(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best psychology & counseling books

What a great question! I am really fascinated by the field of infant/early childhood mental health and social-emotional learning in general. It's a fascinating topic that is also somewhat in the early stages. There is much that we need to learn, but also much that we do know, as well.

Priority number one in promoting positive mental health, particularly with children with speech delay and other developmental challenges, is enabling the child to feel safe and calm. There is something called neuroception, which is a person's physiological ability to detect a threat to their system. This term was coined by Dr. Stephen Porges and he has a wealth of information on the subject that you can find at his website if you are interested. Whatever you can do to teach the child how to regulate themselves to a place of feeling calm, at ease, and relaxed is paramount to anything else. For it is in this state that a child is most ready to learn (both academically and also ready to receive instruction or discipline from caregivers). Children and adults are much more receptive to all that we have to offer them when in a state of calm and safety. This allows the pre-frontal cortex (the most advanced part of our brain that regulates higher level thinking, verbal processing, and many other functions) to be fully engaged and receptive. If there is any sense of threat or danger to a child, this portion of the brain goes completely off-line and is rendered useless as the amygdala and limbic system (fight, flight, or freeze response) takes over. There is an incredibly useful explanation of this that you can actually use to teach the child greater awareness of their own brain and how it works. You can find it here.
It is an incredible tool in teaching positive mental health and teaches children how to notice their own physiological responses to events in their daily lives, which leads to greater self-awareness and regulation of their own mental state.

Once you have taught this hand-model of the brain to the child, you can then use it as a way of warning them when their "lid is about to flip" and then provide them with strategies for calming themselves down. You could offer a visual wheel of choice that gives the child options of what to do when they are feeling stressed, angry, etc. This is something you can develop alongside the child and elicit ideas from them when they are calm and relaxed with you. Making it visual will be particularly important and useful to a child with speech delay as they are limited in their ability to verbally express their feelings which can lead to more behavior.

If you are not able to prevent the behavioral issues, then allow the behavior to happen while being present with them and ready to comfort them when they are finished. Be ready to help them calm themselves down by modeling calmness yourself, deep breathing, etc. So much of promoting positive mental health in our children is about cultivating our own positive mental health for ourselves and then modeling that to our child. If we have the reserves to maintain a sense of calm in the midst of stress, then the child will feel the space and freedom to do the same.

I hope that addresses at least some of what you are after. I would appreciate it if you could follow up with some clarifying questions, if not, so that I can better assist you. But before I finish, I wanted to direct you to some really great resources on the topic. There are two great books by Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne-Bryson Ph.D. The first is The Whole-Brain Child which does a great job of explaining, more in-depth, the concepts that I have discussed here. I know you will find it valuable and useful. The second is No-Drama Discipline. This takes the theory of The Whole Brain Child and applies it to discipline, offering practical and useful strategies for use with kids. The third is a book by Dr. Mona Delahooke and is called Social and Emotional Development in Early Intervention. This is a fantastic book, but is also geared toward professionals in early intervention programs. I still believe that you will find a lot of useful ideas and concepts in there, though. Also, be sure to check out Dr. Mona Delahooke's blog for excellent articles addressing these issues. There is a wealth of resource there.

I wish you well as you explore further on the topic. Please let me know if I can clarify anything or provided further resources. All the best to you!

Warmly,
Jeff

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

If one decides to perform an action in advance, and then performs that action, was it not a self-determined action? He was determined to slap the person in advance, but it was still a choice he made given many alternative options. Furthermore, is free will simply the freedom of action, or is it also the freedom of self-determination? I would argue that free will gives us the freedom to form ourselves into the people we wish to be, not just to perform the actions we wish to perform. He may have shaped himself into the type person that would slap an opponent instead of debating. Since this sub is about existentialist philosophy, you will probably find more people here agree with the idea of shaping ourselves into the people we wish to be.

>(or as Steven Pinker puts its a ghost inside your body pushing all the buttons)

Ah, another reference to a "pop intellectual" who isn't an expert in philosophy or free will. I've seen Sam Harris, Robert Salpolski, and now Steven Pinker as the defenders of hard determinism. It tends to be neuroscientists and psychologists in the popular science community. Why hasn't anyone mentioned a professional philosopher that shares their deterministic views; one who can provide a solid philosophical foundation for such beliefs? It may be because the majority of professional philosophers either believe free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, or that there is free will and it is incompatible with determinism.

>Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.

If you're interested in learning more about the justifications and challenges for free will, I recommend reading Elbow Room by Daniel Dennet and Four Views on Free Will. I can guarantee you'll learn more about free will from those two books than you will by listening to Steven Pinker.

I want to encourage you and say your CPTSD won’t affecting your parenting and you providing her with love and security is enough, but I also don’t want to delude you into a false sense of security. To answer your question as to how I do it: Firstly, I put in a massive amount of effort everyday to keep myself grounded and mindful and conscious of how I’m acting/reacting towards my child. On top of that, I never let myself slip into depressive states. On top of that, I have learned to manage and control all of my triggers so that my emotional states never negatively affect my child.


One major element of CPTSD is that it is an attachment disorder. This attachment disorder WILL affect your ability to provide a consistent sense of safety and security to your little one unless you learn how to manage and counteract those insecurities. Another element of CPTSD is that it causes you to develop a distrust/distaste for humans, and a desire to avoid human interaction. This will be absolutely detrimental to your child as he/she ages. All children rely on their parents to provide them with safe, healthy and consistent family and friends. It’s a very tiring and very difficult job, but it creates a ‘safety net’ of security on which your child can lean. How you interact with and value others will turn into how your child interacts with and values others. You will have to spend lots of time around other moms, letting your child play with their child. It’s a strain on you emotionally and mentally, but it’s necessary for healthy child development.


The best advice I can give you as a fellow parent with CPTSD is to start searching for a trauma psychologist and get an appointment scheduled ASAP. Of course anyone can recover from CPTSD without the aid of a psychologist, but when you add a child to the mix, quality and speed of recovery becomes a very important factor. Getting a psychologist to help you process your trauma and learn newer and better ways to do things will save you a lot of time and heartache. A psychologist will also teach you the importance of obtaining and maintaining friendships, and how to better manage all the triggers that parenting will bring up for you.

In the meantime, here is a short list of my all-time favorite parenting books. I’ve read probably hundreds of parenting books at this point: most are bad, a few are great. These are the best, most knowledgeable books I’ve found for ‘people like us’, at least in my opinion:

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering our Children

ParentSpeak: What's Wrong with How We Talk to Our Children--and What to Say Instead

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind


Feel free to PM me anytime :)

> Most common religions that use this term are buddhism and hinduism. To put it simply, for those who dont know much about it, its a state where you dont suffer anymore and you are outside of what they call as samsara. In this state, you dont cling to emotions, people, material objects and you are egoless. Its a state of mind.

Saṃsāra: ([wiki] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra)) Saṃsāra is a Sanskrit word that means "wandering" or "world", with the connotation of cyclic, circuitous change. It also refers to the theory of rebirth and "cyclicality of all life, matter, existence", a fundamental assumption of all Indian religions. Saṃsāra is sometimes referred to with terms or phrases such as transmigration, karmic cycle, reincarnation, and "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence".

OP, from the context of the quote - are you sure that the term you wanted is "samsara/Saṃsāra"?

If "samsara/Saṃsāra" is the term you wanted then to address your questions:

> Assuming that you meet such as person in your life, you feel its the real deal, but there is no scientific evidence to present to verify it. Would it affect you in any way or are you going to dismiss him?

I am going to dismiss the claim(s) of "samsara/Saṃsāra," transmigration, karmic cycle, reincarnation, and "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence", some form of continuation of the "I" past body death, as this claim is not supported by a threshold level of significance/level of reliability and confidence sufficient to support or justify belief or acceptance. My threshold is that the level of significance must be better than a conceptual possibility, an appeal to emotion, an argument from ignorance/incredulity, the ego-conceit of self-affirmation of a highly-subjective mind-dependent qualia-experience as claimed as having a mind-independent fact or truth value.

----

However, if the term you actually meant was "Satori," where

Satori: (wiki) Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, "comprehension; understanding". It is derived from the Japanese verb satoru. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to the experience of kenshō, "seeing into one's true nature". Ken means "seeing," shō means "nature" or "essence." Satori and kenshō are commonly translated as enlightenment.

Satori is a meditation state in which a sense of transcendent bliss along with a feeling of timelessness and infinity, as if they were a deeply interwoven part of all of reality, as if the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses, is obtained. This state has also been called the "God feeling/being in the presence of God" by those mediators that have a cognitive bias towards the existence of some transcendental God(s).

OP, is "satori" the term you meant? "Satori" is a better fit for the context of your statement.

If "satori" is the term you wanted then to address your questions:

> Assuming that you meet such as person in your life, you feel its the real deal, but there is no scientific evidence to present to verify it. Would it affect you in any way or are you going to dismiss him?

I would accept the claim of reaching a state of satori. And I would accept this claim because there is actual credible evidence in which multiple subjects, under mediation, have reached a non-nominal physiological state to lend actual credibility to the feeling. See:

Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Newberg, Andrew and D’Aquili, Eugene, Ballantine, 2001. (Amazon) (meh-quality PDF scan)

What Newberg and D’Aquili found, via SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) when volunteers (Zen Buddhists) reached the state of satori, that, as expected, the brain regions responsible for concentration were highly active. However, there was one other consistent result that stood out. In all of the volunteers, a particular region of the brain, the superior parietal lobe, showed a sharp reduction in activity.

The role of this brain region was already known. The superior parietal lobe is the brain’s “where” system. Its job is to orient a person in three-dimensional space and help them move through the world; as part of this task, it must draw a clear distinction between “self” and “not-self”. For this reason, Newberg and D’Aquili call it the “orientation association area”, or OAA for short. In all of the volunteers that self-reported reaching the satori state, the OAA had been inhibited by their deep meditative state, deprived of the sensory information it needs to build a coherent picture of the world.

What would be the result of this? Without the OAA, the brain is unable to perceive the physical limits of the self – unable to tell where the body ends and the world begins. And “inn that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real” (Newberg and D’Aquili 2001, p. 6).

Intrigued by the possibility of a biological basis for religious experience, Newberg and D’Aquili broadened their study to include Franciscan nuns who claimed they felt a sense of closeness with God while deep in prayer. The experiment was repeated, and the results were the same: both the Franciscans and the Buddhists experienced similar drops in activity in the OAA, producing a sense of infinite self which both groups then interpreted through the milieu of their own religious beliefs.

> Would it affect you in any way or are you going to dismiss him? If it's going to affect you, in what way?

While it would be cool to experience this qualia-experience, the claim (and supportable fact) that someone else can reach such a meditative state will not affect me, nor my lack of belief/non-belief of the existence of Gods, nor many other positions/beliefs related to the supernatural.

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> In christianity, there is something alike that condition, which i believe its called epiphany. Essentially you become one with god and you are considered to be a saint (in orthodox tradition at least). I will not comment any further for christians beliefs as i dont know much more than that.

Another physiological brain state called temporal lobe epilepsy has been associated/correlated with, for example, seeing cosmic significance in trivial everyday events, and they may believe they were visited by God or in God’s presence, or that they have been “chosen.” (Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, Ramachandran, Vilayanur and Sandra Blakeslee, HarperCollins, 1998.)

Does this mean that "satori" and a supernatural "epiphany" are not real? Nope. Merely that there is significant evidence to support a good correlation between these reported non-nominal qualia-experiences with specific physiological brain conditions. To have one attempt to have challenge another to prove that these qualia-experiences are not experiences of the supernatural is a fallacy of reverse burden of proof. Rather, it is the claimants that claim/assert that these qualia-experiences are supernatural occurrences that have the burden of proof.

Please note that I borrowed/plagiarized/adapted some of my response from the essay "A Ghost in the Machine," by Ebon Musings.

While the idea that the Great Link can create a planetary scale warp field is undeniably a cool one, I'm not sure that it's supported by on-screen evidence. That being said, there's nothing that explicitly says they can't do something like that, but like the other commenters in this thread, I think that if they had the ability they would have used it at some point during the Dominion War.

I don't think, however, that the Founders rest on any delusion that they are gods. Unlike say, Apollo from TOS or the Ori from Stargate, they don't present themselves as gods to those they encounter. They certainly take advantage of the perception that they are gods to the Jem'hadar and the Vorta, but those are species which they have had a direct hand in genetically manipulating.

The question then becomes, where does the perception that they are gods from those species come from? Sure, there could have been a grand demonstration of their divinity as OP posits, but the problem which such grand displays that they need re-enacting every generation or couple of generations or else they just vanish into myth and eventually somebody is going to start questioning.

So it comes back to the inference that if they had this grand power of planetary scale warp travel, they would have used it. Or even if they had some kind of epic god-like power, they would have used it.

So how do they maintain that iron-clad grip of certainty on the part of the Jem'hadar and the Vorta that they are gods? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that both the Jem'hadar and the Vorta are genetically engineered. Can it be that the belief in the Founders' divinity is hard-wired into the genetic code of their servitor species?

Odo suggests this to the defecting Weyoun 6 in "Treachery, Faith and the Great River":

> ODO: Has it ever occurred to you that the reason you believe the Founders are gods is because that's what they want you to believe? That they built that into your genetic code?


> WEYOUN: Of course they did. That's what gods do. After all, why be a god if there's no one to worship you?

Did Odo know this for a fact from his contact with the Great Link or was this just a dig? And was Weyoun 6 being snarky back?

But even if Odo was guessing, perhaps Weyoun 6 wasn't being facetious in his retort. In a 2002 book, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili talk about studies on brain activity during moments of religious experience. The studies used single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) to image regions of the brains of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns which responded to altered states of consciousness during prayer and deep meditation.

They found that the human brain is genetically wired to encourage religious beliefs and to have spiritual and mystical experiences. During deep meditation, there is an increased activity in the frontal lobe area of the brain — it lights up at the peak of meditation. This was seen in an image of the brain taken during a transcendent experience.

The idea that there is a region of the human brain devoted to spirituality is not new. A few years before that, neuroscientists at UCSD identified such a "God Spot". The question is, I suppose, did God create our brains or did our brains create God? Is evolution predisposed to the idea of spiritual realms as an advantage or is the development of such a center pure chance?

That aside, maybe Odo's remark to Weyoun 6 really is correct: that the Founders, in creating the Jem'hadar and uplifting the Vorta into humanoids, inserted code that made them view the Founders as gods - they would literally have no choice in the matter, even in the face of contradictory thoughts or evidence (unless a chance mutation or defect took away or muted that genetic predisposition, like it did for Weyoun 6 in "Treachery"). This would also explain Weyoun 5's certainty about the divinity of the Founders even when, at the same time, he scoffed at the Prophets and Pagh-wraiths ("Tears of the Prophets"), and Weyoun 6's reaction to the suggestion of genetic manipulation as above.

In case you haven't read it yet, Scorecasting speaks to this problem, as well as a number of others. I.e. applying economic theory and statistical analysis to a lot of common-sense notions in sports.

MLS is in a bit of an odd position -- partly because of its rigid economics, partly because of its age, and partly because of its still small footprint in the US sports landscape.

In particular, there is little correlation between salary and on-field success, although this is a lot harder to quantify than the linked analysis implies.

One question Scorecasting tries to address is the importance of the 'star' player -- think of it as a proxy for a DP. The conclusion is that in a game with a lot of players (e.g. NFL), a single star is rarely enough to make a team.

Obviously there are exceptions -- the Colts without Peyton Manning are terrible, for example. On the other hand, Joe Gibbs' Redskins won three Super Bowls with three different QBs, none of whom are hall-of-famers.

