Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2018

If anybody could be described as Machiavellian, it’d surely be Machiavelli, right?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Paul Meany tries to rescue the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have ever studied Shakespeare, you might have heard your teacher use the word “Machiavellian” to describe amoral characters such as Iago from Othello or Edmund from King Lear. “Machiavellian” denotes a person or action that disregards morality and is wholly self-serving. The origin of the word derives from the famous Florentine politician and writer Niccoló Machiavelli.

[…]

Published posthumously, The Prince left Machiavelli with an infamous reputation as an amoral, atheistic, and cynical writer. In 1559, the Catholic Church put Machiavelli’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the play The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, written in 1589, Machiavelli appears in the prologue, boldly exclaiming, “I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”

Machiavelli came to be associated with an Elizabethan term, “Old Nick,” used to denote the devil. There is a subject of modern psychology, known as the “dark triad,” which focuses on three malevolent personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

However, this deeply negative image of Machiavelli did not always exist. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a more positive view of Machiavelli emerged, with authors such as the Republican James Harrington referring to Machiavelli as “the prince of politicians.” During the Italian Renaissance, humanist Giovanni Battista Busini fondly described Machiavelli as “a most extraordinary lover of liberty.”

This praise might seem confusing; after all, the word “Machiavellian” denotes someone who is cunning and unscrupulous. How could a man so devious and pragmatic be called a lover of liberty? The answer lies with Machiavelli’s other book, known as Discourses on Livy, which presents a very different image of his political beliefs.

[…]

The stark differences between Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The Prince come from the nature of the aims of each book. The Prince aims to refine the conduct of a single prince, while Discourses on Livy offers guidance for the entire citizen body. The Prince was written to address a unique political opportunity that quickly evaporated, whereas Discourses on Livy was written to articulate the principles required by republics that sought longevity, liberty, and prosperity.

To this day, there still remains a huge debate over the intricacies and contradictions that characterize Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli was an extremely nuanced and original thinker whose reputation should not exclusively be that of an evil schemer. He argued for a republic whose liberty is safeguarded by the common person, in which free, unhindered debate provides the best course of action, and where compromises between opposing groups create harmony. Discourses on Livy reveals another side of Machiavelli, a man committed to the ideals of freedom through the means of representative government.

March 28, 2018

Ideological Possession

Filed under: Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robin Koerner offers some information on how to diagnose and treat the widespread scourge of ideological possession:

As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it.

Ideological possession is to healthy political discourse as scientism is to science.

The most important thing to know about diagnosing ideological possession is that you can’t do it by looking at the content of the possessing ideology.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s not the content of your belief that makes you dangerous, it’s the way you believe it.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly when advanced by those who are so sure of their own knowledge and moral outlook that they would impose it against the protestations of those affected by it. To the ideologically possessed, the imposition can always be justified because “it’s the right thing to do,” “it will start working if we keep at it,” “the complaints are coming from bad people,” and so on. (Yes. The logic is as circular as it seems.)

[…]

To protect oneself from the terrible epistemic disease of ideological possession, epistemic nutrition and exercise are extremely effective.

With respect to the former, the regular consumption of great thinkers like J.S. Mill (“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), George Orwell (“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”), and Dostoevsky (“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him”) will keep you in good epistemic health. Supplement these basics with a more varied diet of thinkers with whom you disagree on things that matter, and you’ll be in even better shape.

With respect to the latter, a comfortable regime of epistemic exercise — which takes a little time and effort but is immediately rewarding — involves maintaining real friendships with people who have very different assumptions, experiences, and declared moral and political priorities from your own.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.

March 27, 2018

Stereotype duel – Boomers versus Millennials

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the long-term damage the Boomers have done to the Millennials:

I’m highly amused that the boomers, possibly the most media-stereotyped generation in history, where the decent members keep telling us they’re not like the lunatics who protested, shut down universities and joined sex communes to share medieval-like diseases from never bathing, are the ones most stereotyping the millennials, according to how the media portrays the millennials.

As some millennial readers here have said, and as I know from my circle, most millennials aren’t like the lazy, game addicted creatures who preach socialism at everyone that the media shows you. Most millennials I know were raised under the spur of boomer teachers who — sorry guys — really are stereotypical in “challenge all authority except mine!

