Understanding Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff:

What is the name for the type of person in philosophy who clings to concepts and says, in effect, “Facts may contradict my concepts, but if so, it’s tough on the facts”? A “rationalist.” Rationalism has dominated philosophy (at least the better philosophy) through the ages. Starting way back with Parmenides, who gave an argument as to why change is impossible, and then saw things change in front of his eyes, and said, “They’re not really changing, because that simply does not agree with my unanswerable argument.”

I generally agree with Peikoff's point. I'm going to criticize only the comment on Parmenides.

For context, Peikoff is no casual commenter on the history of philosophy. He's a teacher who's lectured on it. And he considers the lectures good enough to sell:

http://www.peikoff.com/courses_and_lectures/the-history-of-philosophy-volume-1-–-founders-of-western-philosophy-thales-to-hume/

A reader would reasonably expect Peikoff to know what he's talking about regarding Parmenides, and not to have made this statement carelessly. I think Peikoff's own position would be, "I'm familiar with Parmenides and I'm right" rather than, "You're being too picky and can't expect me to know much about Parmenides".

Now, from The World of Parmenides by Karl Popper:

Parmenides was a philosopher of nature (in the sense of Newton’s philosophia naturalis). A whole series of highly important astronomical discoveries is credited to him: that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are one and the same; that the Earth has the shape of a sphere (rather than of a drum of a column, as Anaximander thought). About equally important is his discovery that the phases of the Moon are due to the changing way in which the illuminated half-sphere of the Moon is seen from the Earth.[5]”

So Parmenides was a scientist who made empirical discoveries. He wasn't a rationalist who refused to look at the world.

And Parmenides' main work was about the conflict he found between appearance and reality. As a scientist, Parmenides discovered some ways that appearance and reality don't match. E.g. the Earth looks flat but is spherical. This conflict stood out to Parmenides and interested him, so he wrestled with it, tried to make sense of it, and wrote about it.

Popper proposes Parmenides first made an empirical discovery that the moon doesn't change. Then second, in trying to grapple with it, he came up with the idea that actually nothing changes. [1]

Discovering the difference between appearance and reality is a big deal. It's a hard problem. Early work on the matter wasn't up to modern standards and people got confused, but that doesn't make Parmenides anything resembling a modern rationalist.

So what Peikoff said about Parmenides is completely wrong.

[1] This idea is a lot better than it sounds, by the way. It has some similarities to e.g. modern spacetime theory. Time is tricky and commonsense ideas about time are wrong (see David Deutsch's books for details).

And there was a successor theory to Parmenides', which was that reality consists of atoms and the void (rather than just atoms with no empty space), and the atoms don't change but do move. So Parmenides' idea was fruitful, it helped discuss an important problem and lead to some better ideas.

Parmenides' idea may also have been related to Xenophanes' religious ideas which also have some value (rejecting anthropomorphic gods, monotheism, differentiating perfect/divine truth from fallible human knowledge similarly to Parmenides). Parmenides was a pupil of Xenophanes.

I created 4 free podcasts. The topics are:

• Political Activism
• Coffee, Vaping and Weed
• Punishing and Rewarding Children
• Philosopher's Mistakes

I'll be adding more to that YouTube playlist.

I also made podcasts on Helping Children Become Independent and Children Should Make Decisions which are for sale at my Gumroad store.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has a lot of stories about how evil the Soviet gulag system was. Below I quote a brief section about Western complicity in Soviet crimes, and about Churchill and Roosevelt in particular.

Context for reading the quote: The "Vlasov army" refers to Russian units in the German army in WWII. They turned against the Germans and saved Prague before the Soviet army arrived. (Soviet histories lie and take credit.) The "act of a loyal ally" refers to the Vlasov army betraying the Germans. And the Soviets routinely punished anyone who'd been taken prisoner by the Germans with 15 years in the gulag (which is preceded by torture). Many other people were executed. One reason is they didn't want people who knew about life in Europe to spread information about it in Russia. The Soviets were so unfairly cruel and murderous it's hard to believe if you haven't read about it. Many people would rather have killed themselves than be executed or tortured and imprisoned by the Soviets. Keep that context in mind when considering turning anyone over to the Soviets.

