for you to cook. It contains exactly the ingredients you need to make specific meals, along with the recipes.

gobble meals are significantly easier and faster to prepare, cost 20% more, and were more gourmet. selection is similar (around 7-8 meals to choose from per week. maybe blue apron had slightly more. they seem to always have 3 vegetarian meals, so if you usually don't want those then you don't get a lot of choices.)

gobble puts more effort into side dishes, more complete meals, a bit fancier meals, and sauces. i also like their packaging better because they group everything for a meal in an outer bag (except meat separate). blue apron groups up the small things for each meal in a bag but then sends several loose things to deal with.

gobble sends more food that's already partially prepared. e.g. partly cooked rice or mashed potatoes that's done in 2min in microwave. or they've sent me complete raviolis with filling. or they'll send garlic shallot confit ready to add to your dish instead of making you chop garlic. they've also sent cooked meat that you just have to heat sometimes when they want it prepared a specific way that's harder or takes longer. and they'll send complicated sauces they already put significant effort into making to save you time. i also liked all of gobble's salads (and i'm not much of a salad person), but blue apron sent a lazy simple salad that didn't impress. blue apron commonly has you put stuff in the oven for 20-30min, whereas gobble tries to get meals done in 15min. i don't really mind time leaving things in the oven but blue apron is also significantly more time preparing the food.

blue apron was fun for a bit to compare and practice cooking (since you do more actual cooking from closer to scratch) but gobble is way better overall IMO. blue apron isn't bad though, i'd use them over going to the grocery store. both services work well and consistently provide good food.

i cancelled my blue apron account (for some stupid reason you can only skip deliveries one by one, but you can't skip everything by default). next time i feel like putting higher effort into cooking, i'll try a different service (there's a bunch like chefd, peach dish, and hello fresh).

oh and on the subject of food i've gotta recommend Fasta Pasta. it's a special plastic container for microwave cooking. i cook all my pasta with it; it's easier and always comes out perfect (microwaves are more consistent about how much they cook stuff). it does rice and some other stuff in the microwave too. i used it instead of a pot on the stove for cooking some pasta from my meal kits.

One of the themes of Atlas Shrugged is one of the themes of my own philosophy: Don't overreach.

I say: If you exceed your abilities, if you try to do more than you can manage, then you will make more mistakes. More things will go wrong. If you do this too much it'll overwhelm your capability to deal with mistakes. That's overreaching: doing activities where your rate of making mistakes is too high for your ability to find and fix mistakes. Overreaching is bad, and pretty much all adult lives have tons of overreaching. The situation is so bad people just give up on correctness and try to muddle through life putting up with many unsolved mistakes.

Rand doesn't say that. But she says something related.

In Atlas Shrugged, the world has a bunch of nasty problems. Dagny tries to ignore them and run a railroad anyway, but the problems are pretty damn overwhelming and this doesn't work out in the long run despite how amazing Dagny is. What should she have done instead? Retreat from a world where she and her values aren't wanted. Give up the railroad. Give up on big accomplishments in screwed up world. Live her own life. Keep it simpler and smaller, like how they live in Galt's Gulch. But keep it pure with no corruption. Live in a way where everything works and there's no compromises, downsides, disasters, people working to make your life harder, looters stealing from you, taxes draining you, and so on.

In other words, Atlas Shrugged says to scale back your ambitions to projects which are reasonably possible in good ways – without tons of stuff going wrong. That's what John Galt and his allies do. They won't participate in corrupt, broken projects. They will only live life in ways that work. They'd rather have a single hand-tooled tractor in Galt's Gulch, or a little farm, or a few barrels of day of oil production, or a cabin instead of a skyscraper ... as long as it's fully theirs, it's fully pure and proper and correct ... there's nothing broken or wrong or bad about it.

In other words, it's better to have less without errors, corruptions, sacrifices, and moral compromises, rather than to have more at the cost of your soul or the cost of it not actually working right.

It's also like how you should learn things in general (e.g. typing, martial arts moves, or video game techniques): do it slowly and correctly and then speed up. Do not do it fast and wrong and try to fix the mistakes when there's a bunch of them. Speed up gradually so you only deal with a few mistakes at a time and keep the mistakes manageable.