Yes a lot of millennials got lost along the way, and yes, I know my share of millennials drifting through life with no aim, no job, no training, nothing.

But do consider these kids were assured from their youngest age that they were surplus (there are too many humans. I mean they tried to force both of my kids to sign a no-reproduction agreement); that there is nothing they can do (capitalism is inherently unjust, and we’re all ruled by corporations and big, shadowy forces); that no one cares about them (blood for oil; the only reason guns aren’t banned is because people want you to get shot); that their future is poorer and any children they have will be condemned to hell on Earth (we’re running out of oil, water (according to my kids’ teachers), glass (also according to my kids’ teachers) and anything else you can think of (including some things you can’t), there is no future for humanity (global warming is going to kill us all.)

The amazing thing is not that some millennials drift through life with no aim and no plan. Who cares, if it’s all going to end, anyway.

I’m fairly sure they resemble nothing so much as the generation that grew up in the shadow of the year 1000, except without the religious portion, since the prophecies that depress them pretend not to be religious. And yet, anyone who has seen a millennial white male talk about how he’s guilty of all the evils in the world and how he will never be clean of white privilege knows EXACTLY what the flagellants looked like.

Put yourself in their place. The kids who swallowed the gospel of human guilt for everything and in particular the gospel that the West is particularly evil and that the end is nigh and inevitable aren’t getting up and building. I’m shocked, aren’t you shocked?

The brighter they are, too, the easier it is for them to swallow that gospel, because it’s easier for smart people to become attracted by internally consistent systems even if (particularly if) they have no contact with the outside world.

Again, these aren’t all the millennials, just like the toking, commune dwelling lot weren’t all of the boomers.

But they are a significant portion, and in some way they might be the portion that would have been most dedicated/creative.

So, what can be done?

March 26, 2018

Rick McGinnis on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Filed under: Books, Education, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peterson’s book and lecture series has been much in the news lately, so Rick McGinnis shares his thoughts, particularly about the message and intended audience for 12 Rules for Life:

It was probably inevitable that this sudden notoriety would create a demand for a book-length statement of principles from Peterson, and he obliged earlier this year with 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Deceptively packaged as a self-help tome, the book expands on a series of postings Peterson made on Quora, a crowdsourcing website that, instead of asking for money, invites its readers to contribute answers to questions posed by other readers.

The book’s structure is straightforward; after sketching in the origin of the dozen precepts, he states them at the outset of each chapter, explains them in varying degrees of complexity with examples from his practice as a clinical psychologist, anecdotes from his own life or – and this is proving to be most tantalizing – ruminations on quotes from history, philosophy, mythology or (most often of all) the Bible.

On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.

But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.

Early on and quite often, Peterson comes across with butt-clenching dread as the smartest-man-in-the-room, laying out the stories behind the facts, culled from his years of reading and research, with the force and volume of a firehose. He relies heavily on evolutionary biology to explain our hardwired need to create and find our place in hierarchies, with examples that distill our endlessly troubling social responses to bluff, authority, and even violence down to chemical and neurological mechanisms set in place way back in time with far less complex creatures (a scenario that’s easily satirized as “we are all lobsters”).

It’s been observed – and confirmed by Peterson – that the ideal audience for his book is young people in general and young men in particular. As a former young man, I can attest that being told by a wise older man, clearly on your side but unwilling to sugar coat the facts, that the bully and the big-man-on-campus are better armed than you are to jockey for status and fulfillment – the alpha lobsters, waving their claws around to appreciable effect – is very much less than comforting. Peterson’s ideal audience will have to endure the climb up a very steep hill of biological determinism to reach the far more hospitable plateau beyond.

I’m not saying Peterson is wrong. From the perspective of an older man, I’ve seen this lobster battle played out too many times to deny its plausibility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that the ideologies that he decries, imagining that there is no biological determinism – not even the binary division of gender – or even a landscape governed by measurable standards or objective truth, is far more appealing to young people raised to believe in an ever-expanding entitlement of “rights” and a pursuit of “justice” that needs to triumph above history or biology.