In contrast, an NBA team more or less needs a star player to even attempt to be competitive. One player has a much bigger impact among five starters than among 22 (plus special teams).

I think one can quantify what a DP means to a team, but one has to do it in a different way. For example: what's the difference in goal differential one can expect per game from a top-flight DP?

Or to put it another way, what is the plot of expected goal differential per game vs salary for a DP?

I don't know how realistic a calculation this would be, but I bet you could arrive at some numbers -- e.g. Beckham is worth +0.5, Henry is worth +0.3, Marquez is worth -0.2 (a DP with a minus rating is terrible).

All the same, there's this fact: a correlation between salary spending and consistent on-field results is only strong in unconstrained leagues. And always with caveats, exceptions, and outliers.

The Yankees are a consistently competitive team, and are consistently the highest spenders. On the other hand, the Orioles are consistently among the highest spenders and have been a terrible team for over a decade.

Man U are consistently among the highest spenders in the EPL, and are the most consistently successful team; Liverpool are also regularly near the top of the spend table and, let's face it, have seen a lot better days.

All the same, these are unconstrained leagues. If you look at the NFL (in a CBA year), there is not much of a relationship between spending and success. The Cowboys are consistently at the top of the spend scale, but when have they last won a Super Bowl? When have they last been in one?

The salary cap in MLS is even more extreme. And one could argue that weakness at one position is not balanced out by strength at another -- e.g. if your right center back is terrible, you'll give up more goals than your DP attacking mid will create for you.

Or in other words: Do DPs matter? Yes. Are they important? Yes. How important are they? I don't know.

But I do think it's possible to quantify what a DP should be worth at a given salary in terms of extra goals per game, and therefore possible to quantify whether that DP is living up to expectations.

But as for drawing up the specific equations, I'll leave that to someone else.

tl;dr: If you like thinking about this kind of questions, read Scorecasting. And throw Soccernomics on your list as well. And as a side-note: I love this forum for having discussions like this one. Keep it up.

I would go with Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". It can be rather tedious at times, but it's such a great summary of recent work in social and cognitive psychology that it's worth it.

Oliver Sacks, as mentioned before, is another great author. Very approachable, very interesting, yet quite informative.

I have heard that Dan Ariely is a great author. Predictably Irrational might be a great read.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works is also great, but I would recommend Kahneman over him.

Finally, I would recommend a classic: William James - The Principles of Psychology. It's old, and some stuff is dated, but the guy had amazing insight nonetheless. It'd be a great intro reading just to see where psychology came from.

I would stay away from Jonah Lehrer, since he was accused of academic dishonesty. His book "How we Decide" was an extremely easy read, and a bit watered down. On that tangent, I would also avoid Malcolm Gladwell. Sacks does a better job at explaining psychology and neuroscience to a general audience.

Hope that helps!

Personally I think a better questions is 'how should one read Jung?' I have a friend who studied psychology with a neuroscience concentration, and that area doesn't tend to take Jung or most psychoanalysts seriously, and while that's not my background, I can see why. I used to be someone who took those methods of self-description and analysis very seriously, but in addition to occasionally taking me some weird places, it's really not taken seriously by most professionals in the fields of, say, psychology.

That said, there are a couple reasons to still study psychoanalytics. One is if you're interested in things like art, film or literature, which were all hugely influenced by ideas about the subconscious. I read a lot of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, and those writers can't be fully understood without some decent understanding of the understandings of psychology that fed into those authors works (Joyce even had his daughter be analyzed by Jung). Artists like Picasso and Pollock were heavily inspired by psychoanalysis, and much can be said for numerous filmmakers, and even some interesting religious study has been done with their work (Joseph Campbell comes to mind here). So if you're interested in that angle, I'd say go for it, as they've got a lot of interesting insights into how art, literature and even religion work.

Another way you can read them is for personal growth, rather than as a transmission of analytic information (I'm not sure I'm phrasing that very well; apologies). I have a few authors that I love to read, but would hesitate to use them to back up some assertion made in an academic paper, unless it was for a very specific purpose, or maybe just finding some flowery quote that I put at the front of a chapter to be pretentious. Jung's been great for me to understand myself, but I would be wary of using him in some academic setting (outside of some where it makes specific sense). I read him like I do Joseph Campbell, Peter Sloterdijk and Allan Watts.

TLDR: Yes, but only sorta. Expect personal growth, but not rigorous psychology, and you should find a lot of value in his work. I'd also recommend Joseph Campbell, since he developed a lot of psychoanalytic stuff into some somewhat more accessible work, and even edited some of Jung's work into an anthology.

Yes. I didn't recognize my mom as a narcissist until after I had a baby (who's now a toddler), but I think about this a lot now. I'm actively working on it by reading a lot of books on how to be a good parent, like No Bad Kids and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. I've also been talking about this worry with my therapist. She pointed out that I'm approaching empathetic parenting with intention, so that already seems to set me apart from my mom. That makes me feel like I'm on the right path.

I've also been thinking lately about how my mom and my MIL, who is also a narcissist, expect my husband and I (and our siblings) to take care of them. They're not infirm or anything - they've acted like that our entire lives. I remind myself frequently that it's my job to take care of my kid, not the other way around. When he acts out, it's because he's having a hard time. It's not something he's doing to me.

To be honest, it is sometimes a challenge. Even when I feel like I'm doing everything right, I wonder if he'll feel more positive about me than I do about my mom when he gets to be my age. But working on my relationship with him isn't draining in the way that my relationship with my mom is. I feel like all the hard work I put into myself and my relationship with him will pay dividends. If he knows I love him for who he is, I will have succeeded.

This book *Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by former champion table tennis player Matthew Syed, deals with this question. I wouldn't be surprised if Kavanagh's read it, among other stuff like it.

Basically, at best there's a very clear correlation between people who are able to practice a sport-specific skill or skills, from a young age, for a very long time, and being really good at the specific sport later in life. What most people figure is genetics can be explained by this rule. Examples in the book include:

• Brazilians being disproportionately good at football (soccer) - because so many of the kids grow up playing football and, crucially, futsal, which is a similar sport played on a smaller field with a smaller ball, and so is much harder to play well, and makes going on to play regular football way easier.
  
  
• Kenyans being good runners - talks about how basically all the good Kenyan runners come from not all over Kenya but from one particular tribe, and this tribe's lifestyle brings them up running long distances from an early age or something. This article I found probably goes into more detail, but I'm too lazy to bother reading it right now.
  
  
• I think there are plenty others I forget, he talks about his own upbringing, playing table tennis for hours daily (he happened to live on the same street as a former champion player turned coach or something). Also about a European couple who decided to turn their daughters into champion tennis players simply by bringing them up playing the game a lot. I think their third daughter wasn't brought playing tennis at all and lo and behold, she's crap at it. Something like that.
  
  The book completely supports Kavanagh's premise, the idea that "natural talent" is a misconception because it conceals hours upon hours of hard work. Think Mike Tyson, adopted by Cus d'Amato. How many hours of boxing discussion did they have? How many hours of watching fight footage? Tyson was surrounded by the sport and it probably dominated his whole life at that stage, thinking about it every moment. No surprise he got pretty good at it.
  
  This all relates to the "10,000 hour rule" you often hear about. The book explains that this originally took the form of the "10 years rule", putting that an athlete would generally reach mastery of sport after 10 years of good practice. Supposing that the aspiring athlete can dedicate a maximum of 1000 hours per year to training gives us the 10,000 hours figure. Obviously this is a rough guide. But the point is, children who are brought up playing a sport, and have more time to dedicate to it when they're younger, hit the 10,000 hours point earlier, and get more hours overall than another athlete who starts later in life. But these kids are labelled "prodigies" and it's assumed to be genetic.
  
  That's the first half of the book in a nutshell. The second half kinda meanders around other sports-related topics, a bit on roiding and stuff, but the first half is relevant to this discussion. After reading it I agree with it, and so I agree with Kavanagh here. And as I said, it would not surprise me in the slightest if Kavanagh has read this same book.
  
  The takeaway is: if you want to be good at sport, train more. Don't use genetics as an excuse.

You might want to check out Khan Academy, which provides entirely free online courses on a huge range of subjects.

On evolution, Stated Clearly is an outstanding series of videos that break it down very simply and straightforwardly (and they're made by an ex-Christian whose education about evolution was part of his reason for leaving the religion). If you're interested in a book, the best I've seen -- and in fact maybe the best popular science book I've ever read -- is Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. It would certainly be enough to help you decide if you'd like to read more.

If you're interested in neuroscience and the brain you might want to read How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker or The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, both of which are wide-ranging and accessibly written.

Finally, you can just search for "best science books" (or similar phrases) -- you'll find plenty of lists out there of the best books of all time, the past year, the past decade and so on. You can't go wrong just reading the top few, or if there's an area you find yourself more drawn to you can focus on that.

Above all, focus on the positive and enjoy the process of learning about these things, because it's an absolutely fascinating world out there. Have fun!

There's a good book with a catchy title that talks in depth about this very thing.

There are a few summary points:

• In general terms: Video Games > Pleasure Reading (Non-Educational) > TV
  
• The TYPE of video game, TV, or reading you do matters much more than the format, for example:
  
• Puzzle solving games like the Zelda series is much better for the mind than Call of Duty type shooting games.
  
• Novels, especially of a high complexity, are better than Magazines.
  
• Shows that require you to think (examples used were Sopranos and The West Wing) are better than those that don't (examples used were Big Brother and American Idol).
  
• Video Games as a non-educational activity improve test scores the best because they are interactive, you have to both analyze a situation and then respond to it. This is especially beneficial if you are solving puzzles.
  
• Pleasure Reading, while not interactive, requires you to take in and analyze situations in order to understand the story. The more complex the analysis required, the better.
  
• Watching TV only requires sporadic analysis. In the more complex show your brain seeks to solve and connect storylines to make sense of it. In the less complex show you only passively absorb.
  
  In the book they looked at a study which took groups of kids/teens of varying ages (I remember it being 4th grade, 7th grade, and 10th grade) and divided the kids into 4 groups: Gamers, Readers, Watchers, and Listeners. The Listeners did nothing but listen to popular music and socialize. They tested all the kids at the beginning, middle, and end of the experiment. They used the test average from previous years as their baseline for comparison.
  
  They found that kids that played puzzle-solving video games improved their scores the most, readers the second most, and watchers the third most. Listeners scores actually decreased as compared to the average.
  
  The book also looks at a second study that used adults and finds similar results. Gamers > Readers > Watchers > Listeners.
  
  ------
  
  The tl;dr of it is, doing something with your brain is good regardless of the format, and the more interactive and engaging that medium is the better it will improve your thinking.
  
  /u/Rambo_Brit3's and his/her wife need to be more concerned with WHAT video games their son is playing rather than the fact that he enjoys video games. I don't know how complex "League" is (I'm assuming League of Legends simply because of its popularity). And the complexity of the game is an important factor.
  
  At least he's not getting stoned and listening to pop music.

Here are the books specifically on erotic hypnosis that I'd actually recommend:

Mind Play by MARK Wiseman-- this one is linked in the sidebar to the right. It's a good overview of hypnosis in general, hypnosis play in the bedroom and in relationships, and the erotic hypnosis community.

Erotic Hypnosis Scripts by Chewtoy (me!). Obviously I'm biased on this one, ;) but I think it's full of fun ideas for play.

Hypnotic Amnesia by Lee Allure and DJ Pynchon. Obviously this is very specific, rather than covering hypnosis in general or even kinky hypnosis in general; but, well, amnesia play is hot. ;) The book covers a year-long dive the two authors made into every different technique they could think of for inducing hypnotic amnesia, with notes on their experiences.

Hypnotize Your Lover... Deeper by Wendi Friesen. Wendi is a successful hypnotherapist whose practice is mostly not centered around sexy stuff, but she doesn't conspicuously shy away from it as the larger hypnotherapy organizations seem to. This book is a sort of grab bag of different ideas, along with a decent introduction to hypnosis for those who are new to it.

The Mind Play Study Guide by Mark Wiseman. Sort of a sequel to Mind Play, this covers a few new topics, and appears to be written as a sort of guide to presenting classes on erotic hypnosis at kink conventions.

Look Into My Eyes: How To Use Hypnosis To Bring Out the Best In Your Sex Life by Peter Masters. Another overview including an introduction to hypnosis aimed at those new to it. A bit lighter on the D/s angle than, say, Mind Play.

Beyond Games of Trance by Alex Tsander. Actually I haven't finished reading this one yet, so I'm not sure about it; it's spendy and has a lot of "you kids get off my lawn" in the beginning.

(If anyone knows of more, I'd love to hear about them!)

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics. (probably most interesting from a Freudian perspective, deals with many of our unconscious instincts)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces The Shape Our Decisions - Unconscious decision-making, behavioral economics, consumer psychology. Fun read.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Most popular book on the psychology of persuasion, covers all the main principles. Very popular among business crowds.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships - Social neuroscience, mirror neurons, empathy, practical stuff mixed with easy to understand brain science.

Authentic Happiness - Positive Psychology, happiness, increasing life satisfaction.

Feeling Good - A good primer on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Also widely considered one of the best self-help books by mental health practitioners.

The Brain That Changes Itself - Neuroplasticity, how experience shapes our brains. Some really remarkable case studies that get you wondering how powerful our brains really are.

The Buddhist Brain - The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom from a Buddhist perspective.

That should give you more than enough to chew on.

I certainly don't have all the answers to this, and the area is a developing one, but my understanding comes from the reading i've done into the latest research into the area, not anecdotal evidence which is a notoriously fickle customer.

Furthermore, it's amazing how entrenched the idea of 'gifts' and 'talent' is, so much so, people will actively reject it when the opposite idea is presented, a problem well documented in a lot of the books on the topic e.g. Bounce, Talent is a Myth etc. which I strongly recommend if you want a more in-depth answer (and they're generally enjoyable books if you're interested in sport, especially Bounce).

As I mentioned in a comment above, we love the idea that people are born special, when the reality is much more mundane. But it's also much more positive; talent is not reserved for the few, with the right training, we can all do something amazing.

My 4 year old is also very strong willed. I remind myself daily that he is going to do wonderful things as an adult, or so everyone tells me. I constantly tell myself to breath first, think second, respond last. I do my best not to respond with anger, because IMO it only adds fuel to the fire. Redirection at this age gets more difficult, but I still practice it. I often find that sometimes taking action instead of using words is tremendously effective. IE the four year old has a strong decisive to continuously climb on the counter. I tried the, "you're going to get hurt, it's dangerous, etc." route, which did nothing. I then started removing him from the counter without words, setting him on the floor, and firmly saying, "We don't climb on counters."

I've also come to realize saying things like, "please don't climb on the counters," isn't effective. It has to be a firm set of directions (not harsh).

We've also started positive affirmations daily. And lots of appraisal for "good behavior" for positive reinforcement. Like.. "Thank you for cleaning up your toys!" With a happy dance and clap of the hands. Or when he follows a set of directions without telling him half a dozen times I be sure to tell him, "that was an excellent job listening to the directions I gave you, thank you!!"

Something my job taught me was to say a set of silly phrases before responding to a situation that makes you angry, "yellow butter, purple jelly, red jam, black bread." I say that to myself often before responding to my 4 year old. If you're interested two books that really helped me are Peaceful Parents, Happy Kids and No Bad Kids. Hope this helps!

I think we are indeed describing two different kinds of reading. Sure I "read" a lot of things online, but if I tell people I love to read as a hobby and, after they ask what I like to read, tell them that I read the news and online forums, they'll laugh in my face. That's not what being "someone who reads a lot" is.