After saving Prague (bold added):

... the Vlasov army began to retreat toward Bavaria and the Americans. They were pinning all their hopes on the possibility of being useful to the Allies; in this way their years of dangling in the German noose would finally become meaningful. But the Americans greeted them with a wall of armor and forced them to surrender to Soviet hands, as stipulated by the Yalta Conference. In Austria that May, Churchill perpetrated the same sort of "act of a loyal ally," but, out of our accustomed modesty, we did not publicize it. He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men.

[This surrender was an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy. The heart of the matter was that the Cossacks were determined to fight to the death, or to cross the ocean, all the way to Paraguay or Indochina if they had to ... anything rather than surrender alive. Therefore, the English proposed, first, that the Cossacks give up their arms on the pretext of replacing them with standardized weapons. Then the officers—without the enlisted men—were summoned to a supposed conference on the future of the army in the city of Judenburg in the English occupation zone. But the English had secretly turned the city over to the Soviet armies the night before. Forty busloads of officers, all the way from commanders of companies on up to General Krasnov himself, crossed a high viaduct and drove straight down into a semicircle of Black Marias, next to which stood convoy guards with lists in their hands. The road back was blocked by Soviet tanks. The officers didn't even have anything with which to shoot themselves or to stab themselves to death, since their weapons had been taken away. They jumped from the viaduct onto the paving stones below. Immediately afterward, and just as treacherously, the English turned over the rank-and-file soldiers by the trainload—pretending that they were on their way to receive new weapons from their commanders.

In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious. How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guarantees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles' heel? And what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin's hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender? They say it was the price they paid for Stalin's agreeing to enter the war against Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and for giving Kim Il Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political thought! And when, subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajczyk, when Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Budapest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain's Conservatives fled from Suez, could one really believe that those among them with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the Cossacks?]

Along with them, he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children who did not want to return to their native Cossack rivers. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson

I started to hear a “voice” inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said something – something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and matter-of-fact tone:

You don’t believe that.

That isn’t true.

You don’t believe that.

That isn’t true.

The “voice” applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke.

I couldn’t understand what to make of this. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me – I wasn’t schizophrenic – but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me – the talking part, or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it was the criticizing part – well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass unchallenged. This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part. Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren’t real, weren’t true – or, at least, weren’t mine.

All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren’t my things, however – I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them – presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.

wise, IMO.

ppl overreach by saying a bunch of crap instead of actually doing stuff right and thinking. (and if u recommend they slow down, they often bring up the issue that zero would be a bad amount to talk, too. and then you see them say something really careless they spent 2 minutes on. why can't they consistently spend, say, 5 minutes reviewing each of their posts -- more for really long ones, but don't do those anyway -- and send if everything looks good? that should easily get them a more medium result between rushed and nothing.)

a common, important tip for learning is: better to do something correctly, slowly, then speed up. don't go faster than you know what you're doing and try to fix the mistakes later. this applies to learning to touch type, learning video games, and also writing an FI reply.

Peterson also said in a video somewhere, something like: most of what people say is lies or other people's ideas. they don't have their own ideas or a self. they need to create that. i wonder if he's read The Fountainhead.*

in another video, Peterson said basically that people have been building up lies on top of lies on top of lies, for decades. that's why they have such difficult problems! that's why their lives are such a mess! it's layer and layers and layers of lies to untangle!

in some sense, people teach chess, math, Spanish, grammar, history, programming, formal and symbolic logic, chemistry, physics, biology, how our government works, how to cook.

they have school classes on these things. they have books explaining it. i can remember being taught about these things in the past.

by contrast, i cannot remember anyone ever teaching me:

• how to understand what a sentence means
• how to figure out if an argument is true or false
• what an argument IS (and how to decide if X is an argument for Y)
• how to decide if something is a non sequitur
• how to decide if X implies Y
• how to read sentences that don't not have double, triple or quadruple negatives.

people do teach relevant things. reading what the words are is relevant to understanding a written sentence. understanding !!X is relevant to double negatives. but using it is kinda up to you. people also do teach you to avoid using double negatives, and warn they are confusing.

people teach syllogisms. but that's a bad way to think about most arguments. it can make things worse!

people get examples. lots. kids hear many sentences. and they get information about what the sentence was about. like the parent says something including "pancakes" and then 20 minutes later breakfast is served. repeatedly.