It’s when Peterson tries to explain the philosophical and even theological roots of our cultural systems that things might be rewarding, for both young and older readers. He has a core group of texts that he relies upon, with particular emphasis on Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn on the modern side, and while he will evoke ancient mythology – the gods of Egypt make several appearances, though even he can’t overcome the essential strangeness of their myths – he reaps more rewardingly from the Bible, especially in one passage where he analyzes the difference between the Old and New Testament God.

March 14, 2018

“[Jordan Peterson has] been described as ‘rightwing’ or ‘far right’ by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think”

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Guardian, Gareth Hutchens discusses the rise of Jordan Peterson:

Professor Jordan B Peterson is not yet a household name in Australia.

But he’s in the middle of a speaking tour that has found an enthusiastic audience. All four speaking events have sold out, including his Sydney and Brisbane shows this week. Organisers know they could have booked more venues.

Why are Australians paying to hear him talk?

Peterson loathes identity politics, rails against postmodernism and “neo-Marxism”, and despises gender studies and political correctness. He asserts the biological differences between men and women, and delivers pep talks on how to live a meaningful life and how to find the right partner.

He gives lectures on the truths embedded in myths and legends that are thousands of years old.

To appreciate where he’s coming from, it helps to be familiar with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and their premonition that the death of mass belief in God would lead to nihilism and/or the rise of totalitarian value systems as alternatives.

I’ve watched Peterson’s online lectures for a while now, after he became an internet celebrity in late 2016.

It’s been fascinating witnessing media outlets trying to come to terms with him. He’s been described as “rightwing” or “far right” by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think.

Does he belong to the far right because he loathes political correctness, identity politics and postmodernism? Noam Chomsky has made similar criticisms for decades. As did Christopher Hitchens.

Is it rightwing to lament the damage done to the left by the increasing tendency of leftist students on North American campuses to harass people who challenge their ideological orthodoxy? Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician from Yale University, who is a self-confessed progressive, says he can’t understand their behaviour. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor of Evergreen State College, says he can’t understand it either. He considers himself “deeply progressive” but he says the left is “eating itself.”

Peterson deserves to be taken seriously.

March 10, 2018

Carl Jung, “the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy”

Filed under: Books, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few notes on Carl Jung, by Anthony Daniels (more often known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple), commenting on a biography from several years ago:

What exactly were [Jung’s] achievements? Oddly enough, although this biography is more than 800 pages long (649 of them are text, each of them so closely printed that they are the equivalent of two normal pages), by the time you finish it you will nevertheless be hard put to say. You will know a lot about the petty quarrels and squabbles in which Jung repeatedly engaged, and about the details of his domestic life, but relatively little about why any of these things matter in the first place. The author therefore assumes not only a familiarity with Jung’s ideas, and a sympathy towards them, but that the reader also assumes that Jung is worthy of such a lengthy biography. This is not an assumption I share, and though the book is written in serviceable prose, it contains not a single humorous remark. From very early on, therefore, I picked it up with some words that Macaulay wrote in a review of a two-volume biography of Lord Burleigh echoing through my mind like the insistent snatch of a tune (I quote from memory): Compared with the labour of reading these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, the labour of children in the mines, the labour of slaves on the plantation, is but a pleasant recreation. That Miss Bair has been diligent is indisputably true; that her diligence has been wisely applied, unfortunately, is a more open question.

Some men are born charlatans, some achieve charlatanry, and some have charlatanry thrust upon them. Jung was decidedly not born a charlatan — or at least, he was not one throughout the whole of his career. True, he grew up in a family with a more than average number of table-rappers, which no doubt inclined him later to the study of the esoteric (for it certainly never occurred to him to wonder why the esoteric was, in fact, esoteric), and was subjected in his youth to that Teutonic windiness which comes so easily, though no means inevitably, to those who think and write in the German language. There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity, to which bored society ladies are drawn like flies to dung: and this no doubt explains how he became the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy. At the same time, however, he received a thorough grounding in classics as well as in science, spoke four languages fluently, could read Latin as if it were his native tongue, was not bad at Greek, and contributed several expressions to our daily discourse — complex, collective unconscious, archetypes, animus and anima, persona, introvert and extrovert — which by itself is far more than most of us will ever achieve. This is not the same as saying, however, that he contributed to human knowledge: for it is perfectly possible to give names to non-existent entities.

