Best products from r/lectures

We found 22 comments on r/lectures discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 45 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.

Top comments mentioning products on r/lectures:

u/durendal04 · 2 pointsr/lectures

Very well, let's begin.

Since the article doesn't make a single over-arching argument, but instead tacks on bits of misconstrued information to attack Milton and establish him as a moral obscenity and a "fascist", I'm simply going to address those bits one at a time and in order.

Some points stretch the truth, others are out right lies, none are really credible in the end.

>He has been a leading collaborator of every economic official involved in the successful tear-down of the U.S. physical economy over the last 60 years: Arthur Burns, George Shultz, Paul Volcker, and Alan Green- span. He himself stayed out of government over this period but did his dirty work all the same.

So the author is suggesting that Friedman was destroying the economy through these other economic figures? Well the author doesn't bother to back up her claims here so I can only guess what events she's referring to, but at best I'm attacking a straw-man.

> Arthur Burns

Arthur Burns was the federal reserve chairman under Richard Nixon from 1970-1978. The two important things to know about him; he was a friend and teacher of Milton Friedman, and he was also responsible for the double digit inflation that occurred in the 70's. How do the two relate? First some context. At the time there were two prevailing beliefs; the first was that monetary policy had little to do with inflation (we know that's not true); the second was that price and wage control were effective tools to combat inflation. If you ever look up any Friedman videos, most of them are about inflation because it was such a widespread misconception at the time.

Before Burns's role as the chairman, him and Friedman were collaborators. They largely held the same economic views including the idea that increasing the money supply is what leads to inflation. Because of this and their history, Friedman nominated Burns to serve as chairman under Nixon. However, once Burns became chairman, his opinion of inflation changed to favor the idea of price controls. I'm unsure what changed his mind but the result was a huge expansion of the fed in addition to some price and wage control policies. "The Federal Reserve under Burns permitted very rapid monetary growth: so rapid, in fact, that double-digit inflation emerged during the decade—twice". "The disagreement led Friedman in May 1970 to send Burns a lengthy handwritten letter critical of Burns’ statements on incomes policy. The Philadelphia Inquirer (May 29, 1970) reported that Burns was shaken by the letter, and it suggested that relations between Burns and Friedman had deteriorated. The text of the letter (actually, letters, as Friedman wrote multiple times), available in both Friedman’s and Burns’ archives"[1]

It's well documented that Friedman was quite critical of Burns's policies as chairman, so if the author is trying to suggest otherwise then she clearly did not do her homework.

[1]http://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/cromer/Nelson.pdf

>George Shultz

Shultz had less of a relationship to Friedman than Burns did, the only thing they have in common is that they were both academics at Chicago. However, he does relate to the inflation of the 70's. From 1972 to 1974 Shultz served as the Secretary of the Treasury, right in the middle of Nixons new economic policy. He's attributed with participating in the wage and price controls of the time, but again by 1972 it's already established that Friedman is opposed to these policies.

> Paul Volcker

Paul Volcker was another Federal reserve Chairman, serving from 1979 to 1987. I couldn't find any explicit relationship between Volcker and Friedman, but Volcker did fight the runaway inflation of the time via tight monetary policy, as Friedman had always advocated. In 1981, Volcker tightened the Fed, raising interest rates to an unseen 19%. This led to a severe recession, but by 1982 the recession was over and so was the inflation. This initiated an economic golden age for America. The S&P 500 rose at an average annual rate of 15.7% until august 2000. The nation's Gross National Product grew substantially and the U.S. economy created more than 13 million new jobs. Of course the 80's weren't perfect, there was a stock market crash in 1987 and a short recession in 1991, but I digress.

I'm unsure how the author intended to use Paul Volcker to discredit Friedman. If anything he's been vindicated by Volcker's policy.

> Alan Greenspan

The last federal reserve chairman to serve during Friedman's lifetime, he served from 1987 to 2006. In 2006 Friedman passed away at the age of 94. This is important to note because it's on record that Friedman has approved of Greenspan's policies as fed chairman, even though his policies were mostly contrary to Friedman's beliefs. Friedman advocated for a fed tight enough to stop inflation and loose enough to prevent deflation, his overall concern being price stability. Greenspan however was able to maintain price stability while also lowering interest rates, which earned him Friedman's respect. However, this exact monetary policy has been argued as the cause of housing bubble which collapsed in 2008.

Anna Shwartz, Friedman's colleague and co-author of the Nobel prize winning A Monetary History of the U.S., said "There never would have been a subprime mortgage crisis if the Fed had been alert. This is something Alan Greenspan must answer for.”

In short, Greenspan had earned Friedman's respect for operation a loose fed while also maintaining stability. However, it's clear Friedman still supported tight fed policy in his life and it's unlikely he would have the same respect for Greenspan if he lived to see the events of 2008.

> Milton Friedman loved to popularize his economic theories as "freedom to choose." But in his academic work, and among his colleagues, there was widespread recognition that his monetarist theories were nothing less than fascist.

This is the most ironic part of the article because I'm sure most readers are unfamiliar with Friedman's academic work. They probably think the author is referring to something about capitalism since free markets are what Friedman is famously associated with. However, this is not the case. In fact, it's just the opposite. For those of you unfamiliar, Friedman won a noble prize in 1976 which is largely attributed to his work A Monetary history of the United States 1867-1960 in which he comes to a famous conclusion about the great depression.

He argues that even though market speculation caused the economic downturn, it was the failure of the federal reserve to take action which lead to the great depression. The action Friedman was referring to was to have the federal reserve pump money into the economy. Now you might be thinking "Isn't that basically Keynesian economics? Isn't this guy supposed to be all about free markets? What a hypocrite!" However, if you understand Milton Friedman's opinions in general it's not hypocritical at all. For instance, Friedman was opposed to government run education but proposed a school voucher system. He was also opposed to welfare programs but proposed a negative income tax.

Friedman was famous for second best solutions. Even though he was opposed to the current policies and even though he would have favored a free market, he was willing to compromise and come up with practical alternatives that would serve as a step in the right direction. You can find other such opinions of his on healthcare, energy, and others. The same is true for the federal reserve. He has offered academic opinions and insight on the best policies for the fed to pursue but in fact he has always been in favor of abolishing the federal reserve.

This relates back to the great depression because of the nature of how the depression started. When the stock market crashed in 1929, it led to the runs on banks. "In all, 9,000 banks failed during the decade of the 30s. It's estimated that 4,000 banks failed during the one year of 1933 alone. By 1933, depositors saw $140 billion disappear through bank failures."[2] Through out the great depression, the stock of money in the United States declined by one third. Friedman argues that the supply of dollars directly ties to the value of those dollars (this is a point that even libertarian academics such as Hayek will debate against).

Despite the academic debate, the trend proves true in the 70's where Burns's expansion of the fed caused crippling inflation, and again in the 80's where Volcker's tightening of the fed restored price stability. So why was the event of the banks' closing the federal reserve's fault? Simple, it's because the government has a monopoly on the production of currency. It's not uncommon to hear libertarians argue that even currency should be left to the free market, but I digress. Friedman is simply arguing that since the fed is the only one who could reconcile changes in the money supply that the fed alone had a responsibility to stop the money supply from decreasing so sharply. Instead FDR held a "banking holiday for three days"[2] which only worsened the problem.

The ironic part about all of this is that the author is calling Friedman a fascist for basically proposing quantitative easing, a monetary policy that is usually favored by liberals.

(continued)

u/mrsamsa · 2 pointsr/lectures

Your comment appears to have absolutely nothing at all to do with Positive Psychology. These psychologists did not invent the "law of attraction", that was a group of new age hippies who believed that if you just think positive things, then good things will happen.

Positive Psychology, on the other hand, is the idea that clinical psychology has focused too long on mental illness and behavioral abnormalities, and that given the information we currently have on the human condition, we should be trying to use our scientific knowledge to help otherwise healthy and "normal" individuals become happier. So rather than waiting for someone to develop a mental disorder before helping them, Positive Psychology suggests that we should reduce the chance of these people developing disorders in the first place, and we should help work with things like self-esteem, satisfaction, social skills, etc, even when they are not in the "abnormal" range.

These psychologists do not suggest that thinking "positive thoughts" will make your problems go away, and they do not suggest that a failure to think positively is a mental disorder that needs to be treated.

Here are some resources you might find useful:

Positive psychology (Wiki)

Authentic Happiness - Seligman

The Happiness Hypothesis - Haidt

I understand why people confuse Positive Psychology with woo-ey beliefs like 'telling yourself you're beautiful 20 times a day will improve your self esteem!' and the law of attraction, but Positive Psychology is actually a valid field of science which is based upon solid empirical findings. I just wish the researchers in the area would stop using such flowery language to describe their work because it causes this confusion - they're like damn hippies with PhDs.

u/Stewjon · 3 pointsr/lectures

Good find! I could watch this for hours.

I wish all anthropology and linguistics departments did this demonstration once a semester/quarter, not just for students, but for the public. It's fun to see structure and rules emerge in only a few minutes of interaction. It's difficult to think about linguistics or cultural anthropology and not start recognizing the arbitrariness of our own ways of thinking and communicating. That kind of confrontation/awareness/seeing is really invaluable; it's good for everyone.

Everett's book "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes" is a really fun field memoir of his time with the Piraha. One need not be a linguist to understand and enjoy it. It's not heavy on the academic linguistic stuff. It's sort of light linguistic and light ethnography. So if anyone finds something in this lecture intriguing, I'd recommend checking it out. Piraha is one of the most interesting languages I've come across. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498712271&sr=8-1&keywords=daniel+everett

He also spoke at The Long Now Foundation about the Piraha, and about saving disappearing/endangered languages. https://soundcloud.com/longnow/endangered-languages-lost-knowledge-and-future

If anyone watched "Arrival" and thought "hey that looks interesting", guess what! You can do that! Even without aliens. It's almost just as hard, and definitely a lot of fun.

Actually, if you saw "Arrival" and thought "hey that seems neat" or "ugh this is NOT how linguistics and aliens would work" or whatever, then you might be interested in a collection of articles put together by NASA into one document called "Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication" which goes a bit more into the history of concepts around alien contact scenarios. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/archaeology_anthropology_and_interstellar_communication.html

u/godless_communism · 6 pointsr/lectures

This! This! A hundred times this!

Game Theory will really open your eyes to patterns of social interactions and competition. For those who are unfamiliar, Game Theory tells you the best strategy to take given your opponent is rational, but you don't know what he'll do. The insights are amazing.

Also, I would highly recommend this book which I am halfway through - Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

u/WhereaboutsUnknown · 5 pointsr/lectures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the effects of TV on perception of reality.

Tannis MacBeth also did a study and wrote an amazing book on the effects of TV on society, as seen in a real life rural village, from the very beginning.

Book'll change your life, bro, swear to god. Here is a link to amazon, I don't waste my time with money making schemes or none of that shit, so: http://www.amazon.com/The-Impact-Television-Experiment-Communities/dp/0127562915

...but the internet is cool, bros, don't worry. . ..

u/Stavica · 2 pointsr/lectures

Crystal is an excellent author of books regarding the english language, read one of his books for linguistic anthropology, http://www.amazon.ca/Little-Book-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0300170823.

This subreddit is nice, seeing a name I've studied content from :).

As an edit, I figured there was an Aeon article that fit well enough: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

Basically, why is english so odd and different from othr languages, what led up to it, etc.

u/resilienceforall · 10 pointsr/lectures

Second this. It's an absolutely brilliant, thought provoking book.

It grabbed me when I first read it more than 15 years ago with its very first paragraph (in which he was talking about the prevailing Skinnerian idea of punishments and rewards working to shape behavior over time) and never let go. The beginning read:

>"There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us."

That opening gambit is so powerful. I think it can be applied to many other areas of life beyond the psychology of competition too.

Interested readers can buy it on Amazon for as little as one penny.

u/sceadu · 1 pointr/lectures

I would definitely encourage everybody to take a look at the book and buy it if you're interested (just take a look at the reviews :P) http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Cryptography-Textbook-Students-Practitioners/dp/3642041000/

u/Zossimov · 1 pointr/lectures

Not fully on topic but I can recommend a book entitled Understanding Cross-Cultural Management which I use for a summer course of the same title. A comprehensive manual encompassing different fields from organisational culture and change to leadership attributes in multicultural settings.

u/sina12345 · 9 pointsr/lectures

The assessment is interesting, and from a physical/dynamical perspective, it's very enticing. However I can't help but feel unsatisfied that still it's not clear what society should actually do in such a situation.

I also tend to agree with the wildfire analogy right at the very end and have used it myself a few times. I think the useful thing about a wildfire is its obvious ability to quickly deconstruct a massive amount of space at a molecular level, allowing new life to take its place. Nature, evolution, culture are all emergent properties of hysteresis; the past is encoded deeply into the future. When the environment/constraints of life change quicker than the hysteresis allows, societies (or avalanches) collapse. While catastrophic, these collapses can also open new space for new opportunities to blossom that otherwise would not get the chance to.

So I think the problem is that as humans, a controlled and quick deconstruction is not something we like or are good at doing. Tradition, while useful in it's wisdom, also has an interval of relevance. If the constraints of life change quicker than tradition can explain, one must change and explore the chaos and unknown. The age old dichotomy of left and right or yin and yang. Obviously it's a balance of the two, so that means we need to learn as a society when to be swift, and when to be calm.

In today's world where change seems inevitable and tradition longs for relevancy, we face the dilemma of what we keep and what we throw over board. If we don't figure it out fast enough, the probability of collapse or at least a catastrophe will continue to increase as the constraints of life overpower our ability to make the choices required to create a good future and prevent misery.

PS. The citations on the wiki article on Self-organized Criticality is an interesting place to explore the idea of criticality in nature, the human brain, and society. One of the original authors, Per Bak, wrote a whole book on this subject which I've heard is good though I have not had the chance to read yet.

u/broonzy · 2 pointsr/lectures

> Why is that?

Because people should think for themselves.

> But you cannot judge a man based on one work.

Good point. If you want a bit more meat, Peterson also wrote a book called Maps of Meaning which is supported by his class on YouTube.

u/BruceWayneIsBarman · 1 pointr/lectures

For others interested in this topic: I highly recommend a book called The Filter Bubble that explores how algorithms impact our social and political lives.

u/gu1t4r5 · 1 pointr/lectures

Yeah, and it seems like Jerry has just released a book with the same title too. Couldn't find any other reference to the title in my quick google

u/genida · 9 pointsr/lectures

I have his book Punished By Rewards. Excellent stuff.

u/Dangger · 2 pointsr/lectures

In the same vein I recommend 'Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics'

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Ideology-Creation-Contemporary-Politics/dp/0742531139

u/StructuralViolence · 2 pointsr/lectures

If you enjoyed that talk, you'd likely enjoy books from Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker. If you don't have a dozen or more hours to read both of these books, the NYBOOKS writeup is pretty good (and might convince you to spend the dozen hours, as it did me). Lastly, if your schedule/lifestyle better accommodates listening to an mp3 rather than reading a book, I cannot recommend highly enough a talk from UW School of Public Health senior lecturer Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, "Is America Driving You Crazy?" [10mb mp3 or low quality YouTube video].

For those who are too lazy to click the NYBOOKS writeup above, here's a brief excerpt that gets at some of the good stuff:

>For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

>Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.

>Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.

>Kirsch was also struck by another unexpected finding. In his earlier study and in work by others, he observed that even treatments that were not considered to be antidepressants—such as synthetic thyroid hormone, opiates, sedatives, stimulants, and some herbal remedies—were as effective as antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression. Kirsch writes, “When administered as antidepressants, drugs that increase, decrease or have no effect on serotonin all relieve depression to about the same degree.” What all these “effective” drugs had in common was that they produced side effects, which participating patients had been told they might experience.

>It is important that clinical trials, particularly those dealing with subjective conditions like depression, remain double-blind, with neither patients nor doctors knowing whether or not they are getting a placebo. That prevents both patients and doctors from imagining improvements that are not there, something that is more likely if they believe the agent being administered is an active drug instead of a placebo. Faced with his findings that nearly any pill with side effects was slightly more effective in treating depression than an inert placebo, Kirsch speculated that the presence of side effects in individuals receiving drugs enabled them to guess correctly that they were getting active treatment—and this was borne out by interviews with patients and doctors—which made them more likely to report improvement. He suggests that the reason antidepressants appear to work better in relieving severe depression than in less severe cases is that patients with severe symptoms are likely to be on higher doses and therefore experience more side effects.

u/etoipi · 1 pointr/lectures

I recommend Beyond the Mechanical Universe.

Registration is quick and free, but necessary.

Books are published that accompany this series.