i think a lot of how people understand sentences is actually like that. they map the sentence to: "blah blah something about pancakes" and think " cool i understand him". and when you're 3, hey, that's pretty good! success! but when you're 13 or 33, that's bad. but the 33 yo actually interprets tons of stuff that way and muddles through life.

and one of the things that makes it hard is the people talking are as dumb as you. so they say some actual specific words. but they don't know what words mean all that well either. so all they even MEANT is "blah blah something about pancakes". or maybe they had something more complicated in their head, but it didn't match the words they used anyway. that's not universal (even with dumb people) but it's common. a lot of times, "blah blah something about pancakes" is about as good as you can do because the speaker actually didn't use the right words to communicate more. if you try to listen to the details of what he said, and interpret them, you'll just misunderstand him!

people are really bad at explaining or teaching anything they find "self-evident" or super super obvious. that's part of the issue.

Rand, Popper and DD are great at this stuff, but their books don't teach it. they explain more advanced stuff.

anyway, i was thinking there are these subjects people know how to teach (often quite badly). and subjects they basically don't teach at all. and i don't think the other ones are impossible to teach btw, people just don't know how much or don't do it or really really suck at it.

some of the stuff they don't teach is basically the kinda stuff that IQ is about. people don't know how to teach IQ. (btw there's also other stuff they don't like teaching like swear words or sex stuff).

in more Popperian terms people need to do steps like:

1) understand, conceptually, what the problem they are trying to solve is.

and ppl get that wrong all the time. and no one really teaches it as a general skill. or knows how to. it is taught in specific ways, like they'll teach you about a particular category of chemistry problem and how to think about it and what to do with it.

2) brainstorm solutions

how do you brainstorm? there's infinite things you could come up with. which ones should you? how do you know? this isn't really taught. isn't not very important though, just don't get stuck here. the initial brainstorming can be shitty ideas, and that gets fixed in step 4.

3) criticize the brainstormed stuff

here is where you have to actually figure out what kinda stuff to target. you both think of attributes the ideas/examples/solutions/whatever should not have for some reason ("let's not use an animal example b/c ppl are confused about how animals differ from humans. an inanimate object will be clearer") and also attributes it should have ("i want a solution that leaves me with at least as much money as i had before, so i'm not gonna do X or Y").

4) judgement, like which criticisms apply to which ideas.

this is partly hard just in a basic way. if trait Z is bad, ok, well, which ideas have trait Z and which don't? how do you figure that out if you don't already know it?

and it's partly hard in a more complicated way b/c you don't wanna just throw out a bunch of ideas b/c of a dumb criticism. you also need to be judging the criticisms too and making counter-criticisms. that's so complicated it actually kinda ruins my attempt to make this a linear step-by-step process. i just threw it in here.

5) brainstorm variants

so the initial brainstorming can just be rather random crap. that's fine. i don't think any healthy adult actually has much trouble with that, even if they can't really say how they do it.

but this part is harder. where you're coming up with ideas that meet criteria you had from (3). it's like, how do i change the solution to leave me with more money? what are some inanimate objects? (ok that one is easy, but some are harder).

one reason people get stuck on (2) is they already know some criteria of criticism. so they skip (2) and do (3) first, and then move on. that's fine. no problem at all. it just doesn't count as being stuck on (2) if they are really stuck on (5).

6) judge when to stop

when is the idea good enough? how much more should you think of criticism and brainstorm better solutions? this isn't taught. people guess wildly and sometimes make corrections to their policies (like they realize to spend more time than normal for important stuff).

btw, i have not taught it to you here. this is summarizing and describing it. it doesn't actually teach you how to actually do it. it gives you some hints from which you might figure it out yourself. and in some sense that's all we ever give students. but there are lots of topics where the hints are way better and include actual explanations of how to do something. my 6 point list is not what i'd consider teaching it in the usual sense. it's talking about it and it may be helpful, but it really leaves a lot up to you to figure out how actually do the things i mention.

and there's other stuff besides the 6 things on my list and the points earlier like about non sequiturs and figuring out what's an argument for what and how that works and what would and wouldn't be a counter argument. but like, these are basic things people are bad at, and it's the kinda thing that matters to IQ, and people don't teach it.

it's also hard to get ppl to try to learn it. people on FI want to do things like learn Objectivism when they can barely read sentences, you know? they don't sit there and go over the basics.