[…]

One of his patients, who has gone down in history as the solar-phallus man, thought (among many other strange things) that there was a phallus that emerged from the sun, and that by causing this solar appendage to move, he controlled the weather, particularly the wind. Jung subsequently discovered, in his reading about ancient myths, that there was a Persian Mithraic belief of exactly the same kind as his patient’s. Now his patient was not a well-educated or widely read man, so it seemed to Jung impossible that he had learnt of the Mithraic myth from external sources. He therefore concluded that the form of myths was almost — as we should now put it — hard-wired into the human psyche, and he called these forms archetypes. The collective unconscious was full of such archetypes.

Jung was a preternaturally unclear writer and thinker: he would never say anything clearly when obfuscation would do. Whether this was from lack of talent or an unconscious appreciation that clarity led to the possibility of contradiction and even refutation, no one can say, but the precise nature of archetypes, their ontological status as it were, has remained unclear ever since. At any rate, the solar-phallus man’s delusion, which he quoted for the rest of his long life, was the rock on which his theory was built: a somewhat inadequate basis for an entire, far-reaching theory about the mental life of all of humanity. But Jung’s theorizing was always like an inverted pyramid: a mountain of speculation resting on a pin-prick of fact.

There were obvious problems with the theory of archetypes. The theory suggested itself to Jung because of the exact, or very close, correspondence between the madman’s delusion and the original Mithraic myth: but how close did correspondences have to be before they were manifestations of archetypes, which were more platonic forms than actual contents of the mind? Only an analyst can say, of course, and there is no public criterion other than the analyst’s authority.

March 8, 2018

Trump’s ideology is more like psychology

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jonah Goldberg on how Trump’s instincts are far more significant to his behaviour than any residual attachment to an ideology:

On the left, there’s an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn’t a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable, claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump’s behavior.

Intellectuals and ideologically committed journalists on the left and right have a natural tendency to see events through the prism of ideas. Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to such approaches because, by his own admission, he doesn’t consult any serious and coherent body of ideas for his decisions. He trusts his instincts.

Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisers. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That’s narcissism, not ideology, talking.

Even the “ideas” that he has championed consistently — despite countervailing evidence and expertise — are grounded not in arguments but in instincts. He dislikes regulations because, as a businessman, they got in his way. He dislikes trade because he has a childish, narrow understanding of what “winning” means. Foreigners are ripping us off. Other countries are laughing at us. He doesn’t actually care about, let alone understand, the arguments suggesting that protectionism can work. Indeed, he reportedly issued his recent diktat on steel tariffs in a fit of pique over negative media coverage and the investigation into Russian election interference. His administration was wholly unprepared for the announcement.

News emanating from the White House is always more understandable once you accept that Trumpist policy is downstream of Trump’s personality.

March 5, 2018

Gender War

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Owen Benjamin
Published on 10 Mar 2017

Watch this video to understand how men think, how women think, and why this narrative of gender conflict hurts everyone. I do it in a funny way because I’m a comedian, but there is a lot of truth in this. Not because I’m smart, but because I’ve made an unbelievable amount of mistakes in my life and don’t like to repeat them.

if you want to listen to my podcasts or see me live check out hugepianist.com
much love.

H/T to Rick McGinnis for the link.

February 28, 2018

Psychology’s replication failures – “many casualties of the replication crisis do indeed bear a strong resemblance to voodoo”

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Psychology Today, Lee Jussim says that once upon a time in the benighted, ignorant past, we generally believed in magic. In these more scientific, advanced, de-mystified days, we believe in psychology. He wonders if there’s actually much of a difference between the two:

Are some of the most famous effects in psychology – priming, stereotype threat, implicit bias – based on smoke and mirrors? Does the widespread credibility given such effects in the face of very weak evidence have a weird kinship with supernatural beliefs?