In the introduction of Atlas Shrugged (35th anniversary edition), Peikoff quotes Rand's notes:

Her [Dagny's] error—and the cause of her refusal to join the strike—is over-optimism and over-confidence (particularly this last).

...

Over-confidence-in that she thinks she can do more than an individual actually can. She thinks she can run a railroad (or the world) single-handed, she can make people do what she wants or needs, what is right, by the sheer force of her own talent

Overreaching isn't just for beginners who try to act like experts. Even a great hero can overreach.

ppl argue badly. this is ok once. even a few times is not a big deal.

from this, they need to learn things like:

• they might suck at arguing.

• they might be biased.

• they might be dishonest.

don’t accept these things. you don’t know. call them maybes.

from there, pivot to: how do i figure these things out? how does one get better at them? what sort of path is there to develop intellectually in order to get better at this stuff and/or even be able to evaluate it?

what people routinely do instead is:

• get discouraged by an arguing failure.

• refuse to pivot to the underlying issues that are raised by the failure.

• or pivot briefly then forget it, rather than it being an ongoing project.

• reset back where they started an argue badly again with nothing having changed.

overall, people lose track of the situation – that they might be e.g. dishonest and they should be investigating. this is no accident, and it destroys their ability to make progress.

sure, say what you think, see what happens, make mistakes. try stuff. but don’t repeat this endlessly. don’t repeat it much at all. move on. find a problem or three and actually pursue them instead of starting over again next conversation with the now-unreasonable default assumption of your competence, rationality and honesty. those are things that are rare, and shouldn’t even be expected by default.

move on to trying to develop competence, rationality, honesty, intellectual skills. make that an actual goal and actually consider if your actions are in pursuit of that goal. don’t just carelessly argue some point that comes up as if you’ll learn much. if you aren’t taking discussions to conclusions with persistent energy, and you don’t organize your activities, you shouldn’t expect to learn much.

Do you have to choose between reason and other stuff like marriage, or can you have it all?

You can’t have a conventional life and add reason on top. You can add little bits and pieces and fragments of reason on top, but a conventional life simply contradicts reason in major ways.

What if you choose reason first, then can you have it all, or do you have to give something up? Neither. You can genuinely not want some things, and decide they aren’t appealing, and have everything you rationally want. So then you’re happy, you get the things you value in the future when you’re making rational decisions about your values. But you don’t get all the things that sound tempting now, you change your mind about some of them.

Are you a serious intellectual? After you found out about Fallible Ideas, you can learn a lot about yourself from how you reacted.

First, did you read an important FI-related book during the next six months? If not, (and you’re age 15+,) you’re not very interested in FI. (For younger people, it’s less clear, and you may need to look at other forms of engagement to judge interest.)

For the sake of discussion, I’ll suppose the book you read is Atlas Shrugged (AS). There are lots of great books to choose from.

Did you read AS thoughtfully? Did you write down thoughts as you read? Can you remember thoughts you had about it well enough to write them down now?

Did you have questions about the book? What did you do to get them answered? If you had fewer than 100 questions about AS, you aren’t the kind of person who is going to get very far with FI. FI is for people who both want to know things and go seeking answers. You should do that without being told to.

Did you have followup questions after your questions? If you never asked 5+ questions in a row to keep getting more depth about an issue, you aren’t very interested in learning about it.

I know you’ve got excuses. You’re used to a world, such as school, where there’s no one to answer your questions, so you learned not to think of them or not to ask them. Well, so what? Who cares what your excuse is? For whatever reason, you are not suitable for serious learning now.

Can you change? It’s conceivable. But don’t expect it before it happens. Don’t count on it. Most people don’t change in big ways about reason. If you find that discouraging, rational thinking is not for you.

Your relationship with reason can be used for considering practical decisions. E.g. should you get married, if you want to, but you heard a rational argument criticizing it? The key question here is whether you can do better than tradition, or should live with a flawed tradition. In order to attempt to outdo a major societal tradition, you need to be really serious about rational thinking. It will take a ton of serious thought (from you and anyone else involved).

If you didn’t read a book within 6 months, or weren’t bubbling with questions about it, then you’re not going to do better than tradition about marriage. You aren’t wiser than your society. You aren’t suited for paving your own way in life. You aren’t a pioneering first-mover.