part of the issue is people can read sentences. 90% of the time! but it's like, even a little idea involves using some basic skills a bunch of times. 50 tiny little basic things might go into 1 idea. so even if you're 99% reliable and doing the basic stuff right, tons of your ideas will be wrong! you need to be able to do the basic stuff with a VERY good success rate or you get totally overwhelmed with errors when you try to build complex mental structures out of millions of basic components. but people generally don't like practicing stuff they get right over 80% of the time. they don't like trying to go from 99% to 99.999%. and besides being HIGHLY reliable at the basics, people also need to be FAST at them. if you're going to build complex mental structures out of a million little pieces, you better be able to do most of the little pieces in well under a second. but people also don't like practicing to get faster at stuff they are already fast at. they don't like trying to go from 2 seconds to .2 seconds to .02 seconds.

morality is another thing people are bad at teaching. there are people who are good at explaining it like Ayn Rand. but like, i watched Pinocchio (the old disney movie) and the cricket (his conscience for some reason) gives Pinocchio a lecture on morality. it's something about avoiding temptation and doing the right thing. it's completely incoherent and Pinocchio doesn't understand. part of the actual plot is this incoherent moralizing that is not understood. and then Pinocchio is immediately thrust out into the world to face temptations to do other stuff besides go to school. and the movie illustrates, in a magical, exaggerated way with 2 unrealistic examples, how nice sounding things can be dangerous and he should have resisted temptation and gone to school.

i think this fits children's actual experiences pretty well: incoherent verbal moral advice they don't understand at home, followed by being thrust into the world totally unprepared.

a lot of how the Bible teaches morality is with stories, too. and there are other old stories with moral content, like fairytales.

Locke had some good ideas about political philosophy:

• People have natural rights to life, liberty and property.
• Natural rights make sense according to reason and are also God's will.
• Individual rights limit what other citizens and the government can do to individuals.
• The government and law should treat everyone equally. Everyone is politically equal.
• The government has limited power, not arbitrary or unlimited power.
• The government's legitimacy comes from the consent of the citizens who prefer the government over the state of nature (anarchy).
• The reason people form a government is to help resolve conflicts and protect rights.
• The people in the government should work to benefit society, not for personal gain.
• If a government is bad enough, the people have a right to rebel against it.

But Locke had some very bad ideas about education.

This info is from my newsletter. Read the whole thing to find out about Locke's nasty education views, the Barbary pirates, and some political links.

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I like your videos, e.g. about identity politics, university, insight into human life, and the value of skill at thinking, writing, speaking, arguing, and reading. Let's have discussions to advance human knowledge and find truth.

I believe you're mistaken about antidepressants. Logically, at least one of us is mistaken. It'd be good to resolve this and find the truth.

You say [1] that if an antidepressant works, you'll know in a month. But how would you know? If your life improves in a month, it could have been for an unrelated reason, due to trying more, or due to placebo. The correlation between taking the antidepressant and then getting better doesn't imply causation. To know causation you have to figure out explanations of how antidepressants work.

You suggest that antidepressants either work or don't work, and are harmless. You suggest this by saying there's no good reason for people to resist trying antidepressants when they're "depressed". But antidepressants are harmful.

The explanation of how antidepressants "work" is they're brain-disabling [2]. That's what they do, not a side effect. That makes it harder for people to think about or complain about their problems, and harder to fight with others. It also motivates some people to lie that they're better in order to get off the drugs.

Peter Breggin explains [3]:

... except for the brain dysfunction and biochemical imbalances caused by psychiatric drugs, there are no known abnormalities in the brains of people who routinely seek help from psychia­trists ... All biopsychiatric treatments share a common mode of action: the disruption of normal brain function. ... all the major categories of psychiatric drugs—antidepressants, stimulants, tranquilizers (antianxiety drugs), mood stabilizers, and anti­psychotics​—​are neuro­toxic. They poison neurons, and sometimes destroy them. ... The currently available biopsychiatric treatments are not specific for any known disorder of the brain. ... they disrupt normal brain function, without correcting any brain abnormality.

I can elaborate on this, and on the additional issue that "depression" and "mental illness" are myths [4].

I searched for information refuting this position, particularly by you or referenced by you. I was unable to find it. E.g., I checked the six neuroscience books you recommend [5], searched your Quora, and listened to Rethinking Depression [6]. I also looked at other criticism of Breggin [7].