Many findings in psychology are celebrated in part because they were shocking and seemed almost magical. So magical that psychiatrist Scott Alexander argued that many casualties of the replication crisis do indeed bear a strong resemblance to voodoo — the main difference being an appeal to mysterious unobserved unconscious forces rather than mysterious unobserved supernatural ones.

Belief in the efficacy of voodoo itself can by psychologized: Curses work, some say, because believing you are hexed can kill you. There are similar mind-over-matter tales involving implausibly strong effects from placebos and self-affirmations. Priming studies claim that even thinking about the word “retirement” can transfer the weakness of old age into a young body, and make young people walk slower. The idea that people gravitate toward occupations that sound like their names bears a strange resemblance to sympathetic magic: If you name your daughter Suzie, she’s now more likely to wind up selling shells by the seashore, whereas your son Brandon will be a banker.

Supernatural beliefs are a universal feature of human societies. For people in many tribal societies, magic is serious business — a matter of life and death. Sorcerers can make good money by selling their services, while those accused of sorcery might be killed. The same was true in medieval Europe, where many were executed for supposedly using evil magic against their neighbors.

Belief in magic has retreated in modern times. Science has rendered the world less mysterious, technology has given us more effective control over it, and bureaucratic rules make life more predictable. Magic retreated.

Or did it? Any belief as universal as magic may be marvelously adapted to well-worn ruts in the human brain and encouraged by common structures and rhythms of human interaction.

February 25, 2018

Masculinity and homicidal violence (aka “Not all men…”)

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, William Buckner looks at the violence inherent in the (biological) system. “Help, help, we’re being repressed!”

Understanding patterns of lethal violence among humans requires understanding some important sex differences between males and females. Globally, men are 95 percent of homicide offenders and 79 percent of victims. Sex differences in lethal violence tend to be remarkably consistent, on every continent, across every type of society, from hunter-gatherers to large-scale nation states. In their 2013 study on lethal violence among hunter-gatherers, Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg’s data showed that males committed about 96 percent of homicides and were victims 84 percent of the time. In her study on violence in non-state societies, criminologist Amy Nivette shows that, across a number of small-scale pastoralist and agriculturalist societies, males make up 91-98 percent of killers. To illustrate the consistency of this relationship even further: we see the same pattern among chimpanzees, where males make up 92 percent of killers and 73 percent of victims.

To be sure, there is some cross-cultural variation. While I can find no well-studied population where women are known to commit more lethal violence than men, there are some societies where women make up an equal number, or even the majority, of homicide victims. These societies generally seem to have low rates of homicide overall, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime mentions in their 2013 study on global homicide:

    Available data suggest that in countries with very low (and decreasing) homicide rates (less than 1 per 100,000 population), female victims constitute an increasing share of total victims and, in some of those countries, the share of male and female victims appears to be reaching parity.

Hong Kong, with a low homicide rate overall, has a comparatively smaller sex difference in homicide offending, and women make up a majority of homicide victims at 52 percent. Yet even in Hong Kong, males commit 78 percent of reported homicides. The world over, the majority of homicide offenders and victims tend to be reproductive-age males, between their late teens and early 40s.

To understand why this pattern is so consistent across a wide variety of culturally and geographically diverse societies, we need to start by looking at sex differences in reproductive biology.

[…]

Predictably, among humans, males engage in more direct, violent competition for mates than females do, and females provide more caregiving than males do. However, humans are unique in that some male participation in caregiving is ubiquitous across cultures. Human infants are particularly helpless during early development, requiring extensive provisioning and caregiving. Human males face the same tradeoff between securing mating opportunities and providing parental care that males of other species face, and the extent to which males utilize either of these strategies can vary significantly due to social and ecological factors.

Noting these sex differences in reproductive biology and parental investment is important because they help explain why males tend to engage in more violence than females. Aggressively engaging in violent conflict is more likely to reduce a female’s fitness, as it may bring unnecessary danger to her offspring, or cause an injury that may prevent her from reproducing in the future. For a male, however, violent conflict can potentially increase his reproductive success through increases in status, or by aggressively monopolizing access to key resources. Among the Yanomami of the Amazon, and the Nyangatom of East Africa, for example, males who participate in more violence and warfare have increased reproductive success. Even in the contemporary United States, there is evidence that more violent males have more sexual partners.