If that's the definition you're going by, then I'm a huge reader. I read dialogues of a lot of video games, I read instruction manuals when I need to learn how to do things, I read online comics, I read blogs, I read comments Reddit for hours and hours a week. All I do is read. But I've hardly touched a book in the last 11 years, when they stopped forcing us to read books in school.

Would you honestly call me someone who loves to read? I'll give you the credit of assuming that we both know that that's not what it means to be someone who "loves to read" or "reads a lot".

Also ironically, the only book I actually have read in the last decade disputes that reading is better for you than watching TV. It's called Everything Bad is Good For You, and it talks about why reading, particularly as a teenager/adult, is a very mentally passive activity, versus more mentally stimulating activities like playing video games, and that reading is generally only helpful as a child when you are still developing the language parts of your brain.

Eh, women have more fluid sexual attraction than men do -- much more fluid. See this book.

The expression of this fluidity depends on environmental factors (culture, social, etc.). Today, lesbian pairings are "chic". Hollywood and the related supermodel world are peppered with it now, from Cara DeLevingne to Amber Heard to Kristen Stewart to countless others. For a hot young woman to have a GF is now not only accepted but celebrated in the media culture. So when that is the context -- lots of celebrity women who are quite attractive being in lesbian relationships, or going back and forth between being with men and women -- it provides a context where that underlying sexual fluidity in most women, which was always there, expresses itself more freely and openly. That's what we're seeing today.

Note that this is quite independent of how women identify themselves. Only a very small number of women self-identify as exclusively lesbian (it's a smaller percentage of women than the percentage of men who say they are exclusively gay). Not very many more women identify as bisexual, probably because they define bisexual in a way that excludes them, regardless of their behavior. So you can have women who have hooked up with a number of women sexually saying that they are not bisexual, or even women who have been in a relationship with a woman before as GF/GF saying they are not bisexual -- which really only means that they are defining bisexual as being something much more limited than the standard definition of someone who is attracted to some degree to both sexes. So, as with everything else, you can't really go by what they are saying (in terms of whether they say they are bisexual), but look at what they are doing (have they hooked up with (beyond 1-2 times experimentation), or dated, other women) to see what is really going on.

So, bottom line, yes all (not literally all, but most) women are bisexual in potential to some degree -- some more than others, but most have at least some latent attraction to other women, whether they have acted on it or not. The current environment strongly, strongly encourages women to act on this, because it celebrates GF/GF relationships among admired, hot, young celebrity women. So in that context you're going to see more of it going on. I think the rise of porn has an influence, too (when women watch porn, lots of them are watching lesbian porn), but that influence is much smaller than seeing many hot young female celebs hooking up with other hot young female celebs. Herd culture and all that.

TLDR; read "Elbow Room" and you'll see free will arguments in a new light.

"Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennet is a great read on this topic. He starts by deconstructing reasons people give for being afraid of not having free will -- his reasoning here is great in defusing the emotional aspect.

Dennet then walks through a number of definitions of free will and shows how they're incoherent, of only academic interest, or wrong-headed. He does a great job of cutting through a lot of nonsensical arguments that try to link free will and randomness.

Finally, he outlines a few limited definitions of free will that we might want and might be able to have -- one of them based on the idea of people as approximations of an ideal free acting planner. Once you think of yourself as maybe partially free willed, but able to perhaps move to freer on a spectrum, the topic actually becomes interesting. A great way to end a conversation on free will is by brainstorming on the question "what could I do to be a better approximation of an ideal free acting planner?"

I can't recommend the book enough.

Amazon link

> The premise that G-d communicated with the Jews and that we are following his word. I believe in a first cause that is above the rules of nature.

I truly hope it doesn't bother you, but that's definitely not Atheism. Sounds like textbook Deism to me.

For what it's worth, I consider Deism a reasonable conclusion. I think it's the only (best?) conclusion I could draw sans Torah.

And if you're interested, Halachically, it's apikorsus as opposed to minus.

> I had my ups and downs. ... The results astounded me (and made me sick and depressed)

It sounds like you've always been a bit of a square peg in a round hole. I really feel for you. It's really unfortunate. And, if you don't mind me saying so, it sounds like ... "mistakes were made" along the way by all parties. I don't know who Rabbi Nissim Kaplan is, but that's neither here nor there.

> after that I was trapped. Couldnt work because then i wouldnt find a shidduch. Couldnt go to college, because then I wouldnt find a shidduch. ...

I am very grateful that I can't relate to this shidduch culture at all, it's so unhealthy, and I don't think Torah-based at all (it allows no room for Teshuva, for example).

> It dawned on me that we are all products of our up bringing, not just our idiosyncrasies or tastes but our very thought patterns too.

Actually, there's a lot of evidence that the our basic nature -- the things you mentioned, for example -- comes pretty much built-in. I think Steven Pinker wrote a book about it (which I haven't read). When you say it dawned on you... Was this just an epiphany, or do you have some reasoning behind it? (I'm just curious about this, I don't think it's really relevant one way or the other).

> That scared me shitless (i dont use that term lightly). I began questioning every thing.

Sounds, honestly, like a fairly run of the mill existential crisis. It's a bit of a late bloom, but I think many or most thoughtful, intelligent people go through them in adolescence (which extends into your mid-20s, apparently). Nothing wrong with that, I'm just making an observation; and I do think it's relevant to your situation, insofar as I would caution you not to make rash decisions while in the midst of an existential crisis (also, you might enjoy some existential literature. I haven't read very much of it myself, but I could point towards some of the big names if you are unaware and interested; I know very little about what culture you grew up with or what you know now, so excuse me if I'm condescending).

> I took a kiruv course where an Aish rabbi

From my little experience, I'd say this is the wrong response to an intelligent person's existential crisis :)

> The results astounded me (and made me sick and depressed)

I'm just curious: care to elaborate? And, as LazerA said, this is probably a sign that the process was inappropriate for your intellectual level and/or was otherwise not run very well. That said, I don't really support the whole "kiruv" thing to begin with.

> Im not sure how to put it, a feeling of "we are different, there is a divide between us".

Alienation? Otherness?

> I only feel anger toward people in a position of leadership who continue to perpetuate great acts of social negligence (at best).

Can you elaborate on this? What social negligence? Also, am I right in saying that your anger is not at their belief or their beings, but at their actions? In other words, you feel pity for, frustrated by, and alienated from religious people, but are angry at people who perform acts of social negligence (that you happen to witness because these "leaders" are in "your" society).

> Like I said before, I am lonely. But I've always been a loner so not much difference there.

Although you do mention it, so there is something different, even though you are accustomed to loneliness and maybe even feeling like an outsider.

Now, please don't take this the wrong way, but have you considered speaking to a therapist? I'm definitely not saying "you're crazy", I've already said that I think your position is rational and reasonable. But some of the things you are experiencing can be symptomatic of something more troubling, or can at least be alleviated with therapy. I'm always nervous to recommend this (same goes for speaking to a Rabbi), because I know a really top-class therapist who says that most others do more harm than good. Still, I think it might be in your interests. And I'm not saying I think you can or should look to be cured of Apikorsus, I'm just concerned, and I think you might be able to have a better life, with whatever beliefs. As LazerA mentioned, it's possible that religion isn't the problem, and if it isn't, then abandoning it will only be a temporary relief, and maybe it is the right thing, but it's only partial.

While I wouldn't discount this advice without at least giving it some thought, it's obviously also entirely possible that I've misread or misunderstood, and I apologise profusely if I have.

Alternatively, maybe you just feel isolated and alone, but when you develop new friendships in the new and wider world, you will feel better and more connected.

> There is no way to accurately describe the feeling other than to say I feel "Bigger".

Well that is certainly a good thing. I'm glad you feel better about life. Although obviously I do wish you didn't feel that being frum was so constraining.

I recommend reading: The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter, and I Am a Strange Loop also by Douglas R. Hofstadter for some interesting reading on the subject (Warning: Gödel, Escher, Bach isn't for everyone- it's a bit strange, but I love it). I read a lot of books on science in general and, based on that, it seems like many believe consciousness and also free will is just an illusion. In fact, just a few days ago, physicist Brian Greene sorta-kinda said as much in his AMA - granted, he's talking specifically about free will and not consciousness per se, but I think the two must be very related.

I, too, believe in God and also have a very strong belief in and enthusiasm for science, so this is an especially fascinating question for me.

BTW: if you're interested in the way the brain works in general, I highly recommend How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.

First off, read anything by Carl Jung. His theories on archetypes and the collective unconscious form the groundwork upon which not only games, but the entire modern entertainment industry are built.

Basically Jung argues that there is a collective set of symbols and ideas that all humans, regardless of culture or upbringing will respond to. Understanding these symbols, and building your game around them - either as mechanics or story - allows you to influence how the player will respond.

Jung: A Very Short Introduction is a pretty easy way to get started. After you read that I'd suggest getting into the meat of Jung's own words with The Portable Jung (coincidentally edited by Joseph Campbell)

And with that, you should also read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. He takes Jung's ideas, and shows the specific symbols used in the Hero's Journey - one of the most common story types. People talk about the Hero's Journey all the time - but it's a really important concept to understand if you're doing any sort of creative works. Here are two quick video primers on it:

A more serious one: Ted Ed: What Makes a Hero

A more awesome one: Glove and Boots: The Hero's Journey :)

If you want to go further on the narrative route I'd also suggest The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. He takes the Hero's Journey and shows how it is just one of several different plot archetypes, all of which have their own internal path, rules, and idiosyncrasies.

Now, in case you're thinking "Why are you sharing these books about narrative with me? Games are not stories!" remember that people have been responding to stories for all time - and good storytellers are masters at making people feel the desired emotion at the desired time.

Therefore I'd also direct you to Story By Robert McGee as well as Poetics by Aristotle. Both of these books look at story in a mechanical sense, and explain the precise methods storytellers (both ancient Greek ones and modern Hollywood ones) use to evoke emotions in the audience. These principles almost directly translate to game design.

After that I'd suggest looking at Chris Crawford's list of books all game designers should read. Unfortunately I can't find a copy of the list on the internet, but it's at the end of his book Chris Crawford on Game Design

I like this summary from Wikipedia:

> Though it is a commonly held intuition that we have free will,[3] it has been widely debated throughout history not only whether that is true, but even how to define the concept of free will.[4] How exactly must the will be free, what exactly must the will be free from, in order for us to have free will?

I read a whole book on free will, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting by Daniel Dennett.

My main takeaway was this: The science and philosophy on free will, when taken as a whole, give no clear answer.

I bought [The Baby Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Baby-Book-Revised-Edition/dp/0316198269) before I even started trying to conceive with my first, just on a whim, having never heard of Attachement Parenting and everything clicked. It's a great resource on babies in general, but from a gentle, AP perspective. I'd recommend this book for ANY expecting parents, honestly.

[The Attachment Parenting Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Attachment-Parenting-Book-Understanding/dp/0316778095/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0WC7WNX0VS1BQNCQTK5F) contains a lot of the same information, but with some additional resources, and if I recall it goes into slightly more detail.

I'd also highly recommend [Attached at the Heart] (http://www.amazon.com/Attached-Heart-Parenting-Principles-Compassionate/dp/0757317456/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=0JWRN280KQTRGGP6NH0M) as an excellent resource for new moms who want to practice AP.

As for other resources, I belong to a lot of AP and gentle parenting groups on facebook which, while sometimes overly preachy or cloying, often offer great blog posts or affirmations to mull over. Even when I'm super busy with kids and life, I can usually spend five minutes to read a facebook post and often that's all I need to recenter myself and keep myself focused on my parenting goals.

Thanks for the enormous compliment! Here's the one that strikes me as the strongest argument for compatibilism: we've all had the feeling of free choice at some time or another. If determinism is true, then that feeling was a feeling of something other than "breaking the laws of nature" or actually choosing otherwise. In fact, if determinism is true, then no one has ever had a genuine feeling of what a libertarian freedom is like. So what freedom actually is, in all the acts that we've felt it in, must be something compatible with determinism.

My favorite source that I've cited a couple of times in the thread is Harry Frankfurt's essays in The Importance of What We Care About. Or Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Freedom Worth Wanting.

1. Pregnancy test in your presesnce.
   
2. Go to the doctor with her. My sister had a chemical pregnancy, no baby, it happens.
   
3. Get all kinds of counselling together. If abortion is off the table, fine, get adoption counselling everywhere. Explore every option you can when it comes to adoption.
   
4. Be nice to to her during all of this, not for her, but for the life of your child. You don't want her blood pressure up like crazy and have to take care of a premature baby and all that comes with that. I'm not saying get back together but be patient, kind, and supportive, what you do now determines the rest of your life. Remember a kid is with you forever, it doesn't go away at 18 any more than you've gone away from your parents existence. If you are a dick now, you are going to pay for it forever. So be smart about this.
   
5. Lawyer up now. NOW, son.
   
6. Go to every doctors appointment with her.
   
7. Read This baby book. YOU NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING IN HERE.
   
8. Tell your family, the sooner the better. 17 year olds think hellfire will come from their parents, I should know, I had a baby at 18. I've seen this situations many times and read about it even more. It usually goes just like this.. read this thread [update]My(19m) gf (17f) of a year and a half is pregnant. We are really confused and feel pretty different about it. What should we do? How should we tell her parents?
   
9. Get two or three jobs. Work 12 hours a day 7 DAYS A WEEK. When I was 18 I worked two jobs, a day job and a night job, 7 days a week. I busted ass in two restaurants. At this age, you have the energy, so do it. Work harder than you ever have. Do this so you can prove yourself, get promoted somewhere so you can make a good salary while you are going to school.
   
10. Breath. Remember, I said I had a kid at 18. I'm 32 now, my son is 13. Everything was fine. Society brainwashes you to believe that having a kid while young will ruin your life. The truth is, having a kid is what you make it. If you want to know about how those 13 years have gone so far, PM me. My kid has grown up with me and we will share a lifelong relationship far superior to any other because of it. I wasn't too old to understand him, and tl;dr it's been great. Also, my mom had me at 18.. everything was fine. Young parents have been the standard since the dawn of time, older parenting is historically a very new thing. So relax, nature will prepare you to nurture.

I was born into the church, and stayed for 35 years. I always thought of myself as christian, though many other christian sects have differing views. I served a mission, and got married in the temple. I had very deep, fulfilling spiritual experiences, visions, and prophetic dreams. The only problem? The mormon church not only no longer practices what they used to say is mandatory, they often deny it was ever said.

A good friend of mine was never in any church, so it was quite easy for him to identify as an atheist from the beginning. I did not go immediately for atheism because of all the spiritual experiences I have had. There is something almost tangible to all this spirit stuff. There is a reason that religions get formed and followed. There is a real power there.

I joined a Kriya meditation group, and learned a lot about the Bhagavad Gita and hindu spiritual beliefs. The meditation was quite useful, and it also charged my spiritual feelings and gave me visions at times. cool stuff!

I continued my studies of everything I could get my hands on. What is this stuff I am feeling? Why does the spirit feel like a sexual release? Here is one of the books that was very interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Why-God-Wont-Go-Away/dp/034544034X

I don't need to pursue organized religion now, or meditation. Life is experienced within my brain, and can manifest as the many things that people claim are "true." The simplest explanation is that there is no god, but that does not stop people from interpreting their feelings and experiences to believe so.

Are christians any better than the mormons that think they are christian? Are followers of Jesus better than those that read the Koran, or buddhists? I think we are all simply human, with feelings that easily lightup with spiritual drives, and that has created a religion industry for tens of thousands of years.