In Rethinking Depression, you say you disregard human antidepressant trials because of human complexity. It's too hard to measure the results, control all the factors like other drugs being taken, and prevent bias. I agree. But the same issues apply to judging whether a drug works in one individual's life.

You positively bring up animal trials. But human complexity also poses a problem for extrapolating from animals. Can you link a detailed, written explanation, citing animal studies, that you think should change my mind?

You say critics of antidepressants have unrepresentative experiences and don't appreciate the depths of human misery. You're right about some critics, but Thomas Szasz and I agree with you about human tragedy. I have nothing against people getting help (it's not a crutch), as long as that help is compatible with science and liberalism. I'm not denying the reality and severity of "depression" and suffering, I only deny that it's a medical problem and that antidepressants can medically cure it. Note that being a non-medical and non-genetic problem doesn't mean it's easy to solve, I actually think that means it's harder to solve. (Memes are more fearsome adversaries than genes.)

This is similar to identity politics in two ways. First, saying people lack appropriate lived experience, perspective, etc, isn't a good answer to critics. If they don't know something, it can be explained. Second, people have assumed that, since you object to trans pronoun laws, you deny the reality of bigotry against trans people and are unfamiliar with their suffering. Critics like that exist, but that isn't your reasoning.

Do you have additional arguments which address my points about antidepressants?

I like much of what you have to say, and don't think it depends on these claims about antidepressants.

Below I discuss objections to discussion and methods of rational discussion, then provide references.

You may have some objections to discussion like:

• You're busy.

• You're skeptical that I'm smart and knowledgeable enough.

• You expect discussions of this nature usually don't reach conclusions with anyone changing their mind, ever, let alone in a timely manner.

• If it turns out you're correct and I learn something, where's the value for you?

There are solutions to these problems which don't require giving up on addressing criticism and disagreement from the general public.

Today people get flooded with incoming ideas. People normally filter by prestige, popularity, gatekeeping authorities, social circle, subculture, and proxies for those. These filters are bad at finding the truth. Great new ideas often start off unpopular and look just like bad new ideas to the filters.

One of the solutions is a public, online, discussion forum where other people answer questions and arguments, so you don't have to personally defend everything. (For this, it's necessary to have competent supporters – without those, it's kinda only fair and reasonable that a serious intellectual must do a lot of work explaining stuff himself.)

Another solution is reusing ideas with links and references. If something has already been answered, simply provide the link. And take personal responsibility for any mistakes in that answer, even if someone else wrote it, since you're using it for your own position. Or if no one on your side of the debate has ever created an adequate answer to the criticism, then it's worth some time and attention.

This link reuse approach means only a new argument requires a new reply. And one can write general answers which address an entire category of arguments at once, and then only a different category of argument requires a new answer. Writing quality, canonical answers, and then reusing them, also helps avoid making ad hoc arguments for a position one has a bias about. It also builds up human knowledge.

Methods like these address the question: "If I'm mistaken, and you know it ... how will I find out?"

Answering all critical arguments is important because you could be mistaken. It's also a good way to learn. And providing answers allows for your critics to learn why you're right, or to give follow up arguments you haven't addressed.

People don't do this well. They go through life having inconclusive discussions, using filters to ignore some arguments, and staying mistaken about issues where better ideas are already known. There's a better way [8], which I can elaborate on.

References:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuQgJxYriYI

[2] http://www.wayneramsay.com/drugs.htm

[3] Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, 2nd edition, Peter R. Breggin. pp. xxiii, 2, 7

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mental-Illness-Foundations-Personal/dp/0061771228/

http://www.wayneramsay.com/depression.htm

[5] https://jordanbpeterson.com/2017/03/great-books/

[6] http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/rethinking-depression-part-1-1.2913549

[7] E.g. this criticism of Breggin is bad. I can provide details. http://quackwatch.com/11Ind/breggin.html

[8] http://fallibleideas.com/paths-forward

I'm available for hire for philosophy consulting.

Philosophy is a big field. It includes reason which is a general purpose means of figuring things out, solving problems, dealing with mistakes, making good decisions, judging what's true or false, and more. Whatever issue you're dealing with, reason is important to handling it well.

Broadly there are two main uses for philosophy consulting:

1) You want to think better. Reason is my expertise. I'll help you learn it.

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