February 24, 2018

QotD: The use of the [awkward silence] in conversation

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And then there’s [awkward silence]. I learned this one from the psychoanalysts. Nobody likes an awkward silence. If a patient tells you something, and you are awkwardly silent, then the patient will rush to fill the awkward silence with whatever they can think of, which will probably be whatever they were holding back the first time they started talking. You won’t believe how well this one works until you try it. Just stay silent long enough, and the other person will tell you everything. It’s better than waterboarding.

The only problem is when two psychiatrists meet. One of my attendings tried to [awkward silence] me at the same time I was trying to [awkward silence] him, and we ended up just staring at each other for five minutes until finally I broke down laughing.

“I see you find something funny,” he said. “Tell me more.”

Scott Alexander, “3/4”, Slate Star Codex, 2016-07-12.

February 22, 2018

Dieting and mental health

Filed under: Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kaitlin Ugolik discusses her own recent experience of trying a new diet:

We don’t often discuss the mental impact of restrictive diets like Whole30 (no “inflammatory” foods), keto (low carb, high fat) or paleo (foods supposedly eaten during the Paleolithic era). People like to tout the weight loss and mood-boosting effects of these diets, but experts say they can push some of us toward disordered eating.

I tried Whole30 this January, and at first I kind of enjoyed it. I tend to get overwhelmed by options and confused about what’s the latest “right” thing to eat for breakfast, so it was nice to have guidelines. It gave me an excuse to make smoothies and try some new dinner recipes, too.

A few days in, though, I started noticing some disconcerting thoughts. I was reading the labels on everything and starting to think of anything that had any kind of processed sugar — cane sugar, brown rice syrup, anything — as “bad.” I also noticed that some of Whole 30’s carceral language was starting to stick in my head. Foods are labeled as “compliant” or “non-compliant,” for example. Knowing several people who have struggled with eating disorders, I wondered if diets like this, that say you can’t even eat beans or quinoa, might be a gateway to disordered eating for some people. The consensus among the experts I spoke to is that they are.

“All weight-loss diets work against learning to eat ‘normally’ according to appetite cues, which is also called intuitive eating,” said Karen Koenig, a Florida-based social worker who counsels people with eating disorders. “The more we restrict eating—by food type, weighing food, or by counting calories or fat grams—the more we ignore and override our body’s signals for hunger, satisfaction and fullness.”

While some people do benefit from restrictive diets because of their choice-limiting nature, like I did at the beginning, many have a hard time not taking it to the extreme. Most people are taking part in these diets as part of some kind of goal, whether it’s to lose weight, clear up their skin, or just feel better. If (and more likely when) it doesn’t work, it’s normal for anyone to get frustrated. But for people who are already prone to anxiety and obsessive thinking (*raises hand*) or those who have “addictive personalities,” a detox or diet can actually lead to something much more dangerous.

February 18, 2018

Nitay Arbel on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life

Filed under: Books, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A guest post at According to Hoyt:

Those looking for an ‘alt-right’ manifesto will be sorely disappointed. Peterson actually says explicitly that on some economic issues (e.g., income disparity) he leans somewhat left, and elsewhere in the book laments that the cultural demonization of anything masculine is (as he describes it) causing a backlash, in terms of a resurgence in popularity of European parties he calls ‘far right’ or even ‘fascist’. (For Trump, to be clear, he uses the term ‘populist’, which undeniably fits.)

Nor will you find a camouflaged Christian revivalist tract here, as some claim. To be sure, Peterson heavily draws on the Bible and particularly on the Christian New Testament for quotes, but there are plenty of references to Eastern religious philosophies as well, particularly Taoism (‘yang vs. yin’, which here becomes ‘order vs. chaos’) and classical Buddhism (the concept that life is suffering). Among Christian theologians, Kierkegaard’s “act of faith” comes up repeatedly. During an interview, he was asked point-blank “Are you a Christian, and do you believe in G-d?” His intriguing answer: “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.”