TLDR; I gave up on God completely, but not right away. You don't have to leave your Christianity now or ever... but I challenge you to consider why you believe and what evidence holds you to your own personal beliefs. You can be as good as you wish to be with or without god.

You might find the book "The Explosive Child" helpful in understanding your child's behavior. My son sounds very similar to your daughter (and honestly, much, much less of an explosive child than what the book is truly intended for). However, the premise of the book is that kids who explode like this are lacking in the skills of flexibility and adaptability and that helping them learn these skills is far preferable to punishing bad behavior that stems from a lacking skill.

My pediatrician also recommended the book, "The Whole-Brain Child", which helps explain some of the way children's brains functions. This book is especially useful because it explains why, during huge meltdowns, your child is really incapable of rational thought. You have to wait until the child is calm again before trying to address any of the challenges you're facing.

With that being said, I have noticed in particular that my son has a lot more frequent meltdowns when he is 1) tired or 2) hungry. Asking "are you hungry?" and offering him a snack sometimes snaps him right out of it.

Interacting with him/discussing his feelings/giving hugs during the meltdown seem to make it worse (contrary to my initial impulse which is to walk him through his feelings). This is really only possible AFTER the storm has been weathered. Isolating him, which is pretty much my least natural response, is what seems to work for him the best. We simply tell him he needs to stay in his room until he is calm and ready to talk about what's going on. He calms down MUCH faster by himself and half the time, he ends up falling asleep (and wakes up in a perfectly happy mood).

Always check out your local library for these recommendations first. These are mostly the books I liked enough to buy after reading.

Parenting books that I've liked best:

Adele Faber's "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk". This book has exercises to try and breaks things down by different ages so you can refer to it whether you're having trouble with toddlers or teenagers. I also have her companion book Siblings Without Rivalry.

Kim John Payne's Simplicity Parenting. This book emphasizes the importance of developing routines, helps emphasize that you DON'T need to get tons of toys or extra activities for your kids, and helps you organize your life even if your life is a little crazified by frequent job traveling or divorced parenting or stuff like that.

I... can't remember my other favorite book. Might've been a book for baby ages.

Now, for read-alouds. There are lots of nursery rhyme books, my personal favorite is Sylvia Long's Mother Goose, but my kids are really fond of Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells' Mother Goose. Either way, I recommend the ones that have only one nursery rhyme per page. The classic collections by Blanche Fisher Wright tend to have six or eight crammed on to each page and their illustrations don't hold my kids' attention as well. With one rhyme per page, as they get older they can remember what each page's rhyme is and can "read" it to themselves.

Alice Shertle's Little Blue Truck book is probably the #1 most favorite board book in the 1-2 year old range. Seriously. If you get only one read-aloud book, this is it. Other than that, hit up the board books at your library. I've found a ton that I like and a bunch that get recommended (like Sandra Boynton's books) that don't personally appeal to me. I love Leslie Patricelli's books, but I bet she drives other parents crazy to read.

You are whatever you want to be. Gay, straight, bisexual. It doesn't matter. Don't pigeonhole yourself with labels or identifications. Realize you're in a transitional period in your life. So take your time. Don't rush your identification. This is an excellent opportunity to think about yourself with out being a total narcisis. Just be yourself and do what you feel is right for you.

Don't feel stupid about missing red flags. I was with a women once who started to explore her feelings at 55 years old. (She was a total fire cracker in bed by the way. Sooooo hot.)

If you want to explore your homosexuality then do that. If you meet an awesome chick, ask her out. Enjoy yourself. Have fun. Conversely, if you meet an awesome dude, go for it. The point of life is to be happy not live up to other peoples bullshit standards.

Listen, this is your life. You need to work your ass off to do what makes you happy. And so what if its taken you a little longer then others? I took me 24 years to try a Big Mac. Once I finally tried it, it blew my fucking mind, it was so good. Moral of the story, it's easy to miss obvious things sometimes.

Read books. Here's a good starting point.

http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321058655&sr=1-4

Basically, this means you are a total bad ass for being brave enough to do something that you feel is right for you. You're taking a risk and I for one commend you.

Good luck and my the force be with you.

Esoteric religions/philosophies/whatever believe the human spirit has a divinity of some form or fashion that can ascend or transmute themselves into communing with ordinarily invisible parts of the cosmos. However, to do so, requires symbols and paradoxes and lots of mediating initiations to prepare the mind to see that stuff.

Part of what distinguishes 'esoteric' stuff from 'mystic' stuff is that esotericism is modern - it is invented during Late Antiquity and its formative years are the Renaissance. Most esotericists claim their traditions have roots in much older and mostly forgotten traditions. Most of these claims are baseless. In fact, I've never seen one that isn't at least willful distortion, except maybe for those offshoots of Kaballah. The other distinguishing feature is that mysticism may use symbols to access the divine, while esotericism finds it absolutely necessary.

For example, Tibetan Buddhism and Zen are highly symbolic and believe the human can achieve the divine, but they don't hold that initiation is necessary at all, and generally agree you can be born enlightened, or that non-Buddhists can be enlightened. Kaballah is very close to being esoteric, but it isn't, because there's some debate over whether true communion with god is actually achievable, and they also hold that Kaballah itself isn't necessary but rather useful.

I wouldn't belabor this distinction if it wasn't rather important. Western mystic and esoteric sect make many claims about foreign religions without any solid evidence, and it is key to examine them closely, because there are historians and analysts in that field who will debunk half or more of those claims.

Antoine Faivre is the foremost scholar in studying esoteric religions, he's not a bad place to get an understanding of the trend. If you're looking for an intellectual 'in,' I find Carl Jung's work more accessible than most. Aleister Crowley's Thelemic writings aren't bad either. The trick is to assume you're not supposed to understand half the things going on until the third time you read it, and then it's less frustrating.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but just as an alternative view, I don't have much respect for the 'forefathers' of psychology, especially Psychoanalysts.. In fact, I think that they are responsible for leading psychology down the pseudo-scientific path that has been hard to shed for so many years (despite meticulous efforts by Skinner, James, etc.)

What someone called "unified theories" were not unified in the sense of all-encompassing, but were rather shoddy attempts to synthesize rote observations and philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Other sciences were way more advanced than psychology because they were inventing new technologies and methods (Cajal, Darwin, Mendel, to name a few) several years before Freud and Co. came along. Therefore, I don't think they deserve any sympathy. Rather, they were willfully ignorant.

As for OP's question, I think as broad areas of research, there are TONNES of good books to read in case you are (rightfully) moving forward from the dark ages of psychology. For example, Cognition is quite a fantastic coverage of brilliant scientific research in psychology, so is Psychological Science. There is also Choices, Values, Frames which is a bit more applied, and How the Mind Works, which may be a bit more speculative, but fascinating.

If you're done with the surface level stuff and have all the basics covered, pretty much all of Jung's important work is in the collected works (there's also The Red Book, but that's probably not a good starting point).

There really is no "recommended reading order" for Jung. The CW Wiki page has the release dates for each book, but a few of his books were revised multiple times (there were four editions of Symbols of Transformation, for example), so I don't really know how much of a good barometer that's gonna be. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious and Psychological Types are popular, not terribly difficult, pretty good starting points for the CW. Aside from a few of more notoriously difficult books like Aion and the works on alchemy (vol 12-14), you can pretty much move on to anything else after that.

Symbols of Transformation is also a key text, it's the book that pretty much laid the groundwork for all of Jung's thought after he separated from Freud. It is not an easy read but if you understand SoT you've got a solid grip on Jung and can probably handle the rest of the CW. And all that aside, it's an extremely rewarding text.

I just reread my last post to you, and I apologize for any of the stuff that doesn't make sense. 3 hours of sleep + nightshift/dayshift + not proofing = pwnmyownface

Knowing (not believing) that all things happen because of some causality is the only way the natural universe makes sense. And I'm not trying to make an argument that what you experienced was not genuine. And while I have had a couple of mystical/spiritual experiences, I know that those experiences are only possible due to natural processes, such as the "neurocircuitry" we have in our heads. We have the neural machinery to experience spiritual type feelings, of all kinds. I'm taking this from books like Why God Won't Go Away.

Now, while I don't believe in all of the opinions of the authors, I do believe in the neuroscience of it all. Other creatures whose brains are relatively simple like lizards or flies probably are unable to experience something as nuanced as that. Fear, and anger though, probably (not sure about the fly actually, didn't study those in school)).

I've had a couple of different kinds of experiences, and I also know there are a couple that I haven't had before. For example, I've had friends say they actually felt god, or a godlike entity. I don't think he was religious, so that was very interesting and I wonder how I would react to the same experience.

If you are comfortable with telling me, what were those experiences? Mine were pretty benign, like say one of my friends who thinks he is going to die in another year or so. I don't think it'll happen, and I hope it doesn't. It just "can't".

I'd say there are a lot of different types of heroes. I don't have a book of classification on them. The hero in that book is a non hero type of hero. He's not an anti-hero, but the author seems to intentionally make him the least hero hero that could've heroed. Other than the fact he's somewhat of a decent guy, he's a waste of life (at least to those who don't care about him).

The kind of hero you're talking about is a kind of transformative hero. It sounds like it might be the kind of hero you'd like to or are working to be.

I do have a question about a concept, though. Why is it if something exists, that it shouldn't suffer pain?

I agree with you that I don't want to be defined by my pain, though what demons I do have, I'd rather get them on my side, and laugh together. There would be no demons after that.

No...my psych guy I just see once a month. So I've seen him 3 times now, and he's screwed up a few times in that short time (one time put me in the E.R). I don't know if its the meds, but there are some things I feel like he could be doing better as a doc. I don't know what he goes through to provide service for me, but I really don't see it.

I'm not on anything that could do that, I'm starting out on new meds.

I think you're embracing the fallacy that pop culture is bad.

May I suggest reading Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson or Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman for an alternative perspective?

Just because popular culture includes stuff like The Jersey Shore and P. Reign doesn't mean that it is without value. The value in it may be different than the value some people THINK is in it, but value there is.

People like Johnson make the argument that the increasing social complexity of our popular culture actually makes us smarter. To answer against the usual critique that literary theorists don't engage "actual science," he takes a neurological approach to the argument using elements of an indisputably "hard science" to support his argument.

Klosterman takes an admittedly more theoretical route, engaging semiotics and post-modern theory to make a similar argument -- that popular culture has value, and the recent backlash against what many consider "valueless" pop culture is actually rather short sighted.

Anyhow, I agree with both of them (and many others) that pop culture intelligence is now a social currency with inherent value. Whether or not pop culture consists largely of morons like the Kardashians is actually beside the point. It doesn't matter what the pop culture is, it still contains millions shared references for humanity.

So far, it sounds like you're doing it RIGHT. It's important that you don't push her to do anything she's not comfortable with- where coming out is concerned, more is not necessarily better. She may need years of careful acclimation before she accepts the fact that she's queer, and reaches a point where she's okay with it. In the meantime, it may be true that even the thought of being inches away from another queer woman will drive her wild with confusing want and gut-churning terror.

I would recommend that you offer her resources to fuel her own, independent research, like the chat rooms she's already joining. Maybe some magazines she can read when the kids are asleep, or books of adorable coming-out stories. Make it clear that you support her exploring, or not exploring, these parts of herself. You're already doing a good job of not imposing your own agenda, so I say keep it up. (heh.)

When I realized I was queer, I burned two whole months of my life in the "HQ" section of my uni library, reading all the les/bi/an books I could find. I recommend the following to you and/or your lady. Also, my fedora's off to you, as you're clearly one upstanding fellow.

Coming-out stories to warm even the most closeted of hearts

Bisexuals narrate their lives

Studies show women's sexuality is more fluid, anyway

Hell yeah bisexual erotica

More where that came from

I'm only about half-way through it, but I think the book your looking for is The Red Book which was just recently released from the Jung family's swiss bank vault, after collecting dust for about half a century. This NYTime's article does a fantastic job of telling the very rich story of the book.

From what I have read so far, the archetypes are formed from the experiences outlined in this book [events that take place within the unconscious mind]; his dreams and "active imagination" sessions, which could be comparable to waking hallucinations. The bridge, I think, is that he found all the same symbols in his dreams/imagination sessions as in the many patients he analyzed himself - leading him to the formation of the archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious. I'm not yet at the point where I could articulate a valid tl;dr answer for you, and also keep in mind this is just my interpretation of the material, not "solid facts."

It's really something you have to read to understand, it's no easy task either, challenging and delightful.

1. Power of Now. Changed my life. Read with an open mind. Let the spaghetti stick to the wall where it will. Not all of it will stick. But some will.
   
   
2. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty. Opens your eyes to common social traps.
   
   
3. The Empty Boat: Encounters with Nothingness. This one's hard to get through, because ego, but worth the slog. Read #1 first.
   
   I wish you well. Know that you're not alone. I understand the feeling. Also recommend therapy, ideally someone of the same gender. There are certain gender-specific issues that are best understood/empathized with by a therapist of the same gender.

Not really sure if this will come off as condescending but here are some books for general parenting or parenting kids with behavioral issues. For any folks out there looking for resources.


The Connected Child
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001
Mainly focuses on attachment, or lack there of, for adoptive parents but some of the info is good for parents with children who have behavioral issues caused by attachment issues. Does have some religious aspects but also creates space for non-religious folks as well.

The Whole Brian Child
https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-Strategies-Developing/dp/0553386697 great general parenting book.

No Drama Discipline
https://www.amazon.com/No-Drama-Discipline-Whole-Brain-Nurture-Developing/dp/034554806X help me understand what’s happening in my kids brain in misbehaving and tactics for working through various issues.

These really helped me feel empowered and informed as a parent. Every time we do well with the stuff we feel like the best parents in the world. Hope this helps anyone out there that might need it.

Edit: links and formatting. I suck at it and I’m on mobile so...
2: a word

> Yes, those are factors that could plausibly affect the learning curve.

Sure, plausibly they could affect the learning, but that's a bit different than 'it doesn't make sense that every language is as easy to learn', don't you think?

> If we take any language, and then artificially make it twice as difficult to learn by making new, difficult rules to the grammar, it would (almost by definition) mean that such a language would be more difficult to learn to a toddler.

But that's the thing - even very complex grammar rules such as grammatical genders or Finnish-style agglutinated suffixes (and their order!) are pieces of cake to toddlers. They just pick them up very rapidly while second language learners struggle with these for decades.

Here's a paper on the magnificient Stephen Pinker on the topic of language acquisition and also touching a little bit on the different languages topic. If you're interested, his book The Language Instinct is a more in-depth look at the issue at hand and a fun read. Pinker, in general, is a wonderful writer and I'd especially recommend his book The Blank Slate for an interesting look into humanity.

The study you linked to is interesting, but using different parts of the brain - in this case, to decode the tonality of the language - doesn't really say anything about difficulty. Note that the researches uses the term 'different' while the journalist invokes 'more difficult'. This would explain, however, why speakers of tonal languages more commonly have perfect pitch, though..

Why not invest in foreign companies in locations that have less taxes? That should reduce your overall tax contributions to any government, especially to your own.

For that sort of thing, you should probably use a tax haven bank account - not an expert in that sort of thing, but I'm /kind of/ sure it doesn't take a billionaire to do. Many of these will probably let you hold gold or silver too.

For counter-economic investments, try the GLBSE stock exchange. Its currency is bitcoin, which is a stateless digital "cash" currency. Its economy is the most laissez-faire in history - due to almost the total lack of regulatory and taxation (?) compliance, the high number of anarchists in the community (both ancap and socialist), and the statelessness of it all. GLBSE was founded by an agorist (or at the very least, he's a crypto-anarchist, and hangs out in the #Agora IRC channel). You can buy stocks, bonds, futures, etc. too

My most important bit of advice would be to be highly adaptive to change - both in the government and in the markets. Government cracks down on your strategy X, switch to strategy Y, etc. diversify into several strategies (eg. bitcoin, silver, foreign stocks/currency, as well as commodities like oil)

Finally, keep in mind individuals are generally smarter than the government - and outsmarting IS possible (see the book: http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree-World/dp/0965603679 )

Thanks and good luck!

OK.

The single best evo-psych book I can think of is

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. It's extremely readable as well as very informative.

Where you'd want to go next depends on what you'd like to learn more about, and whether you liked Stephen Pinker as an author.

If you'd like to know more about the genetics that underlying the evo-psych then you want.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

If you're interested specifically in what evo-psych has to say about human sexuality you want

The Evolution of Desire by David Buss

And if you really like Stephen Pinker and want to know what evo psych means for human societies I'd recommend

The Angels of our Better Nature by Stephen Pinker

or (if you don't like Pinker)

Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley.

I've given you US Amazon links, and no. I don't get a cut :(

Your best bet is to contact your local academies/ soccer schools to see if they have any trails taking place. From my experience most places are willing to offer a trial game at the very least to a kid, from their point of view its always worth checking someone out. Failing this, ask his coach if he knows anyway of getting him a trail at a more advanced academy. This doesn't have to be at a professional club as there (in England at least) are private academies that can provide great opportunities too.

A trial could range from being invited to a few training sessions to a couple of games in their academies age group, it is always worth trying to get your kid into these if he's serious about playing as even if the academy decided against selecting him, advise they can provide can be fantastic.

I'd recommend you read a book called Bounce by Mathew Syed (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounce-Myth-Talent-Power-Practice/dp/0007350546) which focuses on athlete development and requirements to reach high ability level. If you feel like the weak link in your kids progression, the book should help give you some ideas on how you might be able to aid your son's improvement. The book may be a bit intimidating at first if you're not too clued up on sport but it's a really easy read, something I'd recommend to all parents/coaches as it provides a great insight.

> The idea that the mind is in some way non-physical.

The mind is a product and an element of the physical brain. It may not be concretely tangible (i.e., you can't hold a mind), but that does not mean it is not a part of the physical universe. Physics explains the mind quite well, actually. The neurons in our brain are developed in compliance to the laws of physics and biology, the neurochemicals in our brain are physical substances, and the electric currents in our brains that communicate signals between neurons operate in compliance to the laws of physics.

Evolution also provides insight into the development of consciousness. While, sure, humans are the only terrestrial species with advanced enough consciousness to develop religious and philosophical ideas, we know now that many animals have forms of consciousness and proto-consciousness like what we would expect if humans evolved consciousness from simple origins. The mind is perfectly explainable through naturalistic sciences, and our naturalistic model of human consciousness makes predictions that are falsifiable.

I'd suggest reading Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Here's a talk he gave on the book. I'd also suggest his The Stuff of Thought, The Language Instinct, and The Blank Slate.

I'd also suggest Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. While it's main thrust is to show how science can inform morality, it offers some pretty decent layperson explanation of consciousness, and it is written by an accomplished neuroscientist (whatever your opinion on his religious works may be). His pamphlet-esque Free Will also covers some good ground here.

> All able-bodied humans are born with the ability to learn language.

Not at all true. You can be able-bodied and learning disabled. There was a nonverbal autistic student at my middle school years ago who ran track. Trivial point, but still incorrect.

> I would argue humans also have a Spiritual Acquisition Device.

I would argue that this argument is SAD. (pun; sorry.)

You're positing a massively complex hypothetical neurological infrastructure to link human brains to a divine alternate universe or dimension that has never been shown to exist. Not only has this neural uplink never been observed, but it is entirely unnecessary, as neuroscientists and psychologists have a perfectly functional, testable model of consciousness without it. You're adding a new element to that model that is functionally redundant and untestable. Occam's Razor would trim away your entire posited element out of extraneousness and convolution.

>I also don't like the idea of separating sex and gender; one for biology and the other for feelings

As I said:

>We often assume sex and gender mean the same thing. They're intimately related, yes, and inseparable; any responsible analysis must recognise that quality they share.

I was trying to articulate a complex thought that sees sex and gender as interrelated but also separate things. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, drawing on the ideas of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, conceives of sex and gender as being like the 'sides' of a Mobius strip. That's the best way I can put how I'm asking you to see it. In terms of how they are different: gender is, by and large, a social performance that both the individual or society may or may not ground in a biological base. Sex is apprehended by how we perform gender. So, we 'read' our bodies based on what we are taught about them, as well as their natural, 'inherent' shape.

Studies have shown that children understand gender through hair length and clothing long before they bifurcate it based on who has a penis and who has a vagina. We teach them that those two organs have meanings denoting an ultimate, master class style sex/gender.

Thus this:

>I think it's odd to consider something that can be defined scientifically

Needs to be better defined. What do you mean by "scientifically"? The very fact that you describe intersex people as constituting "abnormalities" is not actually a scientific statement, particularly when it comes to sex.

The scientist interprets what she or he sees. This will be considered objective due to being based on observation, yes, but with what does one record an observation? What does one use when interpreting a phenomenon or an object being observed?

The existence of intersex people is empirical. They're there, as real as you are. So are their genitals and chromosomal structure. Many of them (save a select few) are not born with health problems stemming from their intersex nature. So why then do we have only two sexes?

Furthermore, why are chromosomes the basis for biological sex when so much overlap and variance occurs under their aegis? Boyish men and masculine women exist in abundance, without the help of an intersex condition.

The long and short of it is that 'male' and 'female' are artificial means of corralling vaguely similar physiologies into two classes, and in a society (i.e. a collection of sentient humans who've built something whose meaning exists outside of pure empiricism or tangibility) it seems strange that we limit people based on that.

Can we redefine and remake sex? Yes we can. It's a major part of what we do as humans. We reshape the world and we can reshape our bodies.

>because that seems to support gender stereotypes and doesn't really define someone who has both masculine and feminine characteristics.

I don't think there's a bigger stereotype than the master of them all, the idea that a person is essentially either male or female. And as to 'defining' someone who has both masculine and feminine characteristics, I think that Norrie May-Welby did that quite well for hirself, don't you?

I completely agree with that Saint_Chad_of_Mercia and alreadyredschool have said. And if you're talking about a serious habit-forming addiction like alcohol then breaking the chain can be incredibly tough.

But I firmly believe that we have the power within ourselves to change, it's just that in many cases we want the outcome without the investing in the process.

There is a book called "Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice" written by Matthew Syed, who used to be the British number 1 in table tennis. And he asserts that the importance of talent is overrated, and what is really required to get extremely good at something, possibly close to world-class level, is 10,000 hours of sustained, quality practice. I don't entirely agree with him, actually, but the point is that you can get good at virtually anything if you try really hard.

So I heard about this guy who read the book and decided to carry out a challenge on the Internet. He was rubbish at sport, uncoordinated, had never played table tennis before in his life. And he decided he was going to practice table tennis every day for a year, and try to get to top 250 in Britain level. And he filmed the process every day for a vlog.

When he started he was absolutely atrocious. By the end of the year, he was a tournament-standard table tennis player:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y21uwFUgkE

For me, this is an extremely inspiring video because it shows that if you want to get good at something then you can do it. It just depends on what level of commitment you're willing to make and what sort of investment you're willing to make in achieving your goals. It doesn't mean that anyone can do anything, but it does mean that if you set yourself reasonable goals in life then the only thing stopping you from achieving them is yourself.

If people really wanted to change whatever aspect of themselves that they believe needs to change then they could. It's just that human beings are lazy, for a variety of reasons, and want the reward without the effort.

Discussions on free will always raise my ire. It seems that the majority of philosophers in the field are compatibilists but theists seem to always be ignorant of the last 300 years of philosophical thought in the area of free will. Appeals to quantum mechanics strike me just as absurd as libertarian free will. Random effects at the quantum level do not degrees of freedom in action make.


Unfortunately most people are stuck in the determinism vs libertarian mindset. Compatibilism offers an amazingly powerful argument to the contrary. Other good resources (besides the stanford philosophical dictionary I linked above) are the discussion on free will in Richard Carrier's Sense and Goodness Without God and Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having.

> Some yes, but I've found that pretty much all of these differences come down to reproduction and child rearing.

That's the politically correct belief. Apparently is not true. That's why I mentioned as an example autism, which affects males a lot more than females (like four times more).

> Statistics are a human creation used to better organize data and to recognize patterns.

I'm not sure what are you trying to say with this, other than dismiss statistics.

> It's worth adding that your social environment, especially why you're developing as a child, can actually effect the development of your brain.

Sure, but not so much as we used to think. There are studies with adopted children (different genes, same upbringing), separated twins (the reverse), etc.

Again, I recommend this wonderful book.

You are changing - an old you is dying, and a new one is emerging. Noticing that despite your efforts, this new identity persists is a positive step. Is your therapist LGBTQ-friendly?

I'd recommend reading: "Dear John, I Love Jane": https://www.amazon.com/Dear-John-Love-Jane-Leaving/dp/1580053394

"Sexual Fluidity": https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268

"Whatever...Love Is Love: Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves": https://www.amazon.com/Whatever-Love-Questioning-Labels-Ourselves/dp/0062351842/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=1MC963EA42M449F32YWW

​

Most of these authors have YouTube/Vimeo videos out there, too, if you're not into reading.

​

Good luck!

If you're interested (especially) in why people "do the things they do," I recommend Ray Jackendoff - Patterns in the Mind, as well as pretty much any Steven Pinker book you can get your hands on -- The Blank Slate was an excellent read that goes well beyond basic linguistics as well. These two are some of my favorite "layman" authors for psycholinguistics. Enjoy!

Only if it suits your goals.

How is your health? How is your routine? What is your idealistic lifestyle? 5-years? 10-years? 20-years?

What influences have driven you without your knowledge (parents, teachers, impulses)?

Write a 10-page paper on the benefits of college. A 10-page paper on its opportunity costs. And a 10-page paper on what lifestyle you want to build. Or a 20-page paper. Hell, just go for a book, and sell that. The bottom line is the more you put in now, the better off you will be in your "choice" (which is basically a rationalization of whatever limited information you currently have in a given moment).

Think of your ideal goals or just general thoughts of life:

Will it involve kinky foreign sex at 18?

Will it involve biking?

Will it involve long work hours?

Do you wish to fix things in your life? Work out, exercise, interact with people more often?

Did you know hypnosis is real? Especially the erotic type.

Did you know most people cannot properly read a book? Here is a good starting introduction.

Honestly I would wait and delay it until you find the best college for your needs. Plus right now your frontal lobe is still developing until 23-25 which makes long-term planning a little difficult to perceive at times. And you are getting the spam of "GO TO COLLEGE" non-stop which is priming your own cognitive choices to be "well should I go to college or " instead of "this is what I have, my goals, what should I do to meet them?"


In the meantime, the independence, work experience, and savings rate at your age (with compounding interest) is critical to your own future education. By self-discovering and molding your thinking, you will be ahead of your peers that just go to college without the experience.


Can you make $50,000 now per year? Can you save a significant portion? Do you have a goal outside of work/school? A lifestyle you want to build?



You could go to college now or go to college with experience, more maturity, and a higher net-worth. Which translates to less pressure and more education for your own understanding. You get better choices and better results. You could go travel for the knowledge, meet experts in the field, and overall understand yourself on a higher level.


Check out /r/financialindependence, /r/leanfire, and you probably alright know about /r/cscareerquestions


And then there is /r/simpleliving (for happiness), /r/digitalnomad (for options), /r/Flipping (for turning waste into profit), /r/churning (travel rewards) /r/Entrepreneur (business expansion)

It was interesting reading this guys story, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounce-Myth-Talent-Power-Practice/dp/0007350546

This book alleges that talent isn't something you are born with but something that comes with practice -e.g Tiger Woods wasn't born a great golfer but made a great golfer with extremely strict and regular training from an an early age by his dad.

The example in the book is a street in the UK that produced multiple elite level table tennis players - rather than being "something in the water" the cause was actually one of their teachers was a former table tennis player who set up an after school club which gave the kids the opportunity for coaching and regular practice.

Of course this guys anecdote implies Lebron was a phenom from a young age and also that physically/explosively he was ahead of 18 year olds.

So the question is where does Lebrons ability come from - was it nature or nurture.

My guess is that the physical attributes eg the power and the jump height etc were natural - and the ability/skill came with nurture.

You might try

• Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth
  
• Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces
  
• this Carl Jung Reader is pretty good
  
  Technically these deal with mythology, but they're sufficiently enlightening on the meaning of myth symbolic myth content to serve you for literature.
  
  One other thing worth reading: the Bible. Particularly a literary Bible like this or this.
  
  Much of the symbolism in literature hearkens back to religion or mythology (which is just old religion). So it's never a bad idea to study the most read religions in their own right. Snake, Apple, Water, Flood, Rain, Fire, Smoke. These are all fairly omnipresent symbols with a wealth of genesis in books like the Bible.

How old is the toddler? Janet Lansbury has some great books about discipline, like this one. It's geared toward parents, but there's a lot of useful info in there for caregivers. Toddlers are little boundary-explorers, and creating a secure, consistent environment where they know what to expect is the goal, but it's easier said than done. Behavior is communication, so if you can figure out the underlying need that's leading to the behavior, and meet the need, that's the ideal situation. It's a daily balancing act of figuring out where to put the boundary and then how to hold the boundary firm.

Admittedly I’m not where you are yet, but I have recently read this toddler discipline book for help with my 11 month old. She’s been pulling the cats’ tails and petting them roughly and I felt I wasn’t getting through to her. The book is Janet Lansbury’s No Bad Kids. I’m following her sample script of “I won’t let you touch the tail,” and removing my kid from the situation. She goes into wayyyy more detail and I really like her approach. I read the ebook pretty quickly.

Edit: I know 11 months is pretty young but I’m proud to say she is petting the cats much more gently now! We have success at least half the time after only a week. Admittedly she was never being rough with them out of anger, but it’s still a learning curve for her. She looks over at me while doing it to gauge my reaction.

I'm partial to Jungian psychology so I recommend anything dream-related by him or those he worked close with, namely Marie Louis Von Franz (IMO). A simple—and I mean simple—and good intro would be the book 'Inner Work' by Robert Johnson. It addresses a four-step approach to dream interpretation and active imagination. After that, I'd just read as much of Jung's writings about dreams as you can. Start with Dreams (from the Collected Works). Since Jung's psychology is so much about the unconscious, virtually everything you read will be relatable to dream interpretation in some way. There is a nice compendium edited by Joseph Campbell called The Portable Jung that features a great and mind-blowing essay called something like 'Relation Between the Ego and Unconscious,' and actually, now that I think of it, excerpts from the 'Dreams' book as well. 'Man and His Symbols' by Jung was the last thing he wrote and was intended to introduce the general public to his psychology, so you can also start there if you haven't checked out any Jung before. Get the one with pictures.

>I used to hear God's voice speaking to me, but it said things that were based in my childhood mistaken understanding of the teachings, so I think that's pretty good evidence that it was all in my head.

That sounds like something else though, perhaps more related to aspects of the psyche currently pathologised? (not saying this is what was happening to you), not the kinds of mysticism or mystical experience and insight I'm referring to. Distinctions can be made, even if they all exist in a spectrum of 'altered states' say or the 'parapsychological'. There appears to be considerable overlap, albeit highly distorted in some cases, between states of the brain-mind-body interface called 'mental illness' or 'creativity' and those states designated 'spiritual' or 'mystical'.

Yes, to all you said. But Products of the brain are not necessarily reducible to the brain. Similarly as mind or consciousness not being able to be reduced to mere physical correlates or processes, though inclusive of them. There is equally other kinds of evidence in this domain as referenced in texts such as Why God Won't Go Away or Dimensions of Mystical Experience: Empirical Studies and Pyshcological Links. Perhaps then it is more related to how ones own mind interprets such evidence or assessment? Its a qualitative distinction, and that is relative, as well as nuanced.

>The claims of religious founders that people accept and the claims of those they dismiss as cult leaders are pretty similar, though.

Similarly, its qualitative, but also able to be discerned by 'fruits' of actions and the effect on the people who embrace such teachings.
I've read writings by so-called 'cult' leaders, gurus, other kinds of spiritual teachers, and the writings of Baha'u'llah. They don't compare. But that is a personal assessment and distinction.

In Baha'i Abdu'l Baha says it is the 'Holy Spirit', designated as an actual force, that activates, that 'touches' and interacts with the human consciousness that lends authenticity to these possible states and stages, in terms of an envisaged evolutionary process, as also being that which aligns human consciousness with a greater alleged 'objective' reality, beyond the subtleties of the 'confirmation bias' of the senses and the limits of reason (not that this is seen as an irrational operation, but something that is transpersonal, transrational, inclusive of it).

> Is it because they were raised by their mothers?

Yes and no.

Yes, because most of the time, the kind of woman who allows herself to bring her children into the world, with all its harshness, after failing to find a stable, dedicated and intelligent father is impulsive, irresponsible, high time preference and at the lower end of the IQ scores.

No, because there is a genetic component to these characteristics. The children of single mothers exhibit many of those characteristics because their mothers have "bad" genes, and their fathers are "bad boys" who also have "bad" genes. This is the greatest source of their dysfunction, far more than any environmental cue. This is what the vast scientific literature says (especially Twin studies), each time outcomes are controlled for heredity.

If you want a scholarly look on the subject, I would recommend Steven Pinker of Harvard.

With a welfare state, the natural incentive for women to stay away from unreliable "bad" boys is done away with. They can have kids with the cool, sexy rogues and the state will make sure they do not suffer the consequences of their actions.

There is a corollary for modern married women. You no longer need to screen your mates as harshly, or try to make the marriage work for your husbands as much. If it fails, the state will steal money from your ex husband and award it to you (in the form of child support and alimony), so that you never have to suffer the consequences of your decision to accept and unreliable, unsuitable mate.

>I don't think there are enough single fathers raising their children to draw a conclusion that it is the fault of the gender.

There are. Single fathers are better at raising children. According to the Pew Research Center, they are far less likely to raise their children in poverty and abuse their children only half as much. These are perhaps the most important predictors of positive outcome for a child and single fathers do all this despite largely coming from the bottom socioeconomic classes of society.

>And the lives they spoke of, that I supposedly ruined, were my ex-husbands

You probably ruined their lives, I don't know.

There is the emotional trauma, first. You promised them that you would love each other forever; they probably believed in you, trusted you and made countless sacrifices for you. If so, you betrayed their expectations. Men are not nearly as tough as we like you to think, you probably destroyed some of them, badly.

Of course, there is the financial issue. How much of their wallet did you take each time you left? How did they feel about it?

So maybe you destroyed their lives. I don't really care to be honest. They decided to marry you, they deserve whatever happens to them in my book. It was an easily avoidable situation, with a little research on the eve of the wedding. Instead, they unilaterally decided to hand you the power to do an incredible amount of damage over their lives, should you wish to. They deserve no pity.

>From my simple comment of growing bored by a man after a while they made the presumption that I had been the one to leave the marriages and that my children were miscreants.

I don't think that growing bored makes you a degenerate. If it makes you happier, you should leave, by all means; especially if you don't use the state to steal anything on the way out. I see no reason why you should sacrifice your own happiness for anyone, even your partner. You Only Live Once. Endeavor to enjoy most of it.

As for your children being miscreants? I doubt it. Given the average IQ of a Libertarian, I think there is ample reason to believe that you are an exceptionally gifted woman, intellectually. The children of exceptionally gifted women hardly ever become miscreants. They have good genes.



>that my children were miscreants

If you haven't read Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting by Dan Dennett, I highly recommend it. It's a wonderful explanation of what we actually mean by free will, how it reconciles with what appears to be a deterministic world, and makes a great case for us actually having it.

there's a great book called "Everything Bad is Good For You" by Steven Johnson that talks about how video games, TV, and pop culture in general are actually making us smarter as a society due to the rise in media complexity. it's a great read, not too long, and definitely makes you feel better about binging a Netflix show or playing video games for a few hours. worth checking out if you're interested!

Engage your kids. Now that clothes are done gather all the books and divide them by kid and sit with each one and ask if they want to give it a home on their shelf or give it to a kid who would like it more or be more age appropriate for. My 7 year old doesn't need the baby books any more so she purged those along with those with topics that don't interest her any more.

We did stuffed animals after clothes and she got rid of 50%. The big thing for her is that I remind her that if she keeps it, it needs to have a home in her room, not just piled in the corner or in a tub. She will pick the "easy" items first, those she knows bring joy. Then the shelf is full and she isn't interested in making a "home" for what remains and is okay with putting them in the to-go bag.

We preserved the Legos and Playomobil (two or three sets total) and she sorted through the rest of the toys, mostly Happy Meal quality small plastic crap and old crafts. After she selected the good stuff she was ready to move on and I told her we had to finish but she was allowed to decide that the rest could "move on". She picked out three more small items, said the rest could go and went off to play with friends. I put the rest in a trash bag and put that out of sight (so she can't go back). So far no complaints, just lots of positive attention from visitors for having such a peaceful and tidy room. Still plenty of books and trinkets but with room to breathe.

Edit: also this book, Simplicity Parenting, address the obwervation you made: being overwhelmed by too many toys.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Baby-Book-Revised-Edition/dp/0316198269

All of the Dr. Sears books are great. They treat you and your baby like people, not projects to schedule or manage.

http://www.amazon.com/Thats-What-Theyre-Definitive-Breastfeeding/dp/159337285X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397570127&sr=1-1&keywords=so+thats+what+they%27re+for

This is kind of old, but a funny way to learn to succeed at breastfeeding.

http://www.amazon.com/The-No-Cry-Sleep-Solution-Through/dp/0071381392/ref=pd_sim_b_13?ie=UTF8&refRID=0NSBRKTSW2JNFCDDDGK6

This is the gentlest way to deal with sleep issues if you have them. I have never had sleep issues, though, as we coslept. In fact, I have never slept as much as I did when my oldest was a newborn. I slept 12 hours a night.

If you're looking to try something totally new, there are a couple good books on erotic hypnosis - Mind Play by Mark Wiseman and Look Into My Eyes by Peter Masters. I've only read Mind Play but have also heard good things about the Masters book. Hypnosis can be a really fun and interesting tool for enhancing sexuality, not least because it has so many different applications.

First I'd like to recommend this book. It made a huge difference in my relationships and understanding of my children.

Next, I am seeing a lot of posts about ADHD. Don't put a label on your child. You may need to seek professional help for her, and they may come up with a diagnosis, but until that time comes she's your little girl and you main job is to love her, not put a label on her. Also keep in mind, if you go looking for a diagnosis, you're likely to get one.

Third keep in mind teachers are people too. Some teachers will just "get" your little girl better than others. You may want to talk with other teachers your child has contact with (music, art, and physical education) are they having similar problems? If not you have two options. Leave her in the class she is in to teach her some life lessons on learning to deal with people you don't necessarily like, or roll the dice and have her moved to a new class and take your chances with a new teacher.

Lastly, you're doing better than you think.

I'd go with this lil book, it'll give you an idea of the man and the basics of his ideas http://www.amazon.com/C-G-Jung-Speaking-C-G/dp/0691018715

His work can get pretty fucking dense but never fear, a man named Edward Edinger or a woman named Marie Louise Von Franz did immense work communicating the ideas in more understandable ways.

Also there's this one, it was the one book he approved for the layperson - http://www.amazon.com/Man-Symbols-Carl-Gustav-Jung/dp/0440351839/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404996952&sr=1-1&keywords=man+and+his+symbols

but if you do find that his ideas are worth further reading there's a great compilation http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Jung-Library/dp/0140150706/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404997014&sr=1-1&keywords=the+portable+jung

>So my question is what are the factual bases for Bill Nye's claim that there are more than two genders he makes in his new TV series, Bill Nye Saves the World?

If you're just asking about the gender claim, the factual bases are pretty boring: we just look around in the world and notice there are more than two genders. More info here. Nye also claims that sex is a spectrum, that attraction is a spectrum, and the expression is a spectrum. If you're interested in the evidence for those claims, this book is a pretty good one on sex. Attraction and expression are so manifestly spectrums that it's hard to imagine someone claiming otherwise.

>What are the factual bases of his critics of his claim?

If the critics are people like Breitbart, then the "factual" bases are pretty much nonexistent. Perhaps there are more sophisticated critics that you have in mind, but I would not want to speculateabout the factual bases of their claims without seeing their claims first.

> And as a followup, if there are more than two genders, then how many genders do academics accept as real genders?

I don't think anyone's counted. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia page listed in the first thread I linked turns up at least a dozen, I think. In general this is probably the sort of thing that is too vague to admit of any precise number.

No.

An interesting passage in the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (review) explains that traffic accidents/fatalities were an interesting measure of the corruption of a country. Corruption being a measure of how much the members of the public respect and honor the law in their own country.

Are Americans honest? Drive on the highway and stick to the speed limit. Measure how many cars pass you and compare it to the number you pass: that will give you a measure of how little the average American respects the law.

Yes! In fact we are working on a couple of longterm projects primarily with Dr. Kirk Wilhelmsen at UNC Chapel Hill (as well as some other researchers) looking at this, as well as from a perspective of addiction (how addiction causes genomic changes and vice versa). He is publishing a lot of alcohol-related studies (ETOH easy to get your hands on like tobacco) of this sort, but we are working through the gamut of substances using the same model - looking at changes in the genomes of users versus non-users (it's striking). There's no reason this can't be applied to other substances, although the best results come from sampling a large group of individuals that consume a substance regularly.

The word is that the $1000 genome is not possible right now, but it is. We run more samples than anyone else in the SE. That, along with our facility's status as a CoRE allows us to do a lot of wheeling and dealing in order to test out new technologies (that we get at a discount as the first customer) and do trades for services and equipment.

We primarily support our own researchers, but with our reputation growing, we now have large private projects (from big companies) coming in the door frequently. I can't confirm or deny that we've done personal genomes, but theoretically the tools and protocols exist, as well as the critical mass needed to make it cheap. And lab ninjas that can be in and out with data before dawn.

edit 1: also your family physician will have a desktop sequencer in his office within the next 9 years to provide personalized treatments. The future is here!

edit 2: found it.

edit 3: another guy (Dr. William Valdar) working on the effects of drugs on genomes.

edit 4: I believe you can volunteer as a test subject in these clinical studies if you meet the criteria, but that's just hearsay in the department.

Thank you! And, great question! I have several thoughts on this:

1. Barter and trade is alive and well in our community and I've heard from other parents that this can be a great way to secure "free" lessons for kids. I did a recent post on this with FW reader suggestions on how they barter for their kids' lessons/sports.
   
   
2. Stuff for kids is (fortunately) cheaper out here in rural VT than it was in the big city.
   
   
3. She will learn early on that we don't get everything we want in life and that she'll need to prioritize.
   
   
4. One of the reasons we're FI is that we pick and choose the stuff we want to spend our money on. Paying for Babywoods to take classes she wants to take will be one of those values-based spending priorities.
   
   
5. I'm very much of the 'Simplicity Parenting' mindset (I highly recommend the book!!), which adheres to the notion that kids thrive on unstructured time during which they're allowed to explore/play/discover independently--especially in nature!
   
   My approach to parenting evolves as Babywoods grows, but it always retains the lens of frugality and simplicity because I believe this approach yields tremendous dividends for not only our finances, but also the way we like to live our life.

I would highly recommend the book: Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids. It gave us some great strategies!

Many of you are probably familiar with Mark Wiseman's book, Mind Play, or with some of his erotic writing on MCstories. He's a lovely person and very good at what he does, and he was the guest on this week's episode of the Sex Nerd Sandra podcast. Go have a listen!

(Disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to listen to the podcast yet myself, but I already know that Sandra is a fun host and Mark is a great speaker, so I have high expectations for the episode.)

Personally I've found there to be few helpful books which directly relate to management consulting / business strategy. The only one that I've found really helpful is:

• Winning - an overall look on business strategies and philosophies used by Jack Welch (former CEO of GE)
  
  But here are some books that are very helpful in developing people / soft skills essential to effective consultants:
  
  
• Getting to Yes - an incredible book on negotating skills.
  
• How to Argue and Win Every Time - not as argumentative as it sounds, this is a great book which is hugely helpful on how to present your positions and how to get the best outcome for everyone in a situation.
  
• Influence - brilliant book on the ways in which we are influenced to do things.
  
• The 48 Laws of Power - a very Machiavellian put pragmatic look on the ways in which personal power is gained / lost.
  
• Vital Lies, Simple Truths - how to recognise self deception that we're all prone to and how to overcome its limitations
  
• The Blank Slate - a mindblowing book on human psychology and what we're naturally predisposed to be. Helps you to better understand people and their motivations in not just business but all aspects of life. Read from Part 2 onwards.

Basically what /u/ForkUK said. Like you'd almost never here a guy say, "I met this girl and it was love at first sight. She was just so confident and funny." Anyway there's a good book on the topic called: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire

The best resource is Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling. It presents a recolection of scientific papers, research, experiments since 1800 to the present in sexuality and gender and where we are now and her own take on the subject. It presents critisism to the androgen developmental path (the idea that we are "female" and testosterone makes us male), it introduces the concept of an estrogenic developmental path, it challenges the idea of gender and sex as two distinct characteristics, and joins them in a moebius band, both being part of a more complex structure than a binary pole.

The first half of the book is a very well written recolection of these ideas, the second half is basically for supporting the first half with scientific data. I loved it.

The following comment by unstoppable-cash was openly removed.

The original comment can be found(in censored form) at this link:

np.reddit.com/r/ btc/comments/8fmf4g/-/dy4qeos?context=4

The open modlog reason it was removed as reported by /r/btc was: Removed, url shortener - see sidebar rules

The original comment's content was as follows:

---

> > try to be part of this incredible disruptive technology that is looming.
>
> Excellent point-Agreed!
>
> Disruptive to TPTB... meaning returning power back to the Individual (the ultimate minority)!
>
> EDIT: added below...
>
> > Imagine a government where you can...
>
> I do my best to imagine government rulers dont exist, and do everything in my power to avoid them. Yes, they make it difficult. But there are ways to minimize their tyranny. One small thing I found that helped me some yrs ago (of many avail) is Harry Brown's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
>
> But of course Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash will likely be THE tool to dislodge the shackles in our lifetime!

A couple of good books that look at this:

The Moral Animal
by Robert Wright

The Origins of Virtue
by Matt Ridley

Braintrust
by Patricia Churchland

Ridley looks specifically at the evolution of cooperation. Wright considers a broader range of questions - for instance he looks at sexual mores and customs - ie. polygyny and monogamy, why men care much more about sexual fidelity than women do, etc. If I had my copy here I could probably find some more to point out and provide some of his ideas.... It's a great book (I also highly recommend his book Nonzero). Churchland specifically gets into the neuroscience of morality.

> What are some things that we can do early on that yall wish yall had done?

Start a budget and begin tracking your spending. I really like mint.com because it integrates all your accounts and categorizes spending automatically. The budgeting tools are also really intuitive and work well. I'd suggest figuring out the baby's monthly expenses and then starting to set aside that amount of money each month starting now. You'll help to build savings and also you'll get to simulate living on a baby budget.

If you're planning on using daycare, now is the time to start looking. Any place that's good will have a long waiting list for infants, and the cost is definitely something you want to start working into your budget. Here's a useful page I added to the wiki to help navigate this minefield

If you get the financial stuff figured out early it will minimize freaking out later on when you have fewer options and less time.

Oh, also, I found that reading about pregnancy was simultaneously boring and scary. I prefer to read about parenthood instead. I would recommend The Baby Book. It is biased toward attachment parenting for sure, but there is also a lot of great objective information about baby's developmental milestones as well as frank discussions about common problems that arise and several (attachment parenting) approaches to addressing them.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Quit telling her that she's doing a good job. Tell her instead "you're working hard at that." For a gifted toddler, their vision of what they want will never ever be as good as they can create. You want her to learn that it's about the process, not the product. You really want to avoid praising her for being "smart" (and having others do the same) when she starts school. Read Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset: https://www.mindsetworks.com/parents/default\
   
2. Figure out YOUR boundaries and then when you set them, be firm. Smart kids who can win arguments with you as toddlers NEED clear boundaries that you enforce no matter how hard they tantrum. Like typical 2-5 year olds, they're trying to figure out how the world works. If it works differently on different days or differently if they tantrum vs. not, then they are very unsettled and the unknown makes the world a scary place. I recommend Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's book: Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles. Stanley Greenspan's The Challenging Child also helped me a lot.
   
   1. If dad says no story until something is tidied away and she says "mum can read the book," then your reply is "You need to tidy that away before anyone reads to you." Let the ensuing tantrum happen (see below).
      
   2. For the light example, I'd say "you're right, that one doesn't hurt. What's the difference? Can you always tell the difference? That's why we have to be careful." Not everyone bit of her "defiance" is true defiance. She's trying to figure out the boundaries of her world. She's two and so she's still very very literal. (When my son was two, I told him that all cars had exhaust pipes. He had to check each car we saw for the next week.)
      
3. Give up trying to avoid distress. Instead focus on helping her cope with her distress. I, too, have a super bright, emotionally intense daughter who's now beyond early childhood. She feels deeply, she's easily frustrated, and she has experienced more negative emotions than many other children. I don't want her to feel less, because that's part of who she is. She feels passionately about social justice and is now finally in a position to begin to work with organizations to effect this change.
   
4. Teach your daughter (a) that negative emotions can be withstood and (b) they are not the end of the world. You have to figure out what helps her when she's in distress. For one of my kids, I needed to back off and leave him alone because ANYTHING I did overstimulated him. When he calmed down on his own, we could cuddle and talk. For another, I need to be there to help her calm down (even now as a teen). I would lay down with her on the bed and hum very softly while she sobbed. For helping kids recognize emotions and deal with them, I recommend Dan Siegel's work: The Whole Brain Child and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen by Faber and Mazlish.

the baby book. my daughter is a week tomorrow. love this book, lots of great tips, great information for both partners. coming from a dad.


http://www.amazon.ca/Baby-Book-Revised-Everything-About/dp/0316198269/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374470043&sr=8-1&keywords=the+baby+book

Check out Carl Jung's Liber Novus, also known as the Red Book. What I believe you are experiencing is a state Jung termed active imagination.
It took practice for me to attain a similar realm/state, but it required disassociating myself from past and future and letting my imagination form a reality apart from emotion and desire.
There are beings (which I view as aspects of my subconscious psyche) that I can commune with in this state, and I have found it very useful.
I would interpret what happens to you in meditation as you entering a state of active imagination and your subconscious putting you through a necessary trial - or an experience that is a symbol of a trial you need to undergo.
The realms of mental experience are incredibly vast, however, and it may not be appropriate for me to project my experience onto your own in this manner.

While my Spirit Twin is Pinkie Pie for her unwielding goofiness and friendship-magic, I think my favorite fictional character is Kenneth from 30 Rock. He somehow sneaks in some incredibly dark comedy in between his "aw shucks" moments on the show. Plus, despite how small it seems, he's pretty much living his dream life.

I'd like a used copy of [The Portable Jung] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0140150706/ref=wl_it_of_o_pC_S_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=36FKHTABECFGT&coliid=IOXMVP4MRSFBE&condition=all), which has a handful of under a buck copies, from my Books WL. Or any of the used books on that list that fits the price criteria.

You might find Matt Ridley's "Origins of Virtue" to be pretty interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Cooperation/dp/0140264450

His interpretation is that many times (this is not specific to women in any way) one group may "take one for the team" because in the end, they end up with a better deal than any other options.

To put it in the context of the scenario you mention, perhaps they felt getting SOMEONE in their family voting sooner was better than a more prolonged and possibly less successful battle for their own personal voting rights.

I'm not saying you're wrong. A lot of women get screwed over by the world. I'm just saying, the world is a nasty place for humans and sometimes women may have made a "pragmatic" decision by choosing a "less screwed" option. Ridley and others argue that (for men or women) the ultimate Darwinian measuring stick of our brief time on Earth may simply be the success and vitality of our children. It's why men go to war (and do a lot of other terrible things to) and it might also be why women let themselves get thrown under the bus. Because if they're making the world better for their children, in the grand scheme of things, it's a win.

Flame me if you will.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: Mind Play: A Guide to Erotic Hypnosis


|Country|Link|Charity Links|
|:-----------|:------------|:------------|
|USA|smile.amazon.com|EFF|
|UK|www.amazon.co.uk|Macmillan|
|Spain|www.amazon.es||
|France|www.amazon.fr||
|Germany|www.amazon.de||
|Japan|www.amazon.co.jp||
|Canada|www.amazon.ca||
|Italy|www.amazon.it||
|India|www.amazon.in||




To help add charity links, please have a look at this thread.

This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting). The thread for feature requests can be found here.

You picked the wrong villain. Money is just a way of facilitating trade of scarce items. We can easily trade if I have a goat you want and you have some cotton I want. But when more people are introduced with items (eg someone else has some steel, another person has some paper etc) then direct barter gets too complicated and you can use money to work it out instead. Scarce items is the other important point - you won't find it possible to exchange money for items of an almost unlimited supply.

If you want to avoid trade completely then you will need some sort of communal environment, although you'll find it necessary for the community to trade outside of that environment. Two examples are a kibbutz and communism.

You could eliminate money by not having anything be scarce or at least for there to be no scarcity and being totally self supporting within a community. Generally people cooperate and are virtuous when around people most like them - there is a genetic reason for doing so. The less you are like them the more incentive there is to gain an advantage over others (greed etc).

> Wealth and its correspondingly corrupt power are the real culprit.

I disagree. The problem is not wealth but humans per se. There is always someone who wants to be the boss and this is in any GROUP of humans. It doesn't matter if its a tribal society or a big nation. The difference is that in a big nation the power of the government is much stronger so there is a stronger need for checks and balances. When these fail, well, better be smart, don't try to fight the government head on, because you'll lose.

A good book:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree-World/dp/0965603679/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228837816&sr=8-1

Most men seem to know theyre gay very early in life. For women, some know very early in life, while others tend to move along a spectrum of sexuality from homosexuality to heterosexuality (or in the other direction) as their lives progress. There is a good book about women's sexuality called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268

> Like what reading? I like to read!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Bodies-Matter-Discursive-Limits-Sex-Routledge-Classics/041561015X/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Brain-Lesley-Rogers-2000-06-01/dp/B01HC0RD82/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481591782&sr=1-2&keywords=sexing+the+brain

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delusions-Gender-Science-Behind-Differences/dp/1848312202/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

http://bennorton.com/gender-is-not-alone-the-social-construction-of-sex/

http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2003/Extreme_Problems_with_Essential_Differences/

would be good places to start, plus numerous other papers, some books and blog posts I don't have quite the google-fu to relocate, and a lot of more tangential stuff. (I originally came to this mostly through the study of the theory of bodies and embodiement in art, as well as my spouse's academic studies in gender and sexuality). In getting to grips with this material and the general position it's important to move away from the facile strawman of the idea that biology is disregarded in a social constructionist view; more profoundly, social constructionists realise that social environment reshapes biology.

>Yeah it is. If you believe trans women only transition because of quote unquote "gender" which is purely social...you're wrong.

But what is a 'gender role'? If you restrict it to something as facile as 'girls like pink' then you can make anything absurd. It's worth remembering that the term 'gender roles' was originally coined by the sexologist John Money to describe the behaviours inhabited by unassigned intersex individuals trying to express a single binary gender identity. From a performative standpoint, gender roles are the entirety of the behaviour with which we signal the gender identity we wish to and are trained to project towards society. To say such things are not bound up in the trans experience is simply wrong; many trans folk experience feelings of dysphoria at being identified as their wrong gender, and lessening of these feelings or even positive counter-feelings at being identified as their correct gender. This is purely a matter of social perception. Therapeutically speaking, people transition because it helps to alleviate their feelings of dysphoria. Whether the underlying cause of the dysphoric state is genetic, epigenetic, foetal or psychological (or even spiritual) or some subtle combination of factors which differs on an individual basis is immaterial to the benefits provided by transition to the majority of those who seriously seek it. This is, it is important to note, only the medically legitimised narrative of the trans experience.

I'll prepare for the downvotes, but if you check out the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) it explains why late merging is good and is actually what traffic engineers plan for. I know it's not a popular opinion, but I found it a fascinating read (the whole book, not just the merging part) and highly recommend it.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

Super late to the party, but this is very interesting. If you're still checking this, could you talk about the book Traffic? It's the most interesting book I've read in recent memory.

The key to success with the always going on fourth is to let it influence 1st-3rd down calls. The Arkansas HS coach they referenced in the article almost always runs on third and long, defenses are still caught off guard by it and it sets him up with much more manageable fourth down conversions.

The best breakdown of his system is in the book Scorcasting, which I honestly can't recommend highly enough.

I came here to cautiously recommend therapy. My recommendation caused strain on our relationship. It turns out guys don't want you to send constant emails about every therapist within 20 miles who sees kids... If they go to therapy and you're privy to the info, read up on the diagnosis to see how you can help them thrive! I'd also spend less time parenting and more time reading up on step/parenting. Terrible twos often bleed into the threes. Reading was incredibly therapeutic for me.

Stepmonster - popular here, I'm a fan
Single Girl's Guide - never read, well reviewed
How To Talk So Kids Will Listen
The Whole-Brain Child
Subtle Art - best book ever

Agreed. Scorecasting is a great book. Wertheim breaks down going for it in three bullets

• Inside the opponent's 45 yard line facing anything less than fourth and eight
  
• Inside the opponent's 33 yard line, they are better of going for it on anything less than fourth and 11
  
• Regardless of field position, on anything less than fourth and five, teams are always better off going for it

Adam Smith wrote a book called Theory of Moral Sentiments that described human nature in a way that would be familiar to many socialists. We are altruistic, compassionate, cooperative, and loving. Humans don't act like homo economicus in our daily lives. All of this is complementary to and compatible with Smith's description of man as a self-interested being, which most people are familiar with because of his much more famous book, Wealth of Nations. These aspects of human nature are, in fact, what make capitalism work so well.

Good books on the subject:

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts. This book is brand new and excellent.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, a book by Steven Johnson, would fit well into your research. Also, you definitely need some empirical data if you want to draw any meaningful conclusions, so look for published studies and objective articles on topics like aggression, physiological arousal, and prosocial development in game-playing demographics. The best thing for your thesis is to find some credible academic papers that arrive at a conclusion you disagree with ("games are bad, mmkay") and use them, as well. Biased research isn't valuable research.

I'm having a good time with Happiest Baby on the Block (though I think it's really slow and repetitive, and their "conclusions" (it isn't this, this, or this, so it MUST be this) are a bit, uh, presumptuous; I think the book is spot on for how to treat the baby, especially in the "4th trimester") and The Nursing Mother's Companion. And these aren't baby books, but my husband and I are also reading Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and The Birth Partner to prep for labor.

I have a few more books on my shelf to reference just in case, like Sears' The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (but I am wary of anti-vacc notions of the book), Brain Rules for Baby, and for fun, Experimenting with Babies.

Person, hands down. Doesn't mean that we don't play together. But I never want to be in the business of objectification. I want the full nine yards.

EVERYONE is a person. They have wants, desires, needs, and HUMANITY. The good, the bad, the exciting, the mundane, the hilarious, the fantastical, etc. I want it all.

Entertainment is temporary until the next, slightly more absurd thing comes along. I want to peer into someone's soul and see them for all that they are.

Depends on the theoretical models he’s interested in. Here’s my favorite Jungian gift:
The Red Book
It’s something I would never have bought myself because of the cost, but am glad to have it for its historical significance.

Sigh, sex and gender are not the same thing. Your sex is what you are biologically, your gender is what you identify as. I would encourage you to read Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body as it is a very fascinating and SCIENTIFIC look at gender and sex and the politics behind a lot of it. Don't want to educate yourself? Here's a link to a pdf Fausto-Sterling wrote titled The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.

Here are some slides from my Women and Gender Studies class

Also, do you even know about intersex people? What sex and/or gender would you say they have? The world isn't black and white and I would sincerely encourage you to educate yourself as you sound like a right ignorant twat right now.

The binary sex system was socially constructed by cissexed (or cissexual) humans. It has no place for transsexual or intersexed people. I think more people are realizing how limiting it is towards intersex people, but it's just as limiting towards transsexual people.

It's not like I ever got a choice whether I agreed or not with this cis system of binary sex. I don't agree with it. Therefore, discussing it is a little tough, because every discussion of it assumes that trans people "must" accept "the truth". It's not the truth. My existence disproves it.
I've generally had this discussion with cis folks, and those that seem to be trying a little to accept trans people do seem to want to put us in some "female men" and "male women" categories--but if we can think of gender as socially constructed, it's hard to see why we can't see the sexes as such. We generally assign sex based on appearance of genitals at birth. For the vast majority of people that works out fine.
But not for all people. And being one of the people it doesn't work out for, I'm not likely to accept cis explanations for how I'm wrong.

And it's not like there hasn't been scholarly research on this topic. I'm thinking of Anne Fausto Sterling:
http://www.amazon.com/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145
as one example.

In college I took a "History of Gender" (gender being used to mean both sex and gender) course and at the very end, the professor asked us for our conclusions--what we had learned. I knew this was going to be hard for the cis people in the room to accept, but I said "there's a lot of documentation of the fact that sex is just as socially constructed as gender--I had no idea" (I was 23 at the time and pre physical transition.)
The prof absolutely lit up at my response and said, exactly. It gave me a lot of hope and it was one of the things that encouraged me to transition rather than just accepting the common knowledge of my body as my identity.

> DNA is essentially the driving force behind evolution

In our limited realm of experience, DNA is the primary actor in evolution (the driving force seems like a term better applied to selective pressure). And DNA is really great! But it's conceivable that some other molecule exists out there that can self-replicate and can sometimes make mistakes to allow for adaptation.

We've also been doing research for a couple of decades now into evolutionary programming, whereby a program makes a lot of copies of its own code with minor tweaks and then the resulting copies get tested against some rubric (e.g. how fast or accurately can you solve this problem). The loser copies are culled to gradually develop programs that fit the testing criteria much more closely than the original and can solve the test problems in unexpected ways.

> Better yet, could altruism be an evolutionarily successful trait in a universe with selfish genes?

Matt Ridley wrote a book about exactly this called The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. The short answer is 'yes'; there are examples of altruism all over the Animal kingdom (I can't remember any about fungi or plants, but they might be in there), and there can be advantages to being altruistic even when there are selfish bastards in the same realm looking to exploit that.

(note: Matt Ridley is a pretty conservative dude and draws some near-nihilistic conclusions toward the end of the book, but I still think he's a great science writer when he's citing sources rather than providing political commentary).

Congratulations! Parenting is a learn as you go excercise (every child is different), so I will not offer advice. However, we found the baby book useful.

Also, please read up on febrile seizures. This is not to alarm you, but it is the one thing the wife and I wish we were better informed about. Febrile seizures are not a big deal and have no lasting effects, but can be a bit nerve wracking if you're unprepared.

For erotic play with couples, I thoroughly recommend Mind Play by MarK Wiseman. It will answer a lot of your questions, give you some techniques and give you the basics to enjoy hypnosis in a relationship. Binaural beats aren't necessary.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Play-Guide-Erotic-Hypnosis/dp/1484841034

Tiger Woods dad was an amateur golf player and he trained him since he was a baby. His whole childhood was focused around trainings as a gold player.

David Beckham has an extreme case of OCD. He went every day to the park near his house and shot a ball at the same spot of a wall there. Thats how he gained his shot technique.

So basically, yes, what you do as a child has a massive effect on what people may be consider as "talent". If you're interested on the topic read this book, it answers to your question.

If you're really interested in the evolution of the human brain and how evolution has shaped our psychology, I suggest reading Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works." It's not a light read, but it's incredibly fascinating.

For a more general look at recent human evolution, I enjoyed "The 10,000 Year Explosion." The authors argue that genetic changes have led to higher than average IQs among European Jews.

How to Think About God: A guide for the 20th Century Pagan

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible

The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth

The Abolition of Man

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith


Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally

It is thought that altruistic behavior is actually innate and passed down genetically and thus a product of natural selection, it's part of our survival behavior that actually got us (a bunch of pretty weak apes) this far...

Here's a great book on the genetics and altruism Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley

I recommend Bounce by Matthew Syed on this topic.

The authour tries to dispel the myth of talent, and does a really great job at it.

One of the books on your list that looks promising is Sexing The Body. While it may not provide an in depth overview of human biology it will likely provide the appropriate background information. Many other books under the gender studies umbrella do explore and explain biological sex (male, female, intersex), prominent scientific studies, and current areas of research. One book not on the list is Delusions of Gender and it is just one book to explore these issues.

At the end of the day that's a reading list to get the PhD student started. By the end of their PhD they will have ready 3-4x that many articles and books. Those of their choosing will focus in on areas of research that they are interested in. That may include basic research on human anatomy, biology, and sex.

I guess the question is what do you think is missing from these books that discuss gender and sex from a biological perspective that can only be gained from human biology textbooks?

Oh hon, I feel you. This gets me because I felt the same way. I still do. I have a 19 month old toddler.

Start here: Parenting from the Inside Out.

This book will really help you decipher your family, and really give you hope and tools for not reproducing their problems onto your little beauty of a tiny awesome person.

It's pretty straightforward and incredibly useful.

Then read this and this. Yes read them while you're pregnant because again they will give you hope and insight.

Buy this book and start reading it now too. We call it the Baby Bible in our house.

It's a survival manual for the first year of their life. It has everything. I don't know how many times we've pulled it down and flipped to the index at 2:00 am. It's better than Google. It's fantastic. (That said, it has an angle like all parenting books, even though it tries not to. They are attachment parenting writers. Nothing wrong with attachment parenting per se, just an awareness all parenting books have angles, even the impartial ones.)

Also, if you're anything like me, avoid all the happy, glowing, blowing-stardust-and-glitter-up-your-ass, pregnancy books out there. These did nothing but enrage me. I'm talking about What to Expect and similar. Unless you like stardust and bullshit, avoid avoid avoid.

Basically if you go to a thrift store and there's 8 copies of the damn pregnancy or parenting book on the shelf, don't buy it.

Instead check out books like this and this and this.

Now I haven't read those exact books, unlike all my other recommendations above, all of which I've personally read as a scared, overwhelmed pregnant lady or new mom. But as long as you stay in the 'brutally honest' lane and away from the 'syrupy sweet, guilt laden, shame' lane, then you'll be fine.

Even in 2019 there's a mountain of mommy advice bullshit books out there. Keep your instincts and your wits about you, don't forget who you are. Stay strong. And work on yourself with books like Parenting from the Inside Out and the How to Talk books.

I am a bibliophile and I would really like this book: Jung's Red Book, which is profiled here in the New York Times. It's a beautiful book, by all descriptions, a true work of art. It's a little beyond what I would spend on myself this season, so I thought it would qualify for this thread.

I haven't watched this yet. Is there a significant difference between what Tom said and the things Harry Brown written in his book "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty" (https://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree-World/dp/0965603679)?

Evolution is simply the science of how we got here and except for debunking theistic claims to the contrary (which calls into question all their other claims) doesn't provide much in the way of ethical guidelines. But, if I'm guessing correctly about where you're headed take a look at Matt Ridley's book The Origins of Virtue. It does a pretty good job of explaining how we evolved our sense of moral behavior.

So there is something to novels/tv shows/movies/video games which aren't "educational" as it's normally described.

One of the biggest advantages is the ability to critically think and compartmentalize important information and discard irrelevant details.

For example, when reading a particularly complex book you might need to keep track of a half dozen characters, a variety of details of history of those characters and motivations, their goals, and the background of the world and how that all relates. Being able to "get it" is good practice for dealing with complex situations in your own life. The story may be cheezy, or unrealistic, but if it takes some thinking to get what's happening that has value itself. That's the case even when the media is (insert novel/tv show/video game/movie you consider trash) as long as it isn't extremely straightforward.

There is a really interesting book which goes over this that I recommend Called Everything Bad is Good For You (Amazon link)

Anything from Oliver Sacks always worth reading imo.

• Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain!
  
  
• The Compassionate Brain: A Revolutionary Guide to Developing Your Intelligence to Its Full Potential: How Empathy Creates Intelligence!
  
  
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain!
  
  
• Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions!
  
  
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind!
  
  
• The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound!
  
  not really neuroscience, but interesting imho:
  
  
• How the Mind Works!
  
  
  *(hopes formatting works)

For the science lovers:

Gender

• Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. Lecture here.
  
  
• Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders by Alice Eagly and Linda Carli
  
  
• Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men by Anne Fausto-Sterling
  
  
• Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling
  
  
• A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences by Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly
  
  Race
  
  
• The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Actually, I've read something about tv being somewhat stimulating. Tv these days has so many sub plots that keeping track of it all takes a little brain power.

Playing a video game is more stimulating. You're developing strategies, saving in game money for that next item, etc..

If you're interested, I got these ideas from a book I read a couple years back:

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946

Simplicity Parenting has a wonderful chapter about toys and how keep them meaningful but under control. It's a fantastic book.

No need for cursing.

Didn't include anything as I assumed, it's kind of common knowledge now, ever since the Malcom Gladwell book.

Here's two books for you, if you want to read more and decide for yourself.

Malcol Gladwell - Outliers (here's an extract about the 10,000 hours rule)
http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounce-Myth-Talent-Power-Practice/dp/0007350546

And another article:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmaster-experiment


In summary: If there is such a thing as 'natural talent' it's definitely so tiny that we can barely detect it.

I largely don't care about politics any more because my individual influence on it is limited. I find my energy is better directed towards improving my personal quality of life.

My views are close to those outlined in 'How I found freedom in an unfree world' which are roughly libertarian, but I also agree with some social policies as they influence the culture and I don't want to have to raise kids inside a gated community.

It's pretty pricey, but awesome: https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Book-Liber-Novus/dp/0393065677

True, although RickRickshaw mentioned how this could fall into the "happy" category. And if caring for your dying parents truly makes you miserable, one has to ask, should you really do it?
Harry Browne goes into this question in great detail (tl;dr his answer is no, you shouldn't). http://www.amazon.ca/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree-World/dp/0965603679

1. Simplicity Parenting - by Kim John Payne
   
2. 10/10
   
3. Parenting advice
   
4. A little different from what would normally be recommended but hey...if you have a kid, are about to have a kid, know someone having a kid or ever want to have a kid, put this book in your queue. Great advice through out and I can't wait to apply it more with my new family.
   
5. Amazon

Topical - Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345507983/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_LAXQBb6Z6ZVB9

This all sounds pretty normal, and like a non-'problem' that will fix itself before you know it.

At least the kid sounds normal. What doesn't sound healthy:

> He blames me for the way she is.
> He says she's spoiled

You can't spoil a kid with love; dude has some bizarre thinking on this. And you both need to stop blaming and nagging. There's nothing wrong with the kid and if you spend the early years sniping at each other you will miss out on a really lovely time that flies by really quickly.

I would do more reading on normal babies -- this is something you might both read together.

> When I'm home and I try to hand her off for a bit she usually cries.

So don't hand her off. Stick around while she gets to enjoy both of you. Have family meals; have dad provide any needed assistance with solids. Play games together as a family. The more secure she is that mommy isn't just going to take off and leave her with daddy and never return, the easier it will be for you to leave. Keep building a good secure foundation, and don't force things she's just not developmentally ready for.

Try this ... Ridley goes into games theory and computing as well as evolution to explore the origins of unselfish behavior. A riveting and surprisingly hopeful, hard science exploration.
http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Evolution-Cooperation/dp/0140264450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348738525&sr=1-1&keywords=the+origins+of+virtue

Dennett's Elbow Room: The varieties of free will worth wanting is a good place to start.

Anthropology discovered this like a hundred years ago, yet the discussion and consideration is completely absent from pop culture. If you have a basic 8th grade understanding of biology (egg and sperm) it does seem like men have a motivation to fuck and flee. But when you consider human evolution, it doesn't make sense. But pop culture always gives in to the lowest common denominator (most people don't even believe in human evolution, let alone have studied it).

Human children are born dependent and stay dependent for many years, requiring multiple caregivers. Fuck and flee would ensure the death of a man's children in most cases, so there is no incentive to do that. Humans are extremely social and community is very important for our survival, happiness, and intellectual satisfaction. Fuck and flee severs trust and closeness, which are important to someone who relies on altruism for survival.

If men were programmed for infidelity, our early ancestors would have lived like lions (all the females together raising the kids, while an occasional male would stop by and knock them up). But that's not how we have ever lived. There is evidence of pair bonding in our ancestors back 4 million years, before the Homo Sapiens even existed.

For more reading on this, check out The Origins of Virtue. I read it in one of my anthropology classes in college, and it was a student favorite. It discusses the evolution of community in many species.

If you find this interesting you might wanna check out a great book on this subject. The book is called Traffic and it provides some very interesting insight into the way that people drive.

The refs.

Researchers looking into the phenomenon have been able to largely rule out the "usual suspects" for home field advantage (check out the book Scorecasting - that's not an affiliate link, just to be clear), with the exception of some scheduling bias.

But a paper by Thomas Dohmen using the Bundesliga for data showed the refs tend to favor the home team. And specifically, they favor the home team more the closer they are to the crowd: so a pitch surrounded by a wide warning track gave less home field advantage than a pitch where the stands come right up to the field.

Though I don't have data to support it, this intuitively explains why the effect is more pronounced in soccer than major American sports: soccer calls are quite often judgement calls by the ref rather than strict adherence to detailed rules. No call vs foul, just a foul vs worthy of a booking, yellow card vs red card, largely comes down to how "cynical" the ref thinks the contact was (I obviously don't mean there aren't rules about what constitutes each, but whether it was a hold or just impeding the progress of a player can be a judgement call, and changes an indirect kick to a direct kick. To be clear, I think relying on the judgement of refs is a net benefit to soccer - you never end up with a decades-long argument about how to define a "catch").

And if the game leans a bit harder on the judgement of the referee, it makes sense that a factor which influences that judgement will have a proportionally larger effect on the sport.

the portable jung has a section on the shadow and many other bits that JP speaks about like 'the relations between the ego and unconscious' ...tis a good starting point that covers alot.
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Jung-Library/dp/0140150706

> because it increases the chances they will be treated well.

Actually, I think you're right and this is an even better theory. I'd attribute it to Matt Ridley, who I read on this topic some 10 years ago. (I don't know if he was the first to talk about altruism evolutionarily.)

Ridley's book includes some discussion of game theory, and how the various permutations of "tit for tat" show up in the animal kingdom. I think he showed that chimpanzees follow "Tit for Tat with forgiveness" behavior.

This book Traffic by Vanderbilt is the best non fiction book I read last year. Just if you are interested in the how and why traffic works the way it does.

I recommend The Portable Jung. It's on my bookshelf, and it's your best bet.

do you move in between lanes trying to get in the good lane? do you let people merge into your lane without trying to block them? do you only go in the left lane while passing, allowing traffic to move?

do you even know the ways to make a road efficient? read up on the science/math of traffic. you'll be amazed. i was guilty of a lot of bad road ideas until i read this: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

adding another lane does little to improving traffic flow. more people just decide to use the freeways instead of other methods. you know why they can drive so fast on the autobahn? you need a license, and you get it taken away if you do something inefficient.

> Young girls talk a lot more

You could have stopped right there. I'm going to throw a recommendation for this book as its a good read:

http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767920104

Again a teenage girl's desire for communication and social bonding is very well documented. They even have that saying "Talking on the phone like a 16 year old girl".

> caused by societal pressure

I have an issue with this as well. Over the last few decades we have been playing with this idea of "societal pressures" shaping people. I'm on the other side of the fence with the idea that our nature is what shaped our society in the first place.

Throwing out another recommendation on your second point, also a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368644663&sr=1-2&keywords=blank+slate

You are welcome to challenge any of my opinions but calling them "simplistic" seems rather dense on your part.

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won. I can't give you a quote since I rented it from the library but the Amazon link mentions Home Field Advantage in the description:

>Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists...

ETA: FWIW, this guy disagrees with the findings although I have no idea where he's going with some of it. "If that's the case, then you'd expect home and visiting teams to have similar numbers at equal strength." Ummmm...no you wouldn't.

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594481946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246955706&sr=8-1

i was very surprised at how well done this book was. does a fantastic job of analyzing pop culture today (including video games) and how as dumb as we may think some things are (movies, video games, reality tv, etc...) they're all actually making us smarter and making us think more critically about what we are actually seeing compared to pop culture in the past.

This is a basic premise of Evolutionary Psychology.

Steven Pinker, one of the best non-fiction writers of our time, has an entire book about how we all share a common human (animal) nature.

Try "Elbow Room" -'The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting' by Dan Dennett.

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You can't see the future, that uncertainty has many positive possibility's. You just need to know that, and it might change your perspective.

The only one that did it is How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne.
It was two weeks ago and I'm an avid reader.

I’d recommend The Whole Brain Child My SO and I reading it together during the last bottle feed and it’s pretty solid in our opinion.

I'm reading a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do right now that I think you may find fascinating. It's incredible so far and really touches on some interesting ideas.

I've read and studied under Lisa Diamond. The research they're referring to is likely the Sexual Fluidity of Women. Basically the study shows that women can form emotional and sexual relationships across the gender spectrum throughout their lives. However, it also shows that during those times they express specific identities, or often shed all identities. So, it's not that you could take a lesbian and turn her straight, that is unless you were going for the long troll and waited 50 years and maybe she might have a shift in sexual orientation.

This isn't the first time that this study has been misrepresented. The AFA really likes to tout this study as some proof that you choose to be gay. The difference between the AFA and Paul Clement is that Paul Clement is educated enough to actually understand the study.