Nor is it some sort of “EST”-type (quasi-)cult manual, with Peterson setting himself up as a guru.

Moreover, it does not purport to be a reasoned scholarly tome of conservative philosophy. This is where Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) gets a little dyspeptic in his review in The Spectator, as he found it wanting there. http://archive.is/4eQIE (h/t: masgramondou)

David Solway, in his much more sympathetic article on PJMedia, hits the nail on the head, I believe. https://pjmedia.com/trending/jordan-peterson-phenomenon/ Like Solway, I find it hard to identify a single new idea in the book — pretty much everything Peterson says would be familiar to those of us who have been reared on Scripture and the Great Books.

But we have reached the level of intellectual corruption where, as George Orwell put it, the first duty of any thinking person is the restatement of the obvious. And that, Peterson does very well indeed. The book is a coherent whole, an engaging read, yea even a compelling ‘recap’ to the well-read. Peterson makes his discourse more engaging through extensive illustrations from psychological research, his own clinical practice, neuroscience, and his own life experience. Most importantly, it will bring wisdom of the ages (and of rational-empirical thinking) to a millennial generation drowning in derp and denial of objective reality. To those who, if you will pardon me the phrase, “know not the gods of the copybook headings”.

I just finished reading the book myself, and I largely agree with this summary.

February 9, 2018

Defining bias

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Bo Winegard explains how to define bias:

Bias is an important concept both inside and outside of academia. Despite this, it is remarkably difficult to define or to measure. And many, perhaps all, studies of it are susceptible to reasonable objections from some framework of normative reasoning or another. Nevertheless, in common discourse the term is easy enough to understand. Bias is a preference or commitment that impels a person away from impartiality. If Sally is a fervid fan of the New York Knicks and uses different criteria for assessing fouls against them than against their opponents, then we would say that she is biased.

There are many kinds of biases, and bias can penetrate the cognitive process from start to finish and anywhere between. It can lead to selective exposure, whereby people preferentially seek material that favors their preferred position, and avoid material that contradicts it; it can lead to motivated skepticism, whereby people are more critical of material that opposes their preferred position than of material that supports it; and it can lead to motivated credulity, whereby people assimilate information that supports their preferred position more easily and rapidly than information that contradicts it. Often, these biases all work together.

So, imagine Sally the average ardent progressive. She probably exposes herself chiefly to progressive magazines, news outlets, and friends; and, quite possibly, she inhabits a workplace surrounded by other progressives (selective exposure). Furthermore, when she is exposed to conservative arguments or articles, she is probably extremely critical of them. That National Review article she read this morning about abortion, for example, was insultingly obtuse and only confirmed her opinion that conservatives are cognitively challenged (motivated skepticism). Compounding this, she is equally ready to praise and absorb arguments and articles in progressive magazines (motivated credulity). Just this afternoon, for example, she read a compelling takedown of the Republican tax cuts in Mother Jones which strengthened her intuition that conservatism is an intellectual and moral dead end. (This example would work equally well with an average ardent conservative). The result is an inevitably blinkered world view.

The strength of one’s bias is influenced by many factors, but, for simplicity, we can break these factors into three broad categories: clarity, accuracy concerns, and extraneous concerns. Clarity refers to how ambiguous a topic is. The more ambiguous, the lower the clarity and the higher the bias. So, the score of a basketball game has very high clarity, whereas an individual foul call may have very low clarity. Accuracy concerns refer to how desirous an individual is to know the truth. The higher the concern, on average, the lower the bias. If a fervid New York Knicks fan were also a referee in training who really wanted to get foul calls right, then she would probably have lower bias than the average impassioned fan. Last, extraneous concerns refer to any concerns (save accuracy concerns) that motivate a person toward a certain answer. Probably the most powerful of these are group affiliation and status, but there are many others (self-esteem et cetera).

At risk of simplification, we might say that bias can be represented by an equation such that extraneous concerns (E) minus (accuracy concerns (A) plus clarity (C)) equals bias: (E – (A + C) = B).

January 29, 2018

“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.

I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.

His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.

And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.

Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.

She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.

I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress