Reddit mentions: The best social psychology & interactions books

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I'll try to address all your points.

> My problem here is that I find some aspects of Conservative culture contemptible, having been directly exposed to them. I expect I'm likely to get some nods from social conservatives - I know they feel the same way about me and I'm suprisingly ok with that. I know why they feel as they do. But the reasons are not interchangeable nor do I find the reasons equally compelling.

I was raised in a very conservative area myself so I know exactly what you mean. If you're like me, you've seen an environment openly hostile to gay people, racial minorities, and ceaselessly preoccuppied with others' reproductive rights. Trust me, I know what you mean and I do think that a big problem is that rural/conservative America has not been held accountable for the way it creates the necessity for people to agitate for their rights.

But the reason you do not find them equally compelling is because you have a differing moral palette from a social conservative. I don't share them, either, but reading Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind opened me up a lot to the possibility that there's more to it than just closed-mindedness.

This is not to say that I think homophobia and racism have value. More that I think if we are to adequately ensure the equal treatment of all people, those who do not prioritize that goal need to understand why others think the way they do.

Unfortunately there's nothing to say that social conservatives must understand the way others think. Is that fair to liberals? No. But it's work anyone must do if they want their ideas to be made material. But persuasion and slow change are incredibly important tools in a democracy.

> Since I do believe in individual liberty, I tend to respond to social conservatives saying that "liberals are trying to redefine male and female" for everybody with a derisive snort. I'm in fairly good touch with that sort of liberal - and it's all about being allowed to define your own self. That's a conclusion that is trivially established by asking a few people.

I wish I could agree with you that the goal is about personal liberty, but in a world where Obama's reinterpretation of Title IX materially changes the experience of women and children in bathrooms and locker rooms, it is regrettably not so. Trans people should of course be free of violence, harassment, employment, and housing discrimination. But redefining male/female to be subjective identities rather than material conditions impacts everybody in a huge way. It can take away the right of a woman to eject a male (regardless of gender identity) from her changing area simply because an internal gender identity cannot be proven or disproven. There are non-conservative reasons to rankle at this, that have a lot to do with liberty.

> My childhood brand of Conservatism meshes will with that. But then, it took Classical Liberalism as a given. Individual liberties are sacred and government exists to enforce them against those who would take them from us. Those who violate them are wrong. To the extent that any small trespass is needed in order to achieve some goal, compensation is due.
> It's not a violation of anyone's liberty to respect the needs of the transgendered. If anything, it's a universal increase of liberty.
> Attempts to force other people into a gender binary are being judged harshly. But then, IMHO, force is bad. I cite the Non-Aggression Principle. Nobody is being judged for being gender-conforming and heteronormative. Most people are, to the extent that it's silly to think that the exceptions could be any threat to the general rule.
> This is gay marrage redoux - the idea that gays getting married somehow "ruins" marriage, when all it does is allow another group of people to exercise their individual rights fully.

I understand the comparison between feeling threatened over "redefining marriage" and being skeptical of attempts to "redefine male/female." But marriage has been defined and redefined by the government with a bunch of laws before. There's precedence. Expanding the legal definition to include same-sex consenting adults doesn't change what marriage is (a contractual agreement between consenting adults).

Redefining male/female to be a subjective identity rather than a physical reality is much more complicated. On the grounds of individual liberty, adults should absolutely have the right to dress themselves however they want, and request that others address them how they desire. Absolutely.

But Obama's Title IX letter openly makes clear that sex protections are actually reflective of gender identity. That is redefining male/female in a way that is essentially reflective of a religious belief. And it's not one that everyone shares, or should have to share.

You are entitled to behave and dress and act and think however you want in terms of gendered presentation. That is the right of all people. Females should absolutely be able to be assertive, dress in trousers, and occupy positions of power. Males should absolutely be able to be delicate, wear frilly dresses, and do all the housework they please without being harassed or discriminated against.

You are entitled to all these things. But you are not entitled to your own facts, and there is no scientific proof that internal, innate subjective gender identity exists beyond people saying "I am male/female." Acknowledgment of this claim people have of themselves should not be legislated in the same way acknowledging God should not be legislated. As with religion, it would be absurd if people should be forced to cooperate. The saying goes, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Consider that there is a nose here you're not seeing-- a woman or girl's right to facilities free of penis isn't just uppity, bigoted Christians with an irrational fear. Women fought hard for sex-segregated public facilities. Before them, they were much less able to access the public sphere.

Bear in mind that passing trans people (or those with consent from their communities) have always been able to use the facilities of their identity. But to put into writing that subjective identity trumps all regardless of other factors is redefining male/female for everybody.

> But clearly, this is a clash of moral visions. And clearly, I feel that my consequentialist ethical foundation is far more defensible than a Deontological "Because God Said So."

> I support the right of individual self-determination and reject the notion that I can be expected to sacrifice my own best interest in the name of supporting a social vision I fundamentally object to. I also support those who feel that god says something quite different than what Pat Robertson says they say. I find it difficult to conceive of a god worth knowing that would give Pat Roberson the time of day.
> I should point out that with a few radical exceptions, liberals are not demanding the same thing. They are perfectly willing to accept Conservative self-descriptions. Speaking for myself, I may not believe them, but I'll accept them. It's no more difficult than accepting and tolerating those people who believe they are transpeciated.

I will, too. But not as their gender identity. I might on a case-by-case basis. But that is not the current stated political goal and it is not what the Title IX letter did.

You might accept, love, and want all human rights and housing/employment discrimination protections for a person who believes, with 100% conviction, that they are a dog. But if a great number of dog-folk start lobbying to change the legal definition of a dog to be a subjective state that has nothing to do with bodies? There are far-reaching implications. A lot of noses, so to speak.

> My response is a simple "if you say so." It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Now, I don't have to think of them as strangely compelling either. Nobody is asking me to. If I do, that's my issue and since it is - it's not something I can blame on "liberals."

In many situations, what you're saying applies. I don't think people should be mean to transgender people. I just also do not think that legal definitions of male and female should be changed to reflect their beliefs.

Acknowledging someone's preferred subjective identity is easy and ideal in passing! But it's a bit different when there's an obvious male in your wife's gym's locker room, armed with legislation that prevents her from using common sense to deduce that this person is a man with a fetish. Or an obviously male teenager dominating your daughter's female athletics division.

These may seem like petty concerns, but things like these don't affect you until they do. I encourage you to think about having no recourse if you were in these situations. There's a big difference between being accepting of gender-non-conforming people and redefining male and female to be subjective identities, and that is exactly what the Title IX letter sought to do.

Again, none of this is to say trans people are bad and deserve any sort of harm. It's just to say there are perfectly valid reasons to find some of the recent specific legislation pertaining to gender identity to impinge upon their rights.

I'm not sure if this would work or not, but I would try redirecting people who have conservative or right-wing leaning views at least toward better thinkers than Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and toward optimistic views of the future of society, to cull some of the us-vs-them and zero-sum thinking that plagues these discussions.

Sometimes it feels like men, especially, feel existentially threatened by other modes of thought, so being at least sympathetic to the good bits of their ideas and offering something similar but that promotes openness and liberal ideas may help.

Hans Rosling's Factfulness presents a pretty optimistic view of the world. It's all getting better! Seriously!

Jonathan Haidt (and Greg Lukianoff for the first book)

• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
  
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
  
  I had worried that the first book would be a reiteration of right-wing talking points around safe spaces, but I was surprised to find it a good listen so far. It mentions several cognitive distortions and how cognitive behavioral therapy can overcome them as well. The second book is sympathetic to conservative views and gives a good tour of moral psychology. Really recommend.
  
  Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is also good. Seriously, the world is getting better! Pinker is heavier on the nature side that most lefties, so knowing that may make people more receptive if they won't receive an gender argument without some mention of biology.

>> The problems of morality and meaning are atheism's bitter pills to swallow.
>Meh, not really.
Are you telling me that you don't mind at all that you have no real way of convincing others they should share your core values if they do not, or that everything we have ever known or valued is destined to end as the universe goes cold? Bollocks. Those are hard truths we might be forced to accept, but nobody likes them.

> Morality is a subjective social construct based on biological altruism[1] , which is observed in high abundance in nature- and not just with high intelligence species, but simpler ones as well.

Perhaps you would be interested in looking up moral psychology: Our inbuilt sense of morality is much more nuanced than you seem to think. The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes are great popular level books on the topic.

Explaining why we have the moral impulses we have is the easy part. The real problem of morality I care about is about is that of proscriptive morality: I want to live in a society that is actively promoting the flourishing of all people using evidence based policies. How can I convince people like Roger Ailes and the Koch brothers that they should stop actively thwarting those goals? With no proscriptive morality I'm left with appealing to their own self interest, and while that might get me somewhere with some billionaires, with those people in particular it's just not, because their death defying ideologies contradict mine.

I agree with you that we have a great chance to instantiate many of our largely shared values in the near future, but I'd be lying if I wouldn't still love to be able to shut down Fox News because God said so and then go on to live forever, or at least have my accomplishments live forever... For the great majority of us, our lives have at most an effect about 3 generations into the future before they are washed out by the rest of the influences of the culture around us. Them's some uncomfortable facts.

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s books those are good; he reads his own audiobooks and I like his speaking style. He also has a podcast called revisionist history that I really like.

Tetlock’s superforecasting is a bit long-winded but good; it’s a lay-person’s book on his research for IARPA (intelligence research) to improve intelligence assessments. His intro mentions Kahneman and Duckworth’s grit. I haven’t read it yet, but Nate Silver’s signal and the noise is in a similar vein to Tetlock’s book and is also recommended by IARPA.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was really eye-opening to me to understand the differences in the way that liberals and conservatives (both in the political and cultural sense) view the world around them and how that affects social cohesion. He has a few TED talks if you’d like to get an idea of his research. Related, if you’re interested in an application of Kahneman’s research in politics, the Rationalizing Voter was a good book.

As a “be a better person” book, I really liked 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey (recommend it on audiobook). Particularly, unlike other business-style self-help about positive thinking and manipulating people—this book really makes you examine your core values, what’s truly important to you and gives you some tools to help refocus your efforts in those directions. Though, as I’m typing this I’m thinking about the time I’m spending on reddit and not reading the book I’ve been meaning to all night =p

General

• The Righteous Mind - OP, if you only choose one book, it's gotta be this one. Trust me.
  
• The Fractured Republic - Written by a committed conservative, but very fair. Critical of his own side and empathetic of the positive traits on the left. Also one of the best writers in political history/theory imo.
  
  Conservative - I'm keenly interested in the intellectual history of American Conservatism and could make this this list could go on forever. I'll keep it to three, but if you want more suggestions feel free to ask.
  
  
• 10 Conservative Principles - Not a book, but essential to understanding conservatism
  
• Conservatism in America Since 1930 - A reader that guides you along a chronological and ideological path of conservatism in America.
  
• Hillbilly Elegy - Less academic, but very well written and explains the support of Trump from the rural white working class perfectly
  
  Liberal - You may get a better liberal reading list from another user, but I'll give it a shot.
  
  
• On Liberty - Modern political dialog from the left still echos Mill's classic defense of cultural liberty. A must read for all Americans.
  
• American Progressivism: A Reader - As you can tell, I'm a big fan of reading political giants in their own words.
  
• The Affluent Society - The controversial classic that underpins progressive economic policy.

What you are talking about is overcoming your internal belief system, and that is a long struggle and tremendously difficult for so many people. Please don't give up!

Have you read The God Virus, by Dr. Darrel Ray? There's also a really awesome book about overcoming that internal belief system called: Taming Your Gremlin, A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of your Own Way

Both of those, I think, would really give you some awesome tools to overcoming this stalled stumbling blocks you're talking about. You mention reinventing yourself, but the thing is...you might just need to figure out who you really have been this whole time.

Think of it this way, if you know the superstitions aren't real, then your morality was based on being good for goodness' sake in the first place. Cloaking it in superstition didn't make superstition more real, it just felt that way for the time being.

As for the "if you have the ability to get out, you were never all the way in", I hope you consider that recovery can, for some people, be a lifelong experience. We can't predict when you specifically will feel "over it", and categorizing anyone who feels comfortable in their place on their journey as "never all the way in" discounts their experience as much as it does yours.

Best of luck to you, I do hope you stick around. I appreciate your perspective and empathize with your struggle. Let me know what you think of the books, if you're interested in giving them a whirl :)

Take care of you!
Sarah

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.

Steven Pinker shares this article that challenges some of Peterson's assumptions.

An excerpt:

​

>
>
>Dostoevsky Distraction — Abandon Judeo-Christianity at your peril:
>
>“Crime and Punishment is the best investigation, I know, of what happens if you take the notion that there’s nothing divine about the individual seriously.”
>
>Deconstruction #1 — Jordan repeatedly cites the character Raskolnikov as being the poster child for what happens when a person gives up a belief in the divinity of other humans; or, as he and Dostoevsky define it, an atheist. Except, and as a psychologist, he knows that someone who determines other people have no intrinsic value “is the psychopath’s viewpoint.” That he conflates atheism with psychopathy is disingenuous, intellectually dishonest, and professionally irresponsible.
>
>Deconstruction #2 — Like Jordan, Dostoevsky was a committed Christian who viewed the abandonment of Judeo-Christian values as an ill omen, and sounded the warning. However, Jordan omitted the inconvenient truth that his literary hero was an avowed Christian socialist who proclaimed: “If everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up.”



Moral Atheist Mystification — If you act in a moral way, you’re acting out religious values:

>“As I said at the beginning, the atheist types act out a religious structure.”

Deconstruction #1 — As pointed out in the Deuteronomistic Paradigm, moral values preceded their codification in religious texts, and in the Dostoevsky Distraction, that Jordan has his own, unique, definition of what atheist means, it is irresponsible for Jordan to fuel the flawed perception that atheists are immoral.

Deconstruction #2 — Despite Jordan’s ominous warnings that leaving religion behind is bad for society, there is a clear correlation between countries with increasingly secular tendencies and the happiness of its citizens.

Deconstruction #3 — Again, also despite Jordan’s warning of putting the Judeo-Christian traditions out to pasture, is the idea that atheists are calling for anarchy and immoral behaviour. In conjunction with this perspective, is Jordan’s wholesale ignoring of the immoral acts listed in the Bible (drowning the planet, Abraham’s willingness to murder his child, the Passover slaughter of innocent Egyptians to make a point, Job, etc.); and the fact that most parishioners do not read these stories metaphorically, as Jordan claims religious passages should be understood — not literally, but figuratively — for the morals of the story.

Deconstruction #4 — Jordan’s obsession with the nihilism of Nietzsche is unwarranted, and, indeed, bordering on Chicken Little; especially in light of the facts of deconstruction #2.

It appears contradictory, to me anyway, that if the values contained within the Judeo-Christian tradition preceded the tradition (part 4), then why should Jordan be worried if people are simply abandoning the vehicle which, successfully, conveyed the values? The values are the important factor, the ones that emerged from the unconscious, not the transmission mechanism. “Adamant anti-religious thinkers” are not advocating that we abandon morality, or “our immersement in the underlying dream,” so the values themselves will remain intact. Another Canadian psychologist, Steven Pinker, makes this point in Enlightenment Now:

>“If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case.”

Steven, as the subtitle of the book alludes, made “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” that society is not in any danger — contrary to Jordan’s dire warnings — from increasing secularization:

>“Evolution helps explain another foundation of secular morality: our capacity for sympathy (or, as the Enlightenment writers variously referred to it, benevolence, pity, imagination, or commiseration). Even if a rational agent deduces that it’s in everyone’s long-term interests to be moral, it’s hard to imagine him sticking his neck out to make a sacrifice for another’s benefit unless something gives him a nudge. The nudge needn’t come from an angel on one shoulder; evolutionary psychology explains how it comes from the emotions that make us social animals…Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to encompass all sentient beings…
>
>A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing — that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives — is just such a principle, since it’s based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.
>
>History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism.”

You hit on a lot of good points, yes. But, it is indeed (thought not as our present level of technology) to create such a thing. The "me first" is the most primal, long before monkey, mammal, or vertebrate, programming or our DNA. As life on Earth evolved and became more complex, more layers of code were selected for and passed on. A lot of these systems play of of each other, modify each other, and sometimes play against each other. Cooperation, self-sacrifice, and charity CERTAINLY don't make sense for very primitive organism, but once you start scaling up and you start dealing with mammals it makes a lot of sense. You get new layers of genetic commands piled on top of the old ones, things like "defend kin. Sacrifice for kin. Have attachment to creatures with large heads and large eyes." That for the most part do their job, but also luckily spread outward and let us care about complete strangers and even other species and the planet. There are two really good books to help understand all this

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins goes into the broader category of why life behaves the way it does.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Selfish-Gene-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0192860925

And Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal goes into goes specifically into how altruism, morality, and the more noble aspects of humanity came to be in our simian ancestors and cousins. P,us, it's just sort of an uplifting read that will make you feel good.

http://www.amazon.com/Primates-Philosophers-Morality-Evolved-Princeton/dp/0691141290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419420928&sr=1-1&keywords=primates+and+philosophers

There is a reason for why we humans behave, for good and bad, the way that we do. For why we think the way that we do. But we have the advantage of being self-aware organisms that have the opportunity to look in the mirror and realize what we are doing and why we are doing it and choose a better, more moral course than what biology may demand of us. It is very difficult, many of us won't and of those that do none of us always will, but we can, and that is something fantastic. As far as we know a first for the history of life on this planet.

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 recommendations from books I read in the last year or so (yes, these are all VERY STRONG recommends curated from ~100 books in the last year) -

​

Science fiction-

Derek Kunsken's The Quantum Magician (I would describe it as a cross between Oceans Eleven with some not-too-Hard Science Fiction. Apparently will be a series, but is perfectly fine as a standalone novel).

Cixin Lu's very popular Three Body Problem series (Mixes cleverly politics, sociology, psychology and science fiction)

James A Corey's The Expanse Series (which has been made into the best sci fi tv series ever!)

Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief series (Hard science fiction. WARNING - A lot of the early stuff is intentionally mystifying with endless terminology that’s only slowly explained since the main character himself has lost his memories. Put piecing it all together is part of the charm.)

​

Fantasy-

James Islington's Shadow of What was Lost series (a deep series which makes you think - deep magic, politics, religion all intertwined)

Will Wight's Cradle series (has my vote for one of the best fantasy series ever written)

Brandon Sanderson Legion series (Brandon Sanderson. Nuff said. Creative as always)

​

Manga -

Yukito Kishiro's Alita, Battle Angel series (the manga on what the movie was based)

​

Non-Fiction-

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (and how we are not as rational as we believe we are, and how passion works in tandem with rationality in decision making and is actually required for good decisionmaking)

Rothery's Geology - A Complete Introduction (as per title)

Joseph Krauskopf's A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play, available to read online for free, including a fabulous supplementary of Talmud Parallels to the NT (a Rabbi in 1901 explains why he is not a Christian)

​

Audiobooks -

Bob Brier's The History of Ancient Egypt (as per title - 25 hrs of the best audiobook lectures. Incredible)

​

Academic biblical studies-

Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote The Bible and The Exodus (best academic biblical introductory books into the Documentary Hypothesis and Qenite/Midian hypothesis)

Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed (how archaelogy relates to the bible)

E.P. Sander's Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63BCE-66CE ​(most detailed book of what Judaism is and their beliefs, and one can see from this balanced [Christian] scholar how Christianity has colored our perspectives of what Jews and Pharisees were really like)

Avigdor Shinan's From gods to God (how Israel transitioned from polytheism to monotheism)

Mark S Smith's The Early History of God (early history of Israel, Canaanites, and YHWH)

James D Tabor's Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (as per title)

Tom Dykstra's Mark Canonizer of Paul (engrossing - will make you view the gospel of Mark with new eyes)

Jacob L Wright's King David and His Reign Revisited (enhanced ibook - most readable book ever on King David)

Jacob Dunn's thesis on the Midianite/Kenite hypothesis (free pdf download - warning - highly technical but also extremely well referenced)

An excerpt from a talk by hope researcher, Shane Lopez:

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> The power of social networks (not just the online ones) can help you spread those things to your community. Book: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis

> Shane shows an image of 4 penguins walking in a line and says positive emotions move from one person to the next before they fizzle out. If you're a leader, you're the lead "pinguin." How you behave today will affect the next penguin. How that penguin behaves because they've been infected by your hope will affect another person--maybe someone you don't even know. And then that person will affect another person, before it fizzles out.

> The same is true about hopelessness. You can transfer it in the same way--a ripple effect--if you're not careful.
> So leaders have a responsibility.

> At Gallup they identify the most hopeful people in an organisation and power them to be hopeful beacons.

> Two years ago they put out a call to find hopeful teachers. The superintendents said it didn't take them a second to figure it out. Think of: who's the most hopeful person in your town. [Sad Australian fact: most people don't know the people in their own. We're isolated from our community members. Doesn't have to be]

> The most hopeful teacher in America: Mary Hawkins-Jones. She can transform an entire school district all by herself. When she was hired, she said "the children will remember me this year."


> You can do this for your school, community, town, workplace, government, children in your community. You can say to them: it's your responsibility to spread hope to the 3rd degree (the ripple effect mentioned above).

>* The three things hopeful leaders need to do to make hope happen in your community:

> Create and sustain excitement about the future. You need exciting (sometimes big) goals.

> Knock down existing obstacles to goals, and don't put up new ones.

> Re-establish goals--regoal--when the circumstances demand it.

>[...] “Hope matters. Hope is a choice. Hope can be learned. Hope is contagious.”

-------------------

source

I'm currently reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind which I was introduced to on a similar thread on /r/conservative.

Haidt is a social psychologist who is researching the psychological foundations of morality and how those foundations influence politics. He himself is very liberal though in the course of his research you can see him becoming more and more sympathetic to conservative ideas and coming to share many of their concerns.

His theory is that there are (at least) six basic foundations of morality: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, sanctity and that these foundations are an innate part of human psychology. In his research he found that liberals are concerned with care above the other five foundations. Fairness & liberty still rank fairly high, but loyalty, authority and sanctity rank very low for liberals. As you move to the right on the political spectrum care trends slightly down while all other moral foundations trend up until all six are of roughly equal concern to conservatives. It's not so much that conservatives care less than liberals (though they do... but just a little) It's more that conservatives balance care against several other moral concerns.

Haidt thinks this gives conservatives a political advantage since liberals in their fixation on care end up violating people's moral sensibilities on the other five foundations. More than that he sees the social benefits of those other foundations and that they are all required for a healthy society. Even though he remains extremely liberal himself he concedes that conservatives are right about the value they place on those other competing moral foundations. Haidt advocates that liberals start to value some of the other moral foundations more though I'm not sure how that is any different from saying they should become more conservative (or maybe neo-conservative in the original sense of that word).

Moral Foundations Theory keeps confirming itself.

In short, leftist folk care exclusively about the moral virtues of justice and care. Those on the right have a wider palette of virtues including justice, care, loyalty, purity, and authority, giving these five roughly equal weight.

To the left, the right appears to be uncaring, because the right prioritizes virtues the left disregards.

To the right, the left appears to be ignorant of other legitimate virtues, because, well, it is.

I think this has probably always been so. I would prefer a world where a right-leaning person could value the left's deeper commitment to care, with the left appreciating how successful human societies require the employment of all five virtues. But, we live in a time where more political power can be derived from division than unity, and here we are.

> My friend from Hunnan province told me that he would never support China being a democracy since then 80% of the country would vote for an extremist hawk-party that would send nukes on America first chance they got.

This is exactly why I can understand some of the party's tight control on media.

Anyway,

Been reading this optimistic book:

https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

thought i'd share to a self proclaimed pessimist :D

Also recently read more deeply into China's more recent leaders like jian zemin (disgusting, corrupt as fuck) and hu jintao (pretty amazing). I was very surprised at Hu's contributions, people dont' really seem to talk about him.

In Hu’s words, "A Harmonious Socialist Society should feature democracy." Such a society, he says, will give full scope to people's talent and creativity, enable all the people to share the social wealth brought by reform and development, and forge an ever-closer relationship between the people and government.

Seems he also greatly increased transparency between the party and the public.

Who knows what xi and the future brings. Xi's father has an interesting background, Dali Lama met him and fondly recalled him as "very friendly, comparatively open-minded, very nice.". He was also responsible for the economic liberalisation in Guangdong, so I'm somewhat hopeful that his son, is comparatively (putin/erdogan) more considerate about his own people than profiting from exploitation.

OK. Great. So, embedded in what you're saying is a bunch of assumptions that aren't specific to this particular argument but are much more meta - they have to do with what counts as evidence, who gets standing, and even what kinds of values are important. For instance, you refer to "the basic idea of freedom in letting consenting adults choose their own private life." That frame is one that a lot of people would actually object to because the idea of "adults having maximum freedom to choose what they want" isn't how they frame issues having to do with family and marriage. In fact, framing it that way is a very contemporary/educated/western way to frame this sort of thing - another way of talking about these issues would be to reference values like personal autonomy way less, and you'd end up with different conclusions if you did that.
There's a lot to go into here, and (luckily) a lot of other people have already done it. I think it'll be helpful to get a better understanding of the values/assumption/narrative that lead to different views about marriage, in addition to reading specifically about this.
Some places to start include the "simple rules for simple people" discussion in Diverging Family Structure and 'Rational' Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice. I'd also recommend Jonathon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory work - I liked his book, but I'm sure you can find it packaged in smaller things. For work specifically on sexual ethics, I'd recommend Eve Tushnet and Rod Dreher, but they're both going to be a lot to get into initially, because, as bloggers, they're not really listing their assumptions each and every time they write.
With all of this stuff, you're going to be able to make counterarguments. But they can make counterarguments, too - it's never that hard. I would suggest that to understand other people's arguments, you apply the Principle of Charity. In this case in particular, because your argument seems foreign and clearly wrong to the majority of humans, I think it's especially important to understand their arguments.

Edit: downvotes, eh? I'm not sure how to take that! :) I didn't expect it from this community. The gist of what I was trying to say is said better by Pres. Hinckley in a different talk.

>"Women who make a house a home make a far greater contribution to society than those who command large armies or stand at the head of impressive corporations."
-Gordon B. Hinckley


--------------------------
My original comment:

The talk is beautiful; though I think you're confusing what he's saying with the modern dogma of "equality" that has become so popular.

The modern equality movement argues for equal roles that assumes that individuals are the most important players in society; this line of thinking typically leads to calls to get more women into traditionally male roles. While I personally will encourage my daughters to pursue their goals, whatever they may be, I'm hesitant to argue for equality in the way it's currently understood: equality of roles in one's career.

The reality is that the family unit is much more important, for society as a whole, as well as for the individuals who are influenced and raised by said families.

Often, having a strong family unit means having (at least) one person responsible for full-time teaching/training/loving of the little people in the home. My personal opinion is that it can be a man or a woman (though typically women are more willing and more able to fulfill this vital role).

American individualism can make this all seem very cloudy; I was recently reminded of this when I read this book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, which I highly recommend.

Read the book if you haven't; I'm not sure I can do it justice. The basic idea is that there are three moral categories: the divinity ethic, the autonomy ethic, and the family ethic.

For many secular Americans, the only kind of morality that is "allowed" is the ethic of autonomy, which asks "is it fair? Does it harm any individual?"

But there is a much richer moral fabric, that includes divinity (ie allowing some things to be sacred) and family (ie putting the needs of the family/tribe before individual needs).

Also see a TLDR slideshare on the book edit: removed the Colbert video because it doesn't touch on the ideas from the book that were relevant.

I think a great deal of unnecessary trouble is caused by people on both sides being unable or unwilling to try to understand where those they disagree are coming from. (I'm speaking generally here, not about your particular situation—I'm not accusing you of a lack of empathy!) Understanding people's reasons for holding views that you disagree with won't necessarily make you agree with them (and nor necessarily should it), but it might let a more meaningful discussion take place, instead of people just talking over each other.

I recommend reading stuff by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on this subject, in particular his recent book The Righteous Mind which explores the psychology behind political difference. His main thesis is that conservative types base their worldview on different foundations than do liberals. For example, they tend to consider things like obedience to authority, ideas of purity/sanctity, and loyalty/patriotism to be far more important than do liberals. Both groups care about fairness, but they have different conceptions of it: roughly, liberals are more concerned with equality of outcome whereas conservatives care more about a more "sporting" sense of fairness: if you've earned it you get to keep it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and so on.

So it might be that your colleague might have had that conception of fairness: he might have considered it "unfair" for the government to take away his money to help people he might feel don't "deserve" it. I personally disagree pretty strongly with this viewpoint—it seems to ignore the role luck plays in people's success, as well as narrowly aligning a person's worth with how much they earn for example—but it's interesting and I think very worthwhile to try to understand where people you disagree with are coming from.

Alternatively of course he might just have been a run-of-the-mill bonehead. And apologies for the long post and/or telling you shit you already knew!

To unequivocally debunk the feminist myth would take an entire book, which would require years to research. You're going to have to be very neutral and balanced and as fact-orientated as possible, which most mrm stuff imo falls short of. "Positive discrimination" and false accusations are what feminists WANT you to complain about - not that they're not valid complaints, but things like the gender empathy/victimhood gap, men's lives being valued less, maternal superiority, male moral inferiority etc. which fit into traditionalism and can be put forward as the other side of the coin are much better imo.

Janice Fiamengo's youtube series "The Fiamengo File" (Season 1, Season 2) is a much watch (she's also coincidentally an English proffessor). Her video : "what's wrong with women's studies" is also very good (this lecture was protested, had fire alarms pulled etc.).

Christina Hoff Sommers' channel "The Factual Feminist" is also very good. These videos (1, 2 by Karen Straughan are good, but her other stuff tends to be more sensationalist.

As for books, Warren Farrell's "The myth of male power" and Roy Baumeister's "Is there anything good about men" are essential reading. This paper (on sexual repression) also by Roy Baumeister is also extremely important.

This article touches on a lot about the childcare/domestic vs workplace spheres, also this one on maternal gatekeeping - which you could could add domestic gatekeeping in aswell - basically that a lot of women still see the traditionally female realm as "theirs" (despite wanting into the traditional male realm) and although they probably say they want equality, in reality they want a helpmate rather than a full equal, taking on a managerial/directorial role to which a lot of men might react to by dragging their heels (not that some guys aren't genuinely selfish) - things like fathers looking after their kids being described as "babysitting" tie into this. Of course guys in these situations have very little preparation for this because feminism has resulted in a situation where for decades egalitarian roles have been pushed with a positive encouraging message for women and girls and a negative shaming message for men and boys, as a gain in power for women and girls and a loss in power for men and boys. It has also resulted in tons of messages of traditionally "masculine" things being reconciled with positive/aspirational feminine social value, while the reverse has not been the case remotely near as much (I've only ever seen housework being portrayed as compatible with positive/aspirational masculine value once - in movie Don Jon).

I'd write you a second post about gender roles (and the context they need to be looked at within) throughout history and in the developing world, but there's a lot and I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow morning!

I don't think I'm right. I don't even necessarily have a position on some of these things, but I think it's helpful to ask questions and to really consider the value of arguments from all sides, even if we don't agree with them.

I'd be happy to see a single-payer system in the US. I'm fine with having a military for the purpose of national defense and even intervention in very specific instances (e.g. the Rwandan genocide). I used to consider myself a Libertarian, through and through, but not anymore. I guess Libertarian-socialist is more fitting at this point (yes, it's a thing). I think that the Austrian economists are generally right, especially when it comes to things like the unintended and unforeseen negative consequences of government intervention in markets and economies. And I think it's very likely that Peter Schiff will be right, again, and this whole thing will come tumbling down at some point.

I think most people don't really understand the Libertarian philosophy behind deregulation, which is basically that people are capable enough to figure things out for themselves and will form more organic and effective means of regulation than can be devised by government. It doesn't mean no regulation. Most people look at the world and think deregulation is a crazy idea because they see it as giving corporations more leeway to fuck people over and do whatever they want. But if you move in the direction of reducing the scope of government, you also move in the direction of reducing the scope of corporate influence and power. But in order for this to work, people have to start taking more responsibility for themselves and for the world around them. And to move in that direction requires a certain degree of trust in humanity and the capability of people, which is something that has been eroded by our society/government. A Paradise Built in Hell, a book that Chris has mentioned many times, touches on this quite a bit.

I'm fine with having a social safety net; there's no reason for anyone to have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads or feeding their children if they get laid off, especially in this country. But again, we can't ignore the unintended consequences of having such a system. Some people are going to exploit the system and be worse off because of it. Politicians will feed off of and exploit these people to stay in office. But maybe the worst thing about it is that it makes it very easy for people to stop taking responsibility for the world around them. It makes it easier to look at the suffering around you and say, "I don't care; it's the government's job to take care of the poor, homeless, hungry, etc."

I have no idea whether or not Peter Schiff really gives a shit about the homeless, or people who can't afford to pay their medical bills, or kids growing up in places like Flint or Baltimore. But there are Libertarians who really do care and really do believe that these ideas have merit and can make the world a better place. There are people who really do believe that we would be better off without a social safety net, and that the poor, displaced, homeless, and hungry would be better served by people and communities rather than government. But it's so hard for most people to imagine that world that they quickly dismiss the ideas and the people who support them. Maybe the best thing that Libertarians can do is to start moving in that direction no matter what.

>If President Trump is ideologically Conservative, why do his positions change so frequently?

Nobody makes decisions ideologically. This is why it is seemingly so difficult to convince people to change their minds with just information. You only change people's minds by influencing them socially / appealing to morality, etc.

Trump tapped into a moral framework (like most conservatives candidates) that covers the things that people than lean conservative care about. Conservatives, even people that are super far right, or super religious, voted for Trump and sincerely trust Trump because he appeals to the things they care about. This is why many conservatives will openly say that they will never vote for a Democratic candidate -- they don't feel that Democrats care about the things they care about (and they are right)

>My understanding is that he doesn't support any ideology

He certainly leans conservative but he is generally pretty moderate and does things based on what his supporters want.

>is there an implied hierarchy in the numbering?

Nope, all 6 are equal. But Liberals literally only care about (1) and (2) while conservatives tend to care about all of them relatively equally.

If you want to read a book entirely about this:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Really fascinating read, especially in today's political climate. It humanizes the other side because right now liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think liberals are insane. But if you realize that they are just working with different starting materials you can understand why they value the things that they value, and why it is so difficult to change a person's mind with facts.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research on the ideas of religion, morality, empathy, biases, villifying others, etc. He approaches morality from an evolutionary perspective. Watching and reading his work really helped me have more compassion and diffuse some of the anger I've felt. Haidt is a liberal atheist, but he acknowledges the value that can be gained from certain conservative ideals and traditions. I felt like he validated my Mormon experience and the experiences of my loved, while at the same time deconstructing them.

Book:
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

TED talks:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence?language=en

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_how_common_threats_can_make_common_political_ground


In any case, I've gained a lot of empathy from this stuff. It probably saved my marriage and family relationships. It made me feel OK with my family as they are, even if they never change.

Wait a sec. From the article:

> The survey included two statements to measure sexism: "On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do" and "On the whole, men make better business executives than women do."

From a purely scientific perspective, isn't this a biasing assumption. What if, on the whole (i.e., statistically speaking), men are better at these things. I'm not saying they are, but there are certainly equality-based theories and frameworks that make this entirely plausible. For example, Roy Baumeister's research (and book Is There Anything Good About Men demonstrates how men have a wider variance in many innate drivers (motivations, perhaps capabilities though not necessary), and provides the evolutionary math to show why this could be the case. Men are more at the top and bottom, and innately driven by different strategic goals than women (statistically speaking), such as higher risk and return activities and competition in larger social structures than collaboration in smaller ones. (Again, with good evolutionary explanation and data to back it up.) The research shows how the different strategies address trade-offs given the nature of our different behaviours that maximize reproductive success, and hence every "better than" for one sex has a corresponding "better than" in the other.

Without judging that work, just supposing it could be true would invalidate that these above questions as being sexist. Making decisions on who to hire or work with based on it would be sexist, as a statistical trend doesn't make all cases true. But that's not what it says.

I call scientific foul on this one.

On abiogenesis and how mitochondria evolved, read The Vital Question by Nick Lane. Presents a very good account of the genetic evidence for endosymbiosis (how bacteria could integrate into an existing cell) and how life could have initially evolved via a “metabolism first” mechanism in cool undersea vents.

We don’t really see it as weird, but all metabolism involves exploiting an ion gradient. Mitochondria generate a proton gradient and then use that to power the phosphorylation of ATP - which is a weirdly roundabout way of doing things. Why is it like that? The theory Lane puts forward is that originally, the ion gradients used for metabolism were naturally occurring ones that arose between thin-walled fissures in mineral (olividine) vents. That’s how life started, and then RNA and DNA came later.

On human empathy, it’s obviously a huge advantage in evolutionary terms, since cooperating in tribes, villages, nations is what allowed us to outcompete other apes and hominids.

Why would you help a random stranger? Well, throughout most of human history, if you found someone hurt in a ditch, they’d be part of your community or a nearby one, so your first instinct is to help. Of course, if you saw that they had some kind of outgroup marker, you might be less inclined to cooperate.

Human intelligence is cultural - a single human on their own isn’t smart enough to figure out how to survive, we can only do so because of the accumulated cultural knowledge that enables you to know what plants are good to eat, how to hunt, and so on. Other animals have some cultural knowledge, but transmitting culture, not raw intelligence, is the main advantage humans have over other species. In some tests of pattern matching, chimps outperform people, just like autistic savants can have amazing cognitive powers, but because they lack the ability to tap into cultural intelligence, they still can’t function in society. See The Secret of Our Success by Henrich.

I've changed careers a few times.

> What made you do it, did you have to retrain

In my 30s, I was basically a combination auto mechanic and electronics technician. More and more tasks around the shop needed to be computerized, so I was starting to do more software development on the side. When I got run over by a car, I could no longer bend in the middle so I had to stop being an auto mechanic. While it was expensive and painful, I was fortunate that I was already transitioning towards a different career only because there were gaps in what the shop needed that could only be filled by computerized tracking and databases.

At this time I was also working on my 2nd bachelors which was mostly intended as prereqs for a masters in computer engineering (my first bachelors is in electrical engineering). The second bachelors also included lots of fun courses like statistics, women's studies, music theory and Japanese. I never finished the masters degree.

Software development is an industry where having actual credentials, especially degrees, are considered negatives. That said, I continued to spend a lot on programming books over the years in order to keep up with changing technology.

I've been a programmer for past 15 years. I just completed my 3rd bachelors (this time in accounting) because there is too much age discrimination in software development. My estimate is that a CPA with a background in IT should have a good career in auditing (and a few other things).

Looking back, one of the good things I did were to always be learning. People who treated education as a vaccine (once they've had it, they never needed to do it again) ended up unemployed in their later 50s.

Some books I recommend are on this post at a programmer specific site. If you aren't in IT, then the books to read from the "being a better programmer/employee" section are: The Passionate Programmer (this is about keeping your mind and skills up to date). Corporate Confidential, Death March and Spreadsheet Modeling. All the other sections I still recommend reading (your library should have many of these books), although I usually tell folks to read The Righteous Mind instead of Moral Politics (while still good, Haidt's book gives a better framework for understanding the differences between "liberals" and "conservatives" and why they think differently).

Other books that may help you find what you want to do:

Zen and the Art of Making a Living. About how to figure out what you want to do and how to turn that into a career.

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. About learning on your own and how to give some structure to it so that it isn't "all over the place". His website.

Tell Me About Yourself. One good way to get your message across in interviewing is to be able to answer questions that start "tell me about a time when..." or "how do you..." . Those questions tend to get asked more commonly these days in the competency based interviewing style. It is much harder to slide through that type of interview by claiming knowledge you don't have.

> I'm starting to find the culture of the organisation a bit toxic

Generally, when things get tight, the struggle for power and resources (commonly called "office politics") gets very ugly. I've included some suggested books on office politics in the link above. If you don't learn at least how to recognize and deflect it, then you may as well have WELCOME tattooed on your forehead because you're gonna become a victim of it.

When it comes to office politics, this joke should be your motto:

> Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve starts putting on his tennis shoes
> Mark says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!”
> Steve says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear—I just have to outrun you!”

http://boyslife.org/jokes/6953/you-cant-outrun-a-bear/

Finally, I'd recommend learning some programming. Every field of industry has been affected by software and automation. I call Access and Excel "the gateway drugs to programming" because so many developers got started by automating some spreadsheet to make their job easier and as the thing got more complicated it also got more essential to getting work done at the company.

Not so casual and perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but definitely read the Linguistics Wars by Randy A Harris. It's enjoyable, extremely rigorous (it came out of Harris's PhD dissertation) and very, very insightful: it digs really deep into one of the most controversial period of linguistics in the United States. The author even went through underground notes. The best part about it is that it doesn't require you to be a linguist but it's even better if you are; a lot of things in there you simply can't get from modern textbooks and you get to learn how linguistic ideas originated and evolved. He has a second edition coming out so you might wanna wait for that.

For something perhaps surprising and illuminating: read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson. Most people I know were impressed at how pervasive metaphors actually are in language and cognition. It's very intuitive and sensible once you get the gist of it. This one is quite specific though.

Finally, although now I don't quite agree with it, Language Instinct is what lured me into linguistics so definitely check it out.

These books are quite old now and obviously linguists know much more (although not nearly enough) about language today than they did back then. Claims are also often exaggerated (with the exception of the first one, I think) but they're fun to read and will interest you for sure.

Here is a graphical representation that is easy to share

Some highlights from the article (didn't realize how short it is, this is basically the whole article):

> The economy added an average of 181,000 jobs a month in Obama's last six months in office compared to an average of 179,000 a month in President Trump's first six months. That's a statistically insignificant difference — and a negative one at that — which shows that Trump hasn't made a diffference on the economy. And why would he have? He hasn't cut taxes or increased infrastructure spending or done anything else that would meaningfully boost GDP. (Going golfing and tweeting #MAGA a lot don't count.)

===

> This, in a lot of ways, is the archetypal Trump story: trying to take credit for something he inherited. [...] It's been the same with the economy. Trump hasn't actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he's made it sound like he's passed a new New Deal. (“No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,” he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a “surging economy and jobs,” despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being “fake” and “phony” and “totally fiction” while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it's “very real now.” In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.

===

> Well, it's not just him doing the praising. Trump's new propaganda channel is, too. Those, at least, are jobs he really can take credit for.

---

Edit: Also want plug Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics because it is extremely relevant to what is going on. A central theme in the book is that intuition (emotion being a large part of intuition) comes first, reasoning second: that we have not evolved reason to arrive at truth, but rather as a means of justifying our behavior to others and persuading them to join our side. Thus reason is a strategic mechanism that we employ to justify the opinion we already have-- there are exceptions, of course, but this is the general case.

===

This helps to explain why people hold even more strongly to their opinions in light of disconfirmatory evidence. In this case, Trump supporters are not going to be moved by these facts and figures when employed in arguments. I have not yet finished the book, but this video does a good job explaining one of the main tactics to overcome this problem: speak to the elephant (a person's intuitions) first.

> I think there's not enough writing out there taking a look at the totally understandable emotional reasons why people engage in identity politics.

You're looking for Jonathan Haidt. There's also a TED talk.

Haidt points out that there are six moral "receptors", similar to senses, and that conservatives experience all six, while liberals focus primarily experience only two.

Each of these moral receptors can be exploited. We are hard-wired to respond to these set-points and base our decisions on those gut feelings. We use our intellect (especially on Reddit!) to justify those emotional decisions, not to question them.

Liberals are not going to change their settings. However, they can become better at this game and learn to trigger the four missing receptors to better bring conservatives over to their pet causes.

For example, why don't conservatives respond to the statement: "Trump should release his taxes?" Liberals see this as an issue of fairness and pretty much only fairness - everyone else did it, it's good for the majority to have the information, why is this even a question?

Conservatives bring in a whole host of other moral flavors. They are loyal to Trump. They respect his authority. They believe fairness is about proportionality, so because Trump is rich, he must also be good (those with the most assets have earned a right to lead). All of these cross-currents prevent them from supporting something that is obviously beneficial to society.

Until liberal learn to trigger those switches, they will continue to lose elections. We are ultimately still monkeys.

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit is a good one. Its not "counter culture" as in 1960s counterculture. Its about the "counter cultures" that result from disaster situations (9/11, earthquakes, fires etc) that resemble anarchies because of their horizontalism and sense of community. Also a lot of people find so called disaster situations funner and with more opportunity than the media/history makes them out to be. The book was based off ethnographic studies and people's histories. Highly recommend. It was a joy to read.

Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton. This is closer to the 1960s counterculture, but like 100,000 times better. Provo was a sort of anarchistic counterculture group of the mid 1960s. Its a short but fun read.

Squatting in Europe by the Squatting in Europe Kollective. I actually haven't read this book yet (my reading list is like 100 books deep as it is) but I would like to and it sounds like something that you would be interested in.

Your observations are bang on, the extreme conservative values they hold are self defeating in the face of today's progressive societies. I'll get back to this.

The how: they're intentionally manipulated by people with an agenda who seek power. Either political power or physical dominance by force. They feel safe in their group because of the hive-switch. Jonathan Haidt goes into this pretty heavily in his book The Righteous Mind.

As for helping, you have to talk with them. I know it's easier said than done. I myself get nervous and intimidated when I come across someone with that mentality. They're scary. But they're also people. They sleep, snore, eat, laugh. They had a first kiss and experienced deaths in their families. See, I'm being empathetic. It's what allows me to understand other's viewpoints and put things into perspective. It's also what they lack. But that doesn't mean it can't be learned.

So the societies thing: imagine for a minute that the alt-right magically gets their demands: all "immigrants" leave North America and head back to their mother land. Also, no outsourcing of labor. This is the part when they rub their fingers in delight right? I mean, look at all the land with natural resources they're left with! Look at the potential. Well, let's just say the economy will collapse. It may be obvious but: major companies will have lost their talent, also their customer base. The labor force will have to be massively redistributed, new skills learned (which is already a big challenge for fixed-mindset people, whom from my observation are predisposed to being alt-right) to get essential services back in working order, Trade with other countries will suffer (for obvious reasons) so the nation will have to be self reliant. In the meantime progress WILL CONTINUE in other countries and will outpace this regressive, uncooperative and undiplomatic nation.

Seriously just writing this feels ridiculous. Okay, let's back track. "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change. And they sure as hell better be okay with being second class citizens. This here is not a meritocracy."

And there's that detail about the First Nations. Yeah the First Nations. When they demand all immigrants vacate, they don't include themselves. Is it really a matter of sovereignty or who came here first? Because... never mind. For arguments sake, let's say it's instead a matter of contribution to the making of modern society. Nation building if you will. Europeans came to this land on the premise of commerce. The Canadian fur trade. But these Europeans had associates in this business. Where the natives not contributors to the fur trade? Did they not help these newcomers with food, warmth, information? By the way this is completely ignoring their already existing society and way of life which, had someone asked them at the time, they might have said something along the lines of "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change." Probably.

I'll leave you with a fantastic book that will hopefully illuminate this topic better than I ever could: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics Check out Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks for a glimpse on what he covers in the book. The real bombshell I took away from his book is that: conservatism isn't exclusive to any one nation and it exhibits itself similarly across the globe. The real tragedy is that conservative groups hate each other when they belong to different nations, despite how much they have in common as far as the values they hold dear.

Please don't cheapen that word "consensus" with frivolous usage. The origins of religion is a highly contentious topic, and those who study it are absolutely not in full agreement with each other. You are trying to prop up your arguments with the authority of science while denigrating my intelligence. You don't convince people by arguing that way; you only satisfy your urge to crush an opponent.

Here's where we agree, and where you think we disagree:

1. Religion is a natural phenomenon.
   
2. Religion has been a part of human behaviour for tens of thousands of years.
   
   There. Half your post wasn't necessary, Mr./Ms. Read-More-Carefully.
   
   Where we disagree:
   You think religion... "exists because people believe the immaterial intentional entities (minds without bodies, gods.)" In a related concept, you indicate that we naturally ascribe agency to the natural world.
   
   Just so this is abundantly clear: I was arguing that gods are not required for religion. You misread Buddhism is but one example. "Most" Buddhists isn't "all" Buddhists, and "involves" is a far cry from "being the central element of the religion that defines its existence." Many totemic religions from tribal societies also lack gods. You end up having to redefine "gods" to "any supernatural agent" just to get this idea to work.
   
   But let's focus on the idea that it's natural for us to impose agency to things in the natural world, and this leading to the formation of religion. This also is not done in every religion. When it is done, it isn't relevant to every aspect of the religion in question. Even among Christianity, a great deal of worship is devoted to the saints, who were entirely human. Ditto with ancestor worship in Taoism.
   
   We have also seen the rise of new religions, and we know for a fact this idea of ascribing agency to the natural world was not involved in the creation of many of them: Scientology, or the various cults that are centred around extra terrestrials, or people from the future, or not eating (seriously!)
   
   Finally, it doesn't explain why we have the ability to feel transcendence; that feeling we get when our individuality melts away and we "give ourselves" to something greater. Where does that come from? How does that evolve?
   
   But for the sake of completeness, you would likely need to hear an alternative, so here is where I'm coming from. I ascribe to Emile Durkheim's theory of religion. He's a classic sociologist, and formally founded the field of sociology itself.
   
   Just to provide the brief gist:
   
   His definition of religion: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
   
   The faithful believe in a force that is outside of themselves, and greater than themselves that enters into them usually during moments of collective ritual, giving them the feeling of transcendence. All religions have this force. It is often called a "god," though other terms are used (mana, ch'i, etc.) This force is the "energy," if you will, of the society of the faithful. In other words, god and society... are one and the same. Society is exterior to the individual, and greater than him. If you denigrate this symbol of their society, you are denigrating the society itself, and they will react accordingly. The morals preached by the religion are the morals that the society unifies under. They hold rituals to reinforce this collective bond, and that is really its purpose. Some things are made sacred (objects, values, people), and the community collects around those things, which become a sort of emblem. Rationality will serve the purpose of the community's religion. And, as I initially stated in my first post, the religion of the day will change as the needs of the society changes. Sometimes the religion itself alters, and other times it is simply abandoned for another one.
   
   We see religious behaviour in cruder moments all the time. The feeling of transcendence occurs among soldiers that fight and die together. They often describe their individuality melting away and becoming "whole" with their brothers in arms. They create a small system of morals and beliefs that are specific just to them. And they even sometimes have rituals.
   
   The same religious behaviour can be seen in revolutionaries who rationalize their oppressors as the ultimate evil. Or in nationalistic patriotism (why does a flag make someone cry? Why does it matter what the founding fathers thought?). Or college fraternities with their initiations and pledges. Or the obsession with all things natural and organic, and neo druidism, and Gwenyth Paltrow getting people to stick odd things up their vaginas. Or Trump supports who see Donald Trump as their saviour from the evils that plague them.
   
   We have evolved the innate ability to unite under an emblem and operate as a cohesive whole. That is religion, and no other animal seems to have it. It's the evolutionary trick that made us the dominant species on earth. It's utter shit for finding the truth of things, but it massively serves the purpose of our survival.
   
   Now, if you want religion to just go away so we can have a purely secular society based on reason, then what you want to believe is that religion is just some kind of fluke originally made to explain the world (and it clearly does a poor job of that). I admire that cause, but I doubt it's viability, and I certainly doubt the premise that's justifying it. Or perhaps I'm just making assumptions about your point of view. A purely rational society is one that I think a lot of skeptics dream of, and you are in this subreddit.
   
   Further reading, if you're interested: Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious LIfe." Also, Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion."

The Marxist explanation is the simplest I think: They wish to control (and regulate) the means of production. Specifically the means of production of more hosts for the god virus.

Also, by making something that all humans can't help to avoid a sin... they ensure that sin is committed, guilt and furtherance of their control over them through that guilt.

These two together I believe form powerful reasoning.

I'll add that in the case of women, virginity is valued because traditionally, especially in the time period the bible was written, they were considered property. Therefore... in an awful way a product that has been opened and used is less valuable than one that is still in the packaging. There is of course the old, more practical consideration that a woman who isn't a virgin may be bearing another man's children, thus her husband would expend resources raising children that weren't his and didn't advance his line.

I mean there are so many things at work here it is ridiculous. Original intent is one thing, but over time it gained other advantages. Still, you have to notice that the burden and pressure on women is much greater than men, it's about controlling women.

If you want an in-depth explanation I would suggest the great book "The God Virus" by Darrel Ray. He also has a podcast called secular sexuality, but that's more about exploring sexual behavior(s) than explaining the religious effect on it. If you don't want to buy it, check it out from a library, it really is enlightening when you examine religion in the way he does. (And in fact is one of my top book recommendations for atheist literature after "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great")

https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519/

I highly recommend reading "The righteous Mind" by Johathan Haidt available here. It does a really good job of explaining why we justify the religion while we're in and why we're so angry when we get out. I found it useful in processing what's going through my mind now as well as what is going through my TBM wife's mind. In the end, our "rational" minds aren't very rational at all. We are all very good at justifying decisions, but rarely do we objectively make these decisions. It may give you some needed perspective.

If you're shy of 30, I say you have a very good shot at making it out as a family and enjoying some great years whether or not your spouse makes it out. Look back to understand, but don't forget to look ahead and live the amazing life in front of you.

> There's no such thing as "western science". The scientific method has no particular nationality or culture to it.

Disagree. (A bit of digression, but an interesting side-debate nevertheless; skip this paragraph to go to the topic of the OP.) Cultural beliefs do actually influence ways of thought, scientific method included. A well-known pyschological experiment, for example, puts two objects on a table: a cork cylinder and a plastic pyramid. Participants are given a third item, a cork pyramid, and asked to which group does it belong to. Westerners disproportionately associate it with the plastic pyramid, while easterners disproportionately associate it with the cork cylinder. This (and other variations) show that westerners tend to focus more on object labels while easterners tend to focus more on substances and the environment. So, this and related experiments reveal there ARE trends indicative of differences in how easterners and westerners interpret knowledge. Westerners tend to rely more on formal logic and insist on correctness of one belief over another when investigating conflicting opinions or theories, while easterners consider all the interacting environmental relationships, even if they give conflicting answers (this has implications for the importance easterners place on causality, for example). So yes, cultural traditions CAN influence how you interpret science. When I said the (admittedly vague) phrase "western science", I was referring to the western tradition of highly logical and categorical induction. One can even argue the Scientific Method is actually an invention of the western tradition, but that doesn't mean other cultures don't approach the same issues from different ways. Anyways, I digress from the topic at hand... TL;DR: read something like [The Geography of Thought] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Thought-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344027939&sr=8-1&keywords=geography+of+thought) for intriguing trends in how your Asian lab partner interprets data differently from you.

>Yes, there's a lot of New Age bullshit books out there, trying to claim that physics legitimizes one particular philosophy or religion or another.

Difference being Goswami was a quantum physics professor who wrote respected college textbooks on the matter before he turned to mysticism. I picked the book up because the most interesting advances in human knowledge have been when science has collided head-on with religion/philosophy. You won't find Jesus mentioning anything about quantum physics, but reading about a physicist who turns mystic based on his interprettation is an interesting cross between science and religion. My background is not in quantum physics, but sooner or later you guys will have to (you should?) reconcile your understanding of reality with how different cultural traditions interpret reality. Historically, that has meant offering a more convincing, evidence-based view of reality (e.g. Galileo, etc.). So I thank you for your detailed responses... I was trying only to understand why Goswami's interpretation is not considered appropriate by mainstream physicists rather than trying to assert any particular philosophy.

> Electrons do not have Bohr-style 'orbits', nor do they move between them instantaneously. We know for a fact that they don't.

My understanding was that electrons orbit in fuzzy probability clouds rather than nice planetery-like orbits, but light is emitted when they acquire/lose enough energy to move from one to the next. Furthermore, the jump is discontinuous in that the electron is never in any orbit not defined by one of the probability clouds. Can you please point me to a more accurate description?

> A 'measurement' in quantum mechanics is an interaction (of a particular kind) with the system. The fact that manipulating an object in a different way will give a different outcome is not very surprising, and not what's interesting about the delayed-choice experiment.

What is the interesting part of the delayed-choice experiment then if it's not that what we observe depends on how we measure it?

> It appears as if one particle affects the other instantaneously, which makes it appear as if there is some faster-than-light interaction between them. That does not mean this is how it works. It's not known how it works. No such interaction is known to actually exist, and as far as I know, there's no popular hypothesis giving such a mechanism. [emphasis mine.]

> While if you can't distinguish interpretations of quantum physics from quantum physics, and science from philosophy you've failed to understand all the above.

And therein lies the crux of my original post: the most interesting scientific discoveries come when interpretations of science and philosophy butt up against each other. In the case of Aspect's Bell Test, it appears that a non-local signal (that is, a deliberate faster-than-light transmission) is impossible, but yet, it shows that there is at least some non-local correlated behavior. Goswami's interpretation resorts to a non-local unitary consciousness (which he later calls "god"; the personal diety aspect of the term being unfortunate cultural baggage). The point being, when does an interpretation become theory? When you can test it and do something useful with it. So if the unitary, non-local consciousness interpretation is not helpful, what other more plausible interpretations are there? Help me understand reality as you interpret it.

Read better books. Stop watching the local news and definitely don’t believe what Mormons say about “the world”.

Read this

https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570


Nobody is coming to save us. But what would they save us from? You see, on the whole, we’re doing a pretty good job of making our lives better. Objectively speaking. At the individual level a person feeling terrified when they actually live in a very safe environment and are extremely well protected ... well that to me sounds like something the individual needs to understand and deal with.

Yeah, we have all been brought up to see those people as self-righteous assholes, but transportation engineers have determined that a zipper merge, occurring as close to the point of obstruction as possible, is most efficient (40-50% more efficient than current practice). The Minnesota DOT recently adopted this practice and began a campaign of awareness.

If traffic interests you, check out the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. Super interesting quick read, and you'll learn a lot about interacting with urban traffic efficiently.

Michigan DOT Citations 1 2.pdf

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.

That should probably be "Supply and demand works perfectly if we are perfectly rational actors" - and I agree it does not work perfectly and there are occasional exceptions, but the hypothesis with the least assumptions is that the law of supply is applicable regarding developers. [i.e. since an increase in price usually results in an increase in supply we should assume it is applicable here unless there is sufficient evidence otherwise - not the other way around].

As for negotiation skill, I find it hard to believe that so many people in finance, medicine, and law are amazing negotiators but nearly everyone in software engineering is completely lacking. Top earners in those fields routinely make over 10x the bottom earners (and they do this without founding their own companies, playing startup equity lottery, or receiving ridiculous counter-offers). At most software companies a "top earner" engineer might be making at most double what an intern or entry level dev makes.

PS - I've read Drive, it's a good book, if you enjoyed that you may want to check out Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me

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.

I tend to see things through the lens of biology, so I'd recommend the following biology based books not necessarily on religion but on related subjects that I think tend to favor atheism:

Dark Nature by Lyall Watson.

Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal

Also, in the field of psychology I strongly recommend the free online book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer for an excellent book that explains much of the reasons why fundamentalist Christians are so hard to reason with (link is to free PDF published by Prof. Altemeyer, but you can also order a paper copy through lulu.com here ).

Plenty of atheists feel spiritual. Watch this TED talk by atheist author Jonathan Haidt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYsx6WArKY (key point: the feelings are a part of human nature, and there are many ways to pursue and explore them, not all of them religious.)

I loved Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" too -- as a caveat, I'm not completely sold on the 'group selection' theory of evolution that he sounded somewhat sympathetic to in the book, but he's not a die-hard about it like E.O.Wilson either, and in a few places he seemed to mis-characterize some points by Richard Dawkins, but overall Haidt is an original thinker who has a different perspective on several issues than some more prominent atheist writers, and certainly a sensitivity to the key imporance of spirituality in humans.

You might also consider Sam Harris's book "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" which is mostly a how-to manual about how you might achieve the meditation techniques that he likes. His understanding of the word "spirituality" seems to be more Buddhist (nurturing and exploring the self, alleviating suffering) rather than groupish collective-feeling as Haidt uses the term, but it too was an interesting perspective.

Just finished reading a book on this, http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

In a nutshell, one of the things discussed is that when you look overall, there's 6 qualities people use when defining morality. Care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

When you look at a very narrow subset, like, say, progressives, you find that they only consider 3 of those important (and even then, primarily care). So much so that they don't comprehend that there could be any other values beyond that, and when experiments have been run, they simply don't know how to answer as if they're conservative. While moderates and conservatives can evaluate questions the way a liberal would pretty well.

Also does a really good job of looking at the biological motivations for this stuff.

First, here is a map of which states are most interested in incest porn. Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia don't surprise me, but Kansas and Alaska does surprise me. My wife from Alaska says it's because there are so many small towns that people don't have many options in partners, so then they think "hmmm, how about my cousin? They are looking good."

But on the further point of incest. I find it fascinating as a society when we try and create moral norms without agreeing to a guiding ethos that we all follow. Right now we are moving towards the "consenting adult" standard. If consenting adults want to do it, then why not? That is often the prevailing sentiment among liberals. Since we don't all share a holy book or something that lays out a moral code, then we have to grapple with our basic ideas of what is morally acceptable. For many of us incest will always be unthinkable. I have a cousin my age and I couldn't begin to imagine a relationship, even though first cousin marriage was not only acceptable but in many cultures encouraged to maintain family wealth. For me it is as taboo as eating a dead pet.

It is a fascinating discussion to be had, because there are so many diverse ideas on what should or shouldn't be accepted. There is a fascinating book that deals with this called The Righteous Mind. A Ted talk of his introduces these ideas and how they influence us.

tl;dr Great post, OP! Everyone, no matter what "side" you might or might not be on, check out Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations, either in his book The Righteous Mind, or via his websites or TED talks.

Not going to read all the comments; just skimmed over a selection. My thoughts? First, I really like what OP posted. I think his assessments of each side are relatively accurate, and I agree that (not only with this issue, but with any issue, whether it's political or not, whether it's a "moral issue" or not) it's always a good idea to understand what someone who disagrees with you believes, to understand how they view the situation, and to understand why they view it that way.

The primary hurdle, though, is that people generally do not arrive at positions on political issues (especially if they're seen as "moral issues") by a nice, sound, rational, logical process of starting with data and axioms and reasoning their way to a nice, sound conclusion. This fact is something that has driven me nuts for most of my 50 years. Fortunately, last year I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Read it. Seriuosly. Everyone on this subreddit, everyone who wants to discuss political issues, must read it. (Or, at the very least, watch Haidt's TED talks.) But the gist of his argument, as relevant to this post/this issue, goes like this:

• There is a set of "moral foundations" that we humans developed along the way, presumably via evolution and the societies we created as early humans. (Although there's nothing wrong with believing that we instead received those moral foundations from God or someone/thing similar.)
  
• These moral foundations don't work at the rational level; they work at the subconscious level, at the emotional level, at the "gut" level.
  
• Typically, we think we're using reason and logic and data to come to our political or other opinions. However, what we're really doing is deciding on the position based on our emotional/subconscious/"gut" set of moral foundations, and then afterwards using reason and logic (and careful selection of which data to include and which to ignore) to explain, ex post facto, why we came to that decision. (Haidt suggests that our emotional/subconscious/"gut" reasoning is like an elephant, and our reason is like one who is riding on the elephant, and pretending to guide and direct the elephant. In fact, the elephant goes where it damn well pleases, and so the rider is instead left to explain why the elephant turned left here or turned right there; the rider isn't in control of the elephant, the rider is essentially the elephant's PR representative.)
  
• There are 6 moral foundations. People who self-identify as "conservative" tend to rely on all six roughly equally: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. People who self-identify as "liberal", however, tend to rely only on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations.
  
• And just to confuse things, self-identified liberals and conservatives often see and use the Fairness/cheating moral foundation differently. For example, a liberal might say "It's not fair to make it difficult for wannabe immigrants from Latin America to enter the US legally, and it's not fair to persecute and prosecute them once they're here," while a conservative might say "It's not fair for illegal immigrants to sneak in to the US when so many others follow the law and do it legally."
  
  Anyhow. Not just on this issue, but on any issue, examining it from the point of view of the moral foundations is a very good way to understand those who disagree with you. If you want to learn more, go to either or both of Haidt's websites moralfoundations.org -- which talks about moral foundations theory -- and yourmorals.org -- which has a number of tests you can take to understand your own moral foundations.

Two great books on this very topic, but the short answer is you have the best chance to change someone's mind when they see you as someone "on their side" or in their group/tribe. If they perceive you as someone from the "opposition" then they will get defensive and no amount of convincing, facts, or persuasion is likely to have an impact on their point of view.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WEAI4E/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Matt's comment about the White House, (paraphrasing) "people want the same end result but just have different ideas about how to get there" made me think of this book I just listened to.

It's not the easiest read in the world, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

And of course, it fits very well with the NDQ attitude.

It's by Jonathan Haidt.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NbC0DbWTAKPA9

Check it out and enjoy! And most importantly, share it with people who need to hear it.

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.

Are you counting behavioral economics as Econ or psychology? I personally count all kahneman, fiske, and even green as psychologists. Econ might be useful for explaining how people behave after the action but it isn't good at explaining how to compel actions. I could explain more if you're interested. I saw you were looking to read the tipping point. Don't. Gladwell is crap. Read Connected instead:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316036137?pc_redir=1404306449&robot_redir=1

Honestly even sociology, especially social network theories, are much more useful to influence prosocial behavior than Econ. And unless you cite something specific, you should read up on some other fields. Econ in university always tries to make it sound like it has an answer for everything, but people are pretty complex.

Well as far as the humor, I think this is part of the answer:

http://research.vtc.vt.edu/news/2014/oct/29/liberal-or-conservative-brain-responses-disgusting/

Basically you have the establishment comedy set who tells jokes like The Aristocrats (extreme example, but relevant). These are late night comedy hosts and if you look at the above research and listen to this highly NSFW joke, you'll get the disconnect.

I also recommend The Righteous Mind as a component of the answer, which is part of but expands on the 'disgust' angle. It's an excellent bit of research and Jon Haidt is worth listening to. He's got Ted Talks, etc.

That's a difficult question for me to answer. Someone working in career placement (or whatever it's called - someone who helps you chose a career) could probably give you a better general answer.

In terms of games, you could try playing OpenTTD (Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe) or Cities in Motion 2 (the game Colossal Order made before Cities: Skylines). Both have a much stronger transportation focus, with a good deal more micromanagement and therefore a steeper learning curve, and are a notch closer to what I do IRL. If you can play either/both for days without getting bored, you might want to be a traffic engineer.

If you'd rather read, you could get Traffic: Why we drive the way we do. I think it's a good read for anyone who lives on a street. If you read that and think "I wish this was 10 times longer and also my life", you might want to be a traffic engineer.

If you want to dive into some more technical stuff, wikipedia has some good articles, e.g. on the Braess paradox (the math is interesting, but you can probably skip over it since it's pretty high-level, abstract stuff). If you get to the bottom of that and start clicking all the "See also" links, you might want to be a traffic engineer.

If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask :)

Yes, I listened to the podcast. It was good albeit, as Chris said, a bit harrowing.

The best book I have read on the psychology piece is Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. I highly recommend it. Fascinating and devastating in equal measure.

It's also definitely worth reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion as a backgrounder on moral psychology.

After reading these, I found that my sense of humans as uniquely rational and intelligent was pretty much entirely put to one side... Now I rather see us as apes with technology and pretensions of greatness...

I think that the problem with non-monogamy is not just the act itself, but principally the effect of dishonesty with one's partner. Being transparent about what and why one holds a specific diet and acknowledging its effects addresses a similar, if more minor, concern.

When Peter Singer talks about the "Paris exception", he isn't describing an epicurean whim as a moral good, but rather arguing that the moral criticism should be grounded not in a purity principal but with respect to animal welfare. In the same way, there is a puritanical ethical argument against non-monogamy that while nearly (but not entirely) universal, is less cogent than a critique of the likelihood of an affair impairing one's family's happiness.

Ethical feelings are grounded in evolutionary traits, the purity principle is grounded in taboos around what is healthy. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind acknowledges that vegans have a similar response to eating animals, as many conservatives to do homosexuality or Orthodox Jews do to eating pigs. While this purity principle isn't necessarily wrong, grounding ones ethics in Utilitarianism and animal welfare allows veganism to have a much more universal ethical appeal.

I don't know. I think certain parts of a society need to be pulled into modern ethical norms.

I know this is anti-libertarian but I think the state needs to implement certain laws to help society behave more ethically.

I say this based on the data found in Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now. I highly recommend it and he does a far superior job articulating the importance of the state.

I don't want this to expand into a slippery slope argument. I think there need to be strong limits on government power.

Edit: Added Link

It depends on what types of things you're interested in!

Over time, you'll come to know certain people who research in different areas and you can go to their personal webpages and access their Curriculum Vitae. Through that, you can find all the work they've done and many times they link to PDF copies of their papers.

But psychology is a very broad field. Here are some suggestions I can come up with:

For dealings with moral political psychology (the psychology of how people on the right and people on the left feel about moral decisions - includes religions and other aspects to our deeply-rooted conceptions of 'self'), see Jonathan Haidt - He just wrote a new book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

For dealings with the extent and limits of human rationality, I'd suggest Daniel Kahneman. He also just wrote a new book called Thinking Fast and Slow.

Stuffisnice suggested William James. James' Principles of Psychology is remarkable and very fun to read. It's quite dated both in science and in language, but his writing is impeccable.


In fact, James didn't just do psychology. He did philosophy as well. His later philosophy was at odds with the picture provided by most mainstream psychology that takes the brain as the source of our mental experience. These philosophical aspects have recently been brought into the empirical realm in the branch of Ecological psychology. This is my personal preference for psychology reading as I feel it is much more willing to ask harder questions than traditional psychology; it is willing to do away with assumptions and premises that are generally taken for granted.

This ecological framework deals more with perception and the role of the animal's action in perception. Instead of the traditional way of looking at perception (cells react to stimuli in the environment, feed this encoded stimuli into the brain, the brain processes things and makes sense of them, recreating a picture of the world through its activity, and finally sending out directions to the body to move), the ecological perspective focuses more on how the animal perceives the world directly and does not require internal processing to make sense of the world. It's much cleaner and much simpler. The brain is still crucial for the lived experience, but it is not the whole story.

For readings in ecological psychology, I would recommend Ed Reed's Encountering the World and Eleanor Gibson's An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development.

After you get your bearings, then you can get into some really deep stuff that tries to synthesize biology, psychology, and the essence of human/animal experience (phenomenology). For that, Evan Thompson is my go to guy. His work is heavily philosophical and is sometimes overly dense, but you may find it interesting.

PM me if you have any questions!

Yes, they have more power than their seats suggest, I agree with that, but the monumental chance of having this backfire when voters are told you are the problem because of sabotaging the big party (and can be blamed for the shortcomings of the coalition) is a risk that has to be considered low enough to make it worthwhile. Because, then not only, will the current voters believe the bigger party did their best, but will have an easy scapegoat to blame all the problems on (even if it wouldn't be true, people go through amazing lengths to find "explanations" after the fact, I recommend The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt that shows this phenomenon).

Besides that, NVA avoids controversy (as best as possible), Forza happily provokes it (and seemingly acts incredulous afterwards). A coalition between the two would mean NVA would have to defend itself against the controversy created by Forza. Even if Forza does this accidentally, NVA isn't exactly prepared to deal with it judging by how De Wever has responded to Forza's controversies, which I can understand and is their right.

I'm reading a really interesting book right now that talks about the origins of morality, and how they likely have come about because to flourish we need to be a society, and to be a society, we need to think about the greater good.

I know that probably wouldn't go over well with some religious folks, but I'd take it back WAY past prehistory (which some religious folks might also find objectionable), and talk about early man working in groups.

I really enjoy trying to come up with a reasonable and rational argument that at the same time isn't offensive. It's a unique challenge, but I find the results pretty beneficial for my own thought.

Edit: Dur, the name of the book is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

You have to read (or at least look up) this book https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777 If you haven't used the audible free trial I recommend the audio book. It's read by the author

There's also this interview with the author. FANTASTIC http://billmoyers.com/segment/jonathan-haidt-explains-our-contentious-culture/

I recommend it all over Reddit every chance I get. It explains everything you're talking about here, but from a scientific standpoint. It's also really extremely enlightening. I just know you'll love it.

> Crazy to see how many people arent interested in watching a 42 minute video where someone disproves allegations on them, but would happy read and believe short twitter posts with cherrypicked evidence.

Yeah, this is one of the big points of the book I'm reading right now: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Here's a relevant quote from the book:

>“Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach because we ask “can I believe it” when we want to believe something, but “must I believe it” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always “yes” to the first question, and “no” to the second.”

I've still got a few chapters to go, but the overarching theme seems to be that we, as humans, operate primarily on implicit associations/preferences/biases, which we are mostly unaware of. We then use reasoning to justify our automatic reactions to various stimuli.

Did you catch that? The book suggests that, in general, our reasoning is not responsible for our positions on various subjects, such as moral beliefs. Our reasoning is a post-hoc justification for the subconscious and automatic reactions that we have to those things. Chew on that for awhile.

Bonus: Extreme partisanship may, literally, be addictive (you get a dopamine hit when a member of the opposing party is found to be a hypocrite, for example).

Now that is some Jonathon Haidt-level shit right there! Thank you for sharing the full text of her message. I'm relieved to find that nowhere in the text does it say "you should be able to do or say whatever you want without social consequences," and I'm disappointed to hear that there's a new label for people we disagree with. "Regressive left" seems pejorative in the extreme. My hope is that people who believe different things will actually do what she suggests and talk to each other about what they believe. That is a very hard, but very necessary, thing to do.
Anyway, I wanted to share something that the letter reminded me of that was written at a time when America was even more divided. Here are the last few sentences of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address:

>I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

> I would actually rather have more “nones” than “cultural” Christians. It does more harm than anything to have self-identified Christians who likely aren’t actually saved and are “Christians” either just because they’re parents were or because it’s “the American belief.”

Growing up, my parents always emphasized to me & my brothers the importance of having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” We stopped attending church when I was relatively young (church politics), but my parents retained a zeal for Christianity. They were PRO-Christian, ANTI-Christian culture.

I’ve watched my parents beliefs turn around, over the years. Today, they like being involved in Christian culture, (i.e. church) but they certainly aren’t the evangelical Christians they used to be. My Mom likes Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and complains that she can no longer relate to her more “fundamentalist” Christian friends. My Dad told me that reading Steven Pinker convinced him that Christianity isn’t even a spectacular force for good in the world. His twin brother, who remains an evangelical Christian, now thinks that my Dad is going to Hell. My Dad now thinks it’s ludicrous; people claiming to know what (if anything) happens after we die.

A good friend of mine works for the Christian church, and he tells me that he struggles with the fact that he sees no good reason to believe in the existence of God.

Why is it so hard to accept that real Christians might change their mind about Christianity?

>They ended up being more convincing against Christianity than anything else I read.

Darrel Ray (author of God Virus) quipped a saying I like: "You can't reason out what wasn't reasoned in in the first place."
My experience has mirrored this difficulty of trying to use logic/evidence to convince (or some times even have meaningful conversation) with people who pride themselves on faith and have been convinced largely through indoctrination/emotion.

Does any of this speak to your experience? Did you just grow up thinking the evidence was on the side of christianity? Did you have a faith -> evidence conversion before a chrstianity -> atheist conversion?

The biggest sorrow in my life is also that the one place in my life where I feel worse about about myself is home. I very rarely get comments or feel deliberate guilt-inspiring comments, but the real pain comes from not being able to share my life with them. Sure, I do some things on the weekends that they would think is absolutely crazy, but people on the outside are always telling me that my parents must be so proud and that I have great core values. It's only when I go home do I feel that I AM LESS THAN I SHOULD BE. What a terrible way to make your own children feel, especially when they are already feeling very alone in the world after leaving the church. You're not alone though. Mormons enjoy feeling like big fish in a little pond, which is why leaving is so scary. Sure, the ocean my be more scary, but its full of endless possibilities compared to, let's say, the great Salt Lake

I recommend reading The God Virus for a better understanding of the cultural effects of not only Mormonism, but religion in general. Read the reviews and you will see what I mean.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-religion-infects-culture/dp/0970950519

I recommend reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it and just got to the portion on religion.

Haidt, the author, tells about a study that another researcher (I didn't catch the name) did on communes in the US in the 20th century. He researched both secular (largely socialist) and religious communes. He found that in the religious communes the likelihood of them still being around a decade or two after their founding was directly proportional to the amount of arbitrary rules imposed on the members. That is, when members were required to dress in a certain fashion, cut ties with their old family, obey imposed sexual norms, etc. then the religious communes were more likely to stay together than when they didn't have those rules imposed. This was not the case at all for the secular communes.

The shared ritual (singing, meditation, chanting, etc.) associated with religion literally turned off, or at least severely dampened, the self interested parts of the brains of the individuals. The members of those communes were more likely to consider themselves part of a whole than as self serving individuals. They did not question the arbitrary nature of the imposed rules. It allowed the group to solve the free rider problem. That is, people were just as willing to not question working in the fields (or whatever) for 10 hours a day as they were wearing head coverings (or whatever). Contrast that with the secular communes where people would (quite understandably) look at being told to wear X thing or give all their food to the community pot and say "screw this, I'm going home."

Now, that sounds horrifying from our western individualist moral standpoint. We often claim value autonomy and liberty above all else. But that's not always true. Consider the arguments we're having in the US about healthcare. Those on the Right are frequently complaining about forcing men to pay for maternity care. Or complaining about covering abortion. Or whatever the complaint of the day is. They don't want to contribute to group retirement plans, or public schools. Every man for himself! The brains of our citizens are acting as individuals, not as part of a cohesive whole. Many of us do not see others in our nation as contributing parts of our nation, but as free riders, sucking resources away from them as individuals via our tax dollars.

I'm not saying that these attitudes are due to the decrease in religiosity in the US. Far from it; many of those making these arguments are the most religious people in the US. Rather, I suspect that their increased religiosity is having the exact same effect you'd see in communes; they're pulling into a smaller more insulated group that is interested in themselves (Republicans, good, moral Christians) rather than identifying primarily as Americans. It also helps explain why the more crazy X politician acts the more his constituents stick with him.

Note, this happens on both sides of course. Those on the Left use new-agey hand wavy pseudo-religious bonding mechanisms with no grounding in science as well. There's always some new fad, be it anti-gmo, yoga, green tea, safe spaces, etc, etc, which is used to self identify liberals as a cohesive group. It's not as strong as the pull on the right because people don't meet every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening to discuss and sing about racism, but it's still there. And it turns off parts of their brains too. Go read any leftwing blog to see that.

My point in all of this is that religion, if it truly provides for group bonding among non-kin individuals, as Haidt argues in his book, is very useful to a culture. If it provides a way for groups to pool their resources, then that could have a huge impact in times of hardship or famine.

William Barr would benefit from checking out Peter Singer and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek’s recent work. They're real utilitarians, not pretend ones. That might also help him better understand that leading secular moralists are not relativists or subjectivists and that their morality is about making the world a better place. Barr would also benefit from reading about the moral progress we Homo sapiens have made by reading Steven Pinker’s two recent works: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/utilitarianism-a-very-short-introduction-9780198728795?cc=au&lang=en& https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is a bit more focused than some of the other suggestions, but incredibly fascinating, readable, and does a great job of documenting the evolution of an idea in social psychology, which may give him insight into what it actually means to be a social psychologist. Wish it was available for me to read when I was his age.

Try to keep in mind that popular media rarely presents a proportionately balanced view of the world. Due to fundamental incentives, media tends to be biased toward particular kinds of attention-grabbing sensationalism and pessimism.

Wanting to accurately perceive the state of the overall world beyond our personal experiences is admirable, so good for you. Investing the time to increase understanding helps us react rationally and responsibly.

A useful starting place is this brief TED talk by the amazing statistician Hans Rosling. Good books include Pinker's "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" and Ridley's "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves".

Yep, I studied psycholinguistics in college. Note sure if you've already read it but Steven Pinker wrote a book called "The Language Instinct" that delves into this exact premise...that language has become an evolutionary process not unlike how kids learn to walk or lose their baby teeth or whatever. I never wound up doing anything with those studies but I found them to be fascinating, easily one of the best courses I took.

With regard to this particular TIL though, discovering this is a wet dream for a researcher in the field ;)

Thanks for the recommendation. I read a whole lot. I did, in fact, read that article I just have some criticisms as you know.

You must realize you have just made a snide remark. I hope. I would suggest you read this book that I really enjoy: "Mistakes Were Made, but Not By Me" http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909

It is truly an excellent book by very accomplished social scientists.

(mods, please remove if my source is bad)

I like the book The Righteous Mind and its discussion of morality. One of the points it makes is that being loyal to one's tribe and obeying authority are deeply moral matters for some people - and that those are more important then being nice, or being fair. The President is the head of a group they identify with and thus they are loyal.

> the rest of your statements don't really seem to follow

I was merely commenting on the part I quoted, ie. the idea that (mostly) linguists do "this".

Now, it's probably fair to say that we may have slightly different opinions what "this" actually is.

For me, it was linguists writing articles and selling books supposedly outside of their "expertise", as you called it. I'll shortly explain why I put expertise in quotes. But as far as I can tell, this happens quite frequently and the culprits come from all social sciences. You seem to agree with me on this point.

Now, you say they are justified to do this, because "[they] all study aspects of society or behavior that have political implications." But this strikes as superficial an association as if I'd say "linguists are social scientists, and politics is part of social science".

One might as well ask what qualifies a social scientist like, say, Roy Baumeister to write about topics as diverse as: The need to belong, self-esteem, willpower, "Evil", and gender?

In my experience, such a diversity is quite normal for any active social psychologist with a sufficiently long career. This also holds for some economists, I'd say.

But if expertise were in one's basic education and a single topic, the correct answer would be "nothing", ie. we would need to say that Baumeister is not qualified (and I suspect some feminists said exactly that about his work concerning men and gender).

But all of our lives would be quite boring if that's the case.

Which brings me to the question concerning expertise, and the reason I put it in quotes above. I'm not quite sure a social scientist's expertise is about the topic itself. One might as well argue that it's about the methods one uses to research a topic and contribute to the discussion.

For instance, Steven Pinker's "The better angels" follows the usual habits of scholarship. I'm picking this one because I've read it, and chapter 6 (IIRC) is about a current research interest of mine. And in all fairness, the chapter is a sufficiently good introduction about the causes of immoral behavior, given the time it was written.

Sure, one can complain that one's pet idea wasn't mentioned by Pinker (and many do just that), but that's the usual envy in scholarship concerning popular and successful authors, in my opinion. Ask r/anthropology about Jarred Diamond and watch what happens.

However, ignoring "possibly relevant" works is something we all are guilty of. The amount of "possibly relevant" literature is beyond anyone's intellectual and physical capacity as a writer, not to mention the reader's patience.

To summarize, I think you over-reacted a little bit in your initial comment.

I'd recommend perusing the following books for inspiration on how applying social psych can be interesting:

Stumbling on Happiness

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)

*Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Like others have said, it's pretty hard to make social psych boring! (And I think it's awesome you get to teach it to high school students!)

> We pretty much all feel like something's fucked, we just don't know how to fix it.

What boggles me about this feeling is that human beings have never had it so good. Evidence that "something's fucked" is shockingly thin, unless it's evidence that what's fucked is people's expectations, and the whatever-it-is-we're-doing to give them those expectations. There is definitely suffering out there, there are winners and losers, and it is difficult to hear that "the world is better than ever" when you're the one whose ship never seems to come in (so to speak). But ideologies built on the idea of impending apocalypse are at least as ancient as Christianity, and they historically appeal to society's worst-off for precisely this reason--this feeling that "something's fucked."

I call that feeling "the human condition." It's okay to want to make the world better. And we should definitely do that where we can. Following that feeling is how we built the amazing world we live in today.

The trick is to also be grateful for the amazing world we live in today, too. It's possible to do that and still want to make things better. It's that gratitude, I think, that staves off a tumble into nihilism--which I suspect is a much better name than "socialism" for what the teenagers calling themselves "socialists" today are feeling.

Of course, I suspected as much from your user name and my response is taylored to account for that.

I too have taken several asian studies courses, Asian philosophy courses, asian language courses, I've read the sandard literature such as Journey West and Three Kingdoms and I've tried to apply all of this to my life as lived in Korea for 8 and a half years.

No matter how I tried to twist this conventional wisdon I found myself constantly rewriting everything I knew every month. There would always be discrepencies, inconsistencies and hippocrisy. There was never a consistent narrative from which I could draw a predictive conclusion. Until about several years in when I realized in my attempt to learn about Korea culture I instead learned more about American culture and that everything they did that was some how different and confucian was something we did in American we just thought of it differenlty cause you know, 'murica.

Now if I had those biases what about people around me? It finally made sense why I could never trust a Korean to give me an honest account of Korean Culture, or someone from China to give an honest account of Chinese culture. or even trust myself to give an honest account of American Culture.

Then I read a good book on moral psychology, and it made even more sense.

> I can tell you there is definitely a cultural difference from the 6 years I have been here in my experience.

I can tell you there is a definite contectual bias in being amongst people you consider a different culture. Especially when you expect it.

> What you seem to be suggesting is that all differences are a fantasy and that there is no Confucianism or Judeo-Christianity.

What I am suggesting is that Confuciansim and Judeo-Christianity ultimately turn into tools for the lazy who want to make facile post hoc explanations for things and be done with it. You'd be right more often if you just treated people as people and pretended the concepts didn't exsist.

If we want to talk about instances where we can find differences in a controlled scientific setting (as opposed to uncontrolled instances on reddit of throughout ones day to day experiences) I would again suggest the book by Jonathan Haidt. His model of Moral Foundations Theory does a much better job of accounting for differences in a unified model instead of constantly going back to the drawing board for every culture.

I haven't voted GOP or Democrat in the last few races, either.

But if you really want to know why Libertarians tend to lean right in elections, read "The Righteous Mind":

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

Libertarians tend to value solely individual liberty over all other considerations. Democrats tend to value Care/Social/Fairness, but "fairness" to a Democrat is that everyone gets equally in the share of the wealth, while Libertarians (and ostensibly republicans) believe "fairness" is defined as "everyone gets what they work for themselves, and no one else (individual, group, or government) can take it by force, morally".

This one association, even though plenty of Libertarian concepts are left-leaning (pro-choice, ending drug prohibition, eliminating the power of police to oppress minorities, ending immigration laws, ending incarceration of non-violent "criminals") is the primary one for most Libertarians and hence, they vote republican.

Because Libertarian candidates have no shot at being elected for office. Some of us vote for them anyway, in hope to break the two-party binary system, but most look at it pragmatically and want to "minimize the damage", from their point of view.

You should read this book!

There's a great story in there about a bonobo that found a stunned bird in its enclosure. It took the bird to the top of the highest tree carefully spread its wings, and threw it like a paper airplane. While it was not a successful attempt at help, it showed a pretty impressive understanding of the difference between it and a bird.

RE: actions are mischaracterized, I’m going to go with the low-hanging-fruit example of FOX news. Wikipedia has a great entry over FOX news controversies:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies

Of course, FOX isn’t alone in this. MSNBC will exaggerate the words and actions of the right, too. And many other organizations. I only offer FOX because it’s the easiest.

RE: tribalism preferred over truth, there are a plethora of example, and tangent examples (like the echo chamber model) which support this, but for an actual source, I could go with Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind.

Haidt explains that our tendency to form social groups enforces a expectation for social conformity, which favors group ideas and beliefs over external views and information even when that external information is demonstrably true.

We can see this behavior in religion as well. People insist that men have one less rib than women despite our ability to count them in xrays. Faith over fact.

Thank you for the update and for the words of encouragement for others who may be in a similar situation. Here in San Francisco, I see new homeless youth show up every week. Almost all are LGBT -- they've been shunned by their families, their support network failed, and their worlds have collapsed. Some get themselves back on their feet. Others never do. Give yourself some solid credit for rising above the adversity and for your willingness to reach out to others who are in the same position. You're well on the way to a happier, healthier you! And someday, maybe some of those family members will come around too.

By the way, I found this book helpful in understanding why people cling so tightly to their homophobia. You might enjoy the read too. It may give you some insight and understanding into your family.

> Well how would you scientifically evaluate the statement that “murder is wrong”? One might say “ok, it reduces overall happiness in the world, which maybe we can measure.”

If you're interested in stuff like this but bored with the same old arguments from pragmatist ethics, I'd strongly recommend checking out Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Quantitative reasoning is not the only thing, but it's pretty much always a good thing

For me, it's really just wanting to be able to change the world and impose what I believe to be logically sound on others. My love of politics stems from my love of history.

In the words of Dennis Van Roekel, "For anyone who cares about the direction of the country, engagement in the political process should be a lifetime commitment." In other words, you should ALWAYS vote. Many people never take any action because they believe their voice is so minuscule that it will not matter.

Here are some books I'd recommend if you really are wanting to start up.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

http://www.amazon.com/World-Order-Henry-Kissinger/dp/1594206147

Bart Ehrman's books & videos are a great start for the accuracy of the Bible. He is very clear especially considering he's an academic. Forged would be the best one specifically about the accuracy of the Bible. His books are linked at his website: http://www.bartdehrman.com/books.htm

There are no historical documents of Jesus' life, only a few references to Christians from later documents. Nobody disputes that people believed in Jesus, so those don't really prove anything. It's clear that people believed in Thor and Zeus too. That doesn't mean a thing.

Whether faith is helpful or good, can't help you there. I think it's totally useless except to control sociopaths with low IQs.

For morality, check out Good without God: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Without-God-Billion-Nonreligious/dp/006167012X

or Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: http://www.samharris.org/the-moral-landscape

Science vs religion: that's kind of apples & oranges despite what believers keep saying. Science is a method of investigating hunches. Religion is subservience to an unproven deity.

How about the science of religion? Try Michael Shermer: The Science of Good and Evil: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805077693/ or The Believing Brain: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250008808/ or Why We Believe Weird Things: http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893/

Thanks for visiting. An unexamined belief system is not worth believing!

I think you've got more than enough good responses I just want to STRONGLY recommend that you read "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker. It just came out last month. I love it. The entire book is a very well reasoned and well researched and quantitatively substantiated argument for why our civilization has made things better and not worse and why we should continue down the road we're headed (with some minor improvements) rather than blowing it up and calling it a failed experiment. Part of his argument does touch on animal welfare. I'm convinced, given what you wrote in the OP that it could be a life changing read for you.

> often times the answer seems self-evident at a certain point, even if it would be difficult to convince someone else

I feel this way a lot too. Sometimes it feels like even if you were to find an absolute truth, nobody would want to listen anyways.

>For what I'm working on tonight, trying to develop ideas of how belief systems get constructed in people, and what it takes to make them change or shift them.

I've been reading a book on this sort of thing lately. Here's a link. I'm most of the way through and it seems to be a pretty well put together book that makes some good points about how and why people end up believing the way they do. You might like it.

Took a photo of the book cover because the last time I looked had issues finding it:
https://imgur.com/BIpU5f3


And then I just found the [Amazon link] (https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=) if that helps you.

It reads like a novel but discusses a lot of data as well, so certain sections do read like scholarly journals, but overall really fascinating and gave me a lot to think about.

While it is no doubt true that people of means have more influence of the democratic system than regular joes, it seems to me borderline conspiratorial to say the laws are set by them and solely for their own benefits, considering the fact that if that to be the case, we would have a flat tax system, rather than the progressive tax system that is adopted throughout the western world , including the US, where The top 1 percent paid a greater share of tax than the bottom 90 percent combined. (I am sure the situation is even more extreme in France.) There are various reasons of income inequality, but the undeniable fact is the vast majority of people today have a better living standard than people even 30 years ago, ( souce: enlightenment now) thanks to the system of capitalism where people getting rewarded for satisfying the needs and wants of others, rather than a socialist system wheres some angry people on reddit( or god forbidden, politicians and bureaucrats) decide, arbitrarily whose labour is worth how much. Steve Jobs became a billionaire, not because he worked 1 million times harder than a struggling artist, but because it is 1 million times more "useful", reflected by the great willingness of consumers to buy his product. It is certainly not perfect, and there are various ways the market can be distorted, including the tragedy of commons etc. but I would rather making pragmatic adjustments to a system that has proved astonishingly efficient at satisfying want rather than a hypothetical ones which accords with your sweeping and moralistic declaration that the existence of billionaire is a policy failure, which presumably means, that one would rather live in a world where people continue dying of cancer rather than a world where some drug companies become filthy rich for providing drugs that successfully cure cancer, which they no doubt will have to invest heavily and take on considerable financial risk to develop?

​

I also don't agree with the implication that tax dodging( minimization) is a flaw of character. I usually judge people based on what I would have done in their shoes, and if I were a billionaire, I would no doubt also try to minimize my tax obligation as much as possible, as I believe most people would too, including I suspect, you. Isn't it rather strange to cast aspersion on someones' character for things that you are doing and would have done? It is up to the politicians to set up a system of taxation that they believe is fair and just and efficient, is it not? Besides, France is the most heavily taxed country on earth(10 percent more than Germany or Canada) , followed closely by Italy, and consider both countries are mired in high unemployment and economic stagnation, it seems to me empirically that a country that spends more energy and time trying to figure out ways to take money from someone and give it to someone else is not exactly an ideal place to live, even for ordinary people. ( I have a lot of french friends here in Montreal looking for jobs, thanks to the dismal job market in France) Canada is also a quite progressive country, but it seems to me that here people think tax as a way to pay for this or that programs that deems beneficial to the society as a whole, while in France, the mood seem to be tax as a way of punishment, to punish people who dare to be successful. I honestly don't begrudge smart and successful people for wanting to emigrate from France.


Also, a side note. I admit I don't know much about the situation in France, but at least in Canada, where I have an acquaintance who works as a firefighter, the fire fighters are extremely well compensated(especially comparing to their education background) and only works alternative days. I could be wrong of course, with regards to the situation of France, but since it is a country that is world famous for its public sector union, I doubt it would be much different. So I am not convinced any of the hypothetical 2.5 Billions. would somehow go to the firefighters, rather than another costly and inefficient government programs that serve more to win applauds for politicians and give cushy jobs to the politically connected than actually helping people in needs.

My answer to this is a bit complicated, but the short version is: it's important to try to keep an ear open for the the best arguments made by reasonable conservatives, but one shouldn't expect to hear any of those arguments being made by the mainstream of American conservatism, who have essentially expelled reasonableness from their ranks.
~
For a longer version, I'd say, watch CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry", read David Roberts on NYT conservatism, and read Jon Haidt's "Righteous Mind", maybe also Yglesias on "The Hack Gap".
~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/15/17113176/new-york-times-opinion-page-conservatism
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777
~
I'd explain more but that's probably a whole essay of stuff. But yes, you shouldn't be at all surprised that your efforts to engage in good faith with the best arguments your "local republicans" have to offer end in frustration.

https://www.academia.edu/38034640/The_Privileged_Sex_-_Create_Space_Independent_-_Martin_van_Creveld

"The Privileged Sex" by Martin van Creveld is a great read about men's issues.

EDIT: I haven't personally read this one, but a lot of people seem to say "Is There Anything Good About Men" by Roy Baumeister is a good book on the topic as well. https://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

You are absolutely right – there is no one true way. Good for you for not falling into that trap again. Here is an amazing book I’ve been reading that explores morality and has helped me better form my own morals while understanding morals of others. I highly recommend it.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307455777/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_AXtYBb10FZHXD

The one book that I recommend to every single person I run into is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion".

The book is a summation of research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt that really changed the way I thought about how different people arrive at different moral values and perspectives, as well as articulated and crystallized what I already intuitively understood.

It had particular relevance to me as an Indian-American because when it comes down to it, the culture clash between Desi and Western values really revolves around different moral values, and the book really helped me understand the nuance and approach behind both.

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.

>f 2/3 of the public was never willing to change their view, how do you explain major shifts in public opinion over time?

The OP is talking about changing views based on facts and evidence.

As someone who has spent his whole life trying to change people's views based on objective fact and evidence, I tend to side with OP. It can work, but it is rare (although not as rare as 1%).

Many had recommended I read Influence by Cialdini. So I did. I now recommend it to everyone.

People will mostly change their views if it comes from someone who has influence over them. When said influential person presents the facts, they are more likely to change their views. But if a random person, or someone who is somehow different[1] presents the same facts, it has little effect. They don't change their views primarily because of the facts, but because of the person presenting the facts.

[1] What constitutes "different" will vary from person to person. It could be race/gender/sexual orientation/nationality/job/etc. It could be more complex: A tech geek is more likely to listen to another tech geek. Ever had/witnessed a conversation where someone says "I know what X is saying sounds crazy, but he's not (e.g. senior corporate manager), he is one of us. I think we should at least consider what he is saying". People are skeptical of the outgroup, but if someone in their ingroup says it, they are more likely to listen.

Also just read The Righteous Mind. Also highly recommend it. Too much in there to summarize, but he points out that if you want to change someone's mind, you'll have much more luck by applying Dale Carnegie's techniques than presenting facts and evidence. Be kind to people. Compliment them. Butter them up with gifts, etc. And so on.

Both are books by academics who study their subjects. Not some random bloke on Reddit.

This is not about thinking. There have been studies showing that education can make you better at defending incorrect information.

We spread and defend incorrect information because it reinforces a pre-existing bias, often subconscious. Information that is shared virally tends to align with one of humanity's trigger points:

• Tribalism (racism, they tuk me jobs)
  
• Authority (support for police, borders, force)
  
• Purity ("dirty" immigrants, "bleeding from her whatever")
  
• Sexual dominance ("I just didn't like Hillary", "Pelosi is a bitch")
  
• Fairness ("Republicans are hypocrites", welfare queen myths)
  
• Loyalty (ok for my guy to break the law)
  
  When we focus on intelligence, we are demonstrating the Democratic bias toward rules. Education = competence = success. The Republican brain wants to reward personal exceptionalism. "I succeeded, not because of how hard I worked, but because of who I am."
  
  If we don't understand these triggers, we will continue to be manipulated by them.
  
  Edit: thanks very much to my anonymous gilder, but the ideas are cribbed from Jonathan Haidt's work. Highly recommend you check out either his book or his TED talk.
  
  https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=asc_df_0307455777/

A regular perusal of the news can falsely lead one to believe that the world is going to shit. In reality, it's getting better. Media outlets much prefer to report negative happenings and glance over most of the positives. The fact that the news is dominated by 'bad' stories should tell one that 'good' or 'neutral' events are the norm, and not the other way around.

​

On the Late Late Show last night there were three guests talking about the 'homelessness crisis' in the country. It was pretty much all negativity. While I'm not ignoring the fact that there are people struggling in this country in many ways, compare the situation now to 100 or fewer years ago. Read about the Tenements in Dublin before the 1960s, for example.

​

Quality of life is increasing pretty much all over the world. This is a good book for anybody interested in learning more about that fact. I'm not surprised by the sarcastic comments here: people really take for granted just how lucky they are to live in a Western European country in the 21st century, and Ireland is a great country to live in. If only we had time machines that could transport people back 200, 150 or 100 years ago so they could see how much life has improved and how lucky they are.

I would start with the classic Some mistakes of Moses, by Robert Ingersoll.

There is a short book called Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God, by Armin Navabi, that is also a nice read.

One that I recently finished reading and enjoyed very much is The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, by Aron Ra. The book is not exactly about atheism; it's Aron's rebuttal to many creationist arguments, but Aron is a widely known atheist activist, and the book is very enjoyable.

I usually listen to The Thinking Atheist podcast, from Seth Andrews (a podcast I highly recommend, by the way). There are some book he suggested in his podcast that I haven't read yet, but which I included in my to-read list:

• A Manual for Creating Atheists, by Peter Boghossian.
  
• God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, by Dan Barker.
  
• [The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture] (https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486982921&sr=1-1&keywords=the+god+virus), by Darrel Ray.
  
• Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World, by Seth Andrews himself.

There's a link between how at ease you feel as a driver and the speed that you drive. If you feel perfectly at ease, like when you're on the highway and no one is around you, you'll drive faster. If you feel unease, like the road is narrow or there are kids playing with a ball near the road, you'll drive slower.

It seems a bit counter intuitive that making an unsafe road smaller makes it safer, but it really does change driving behavior. I'd recommend Tom Vanderbilt's book Traffic if you're interested in this kind of thing.

Interesting.

He mentions Jonathan Haight in the talk. I highly recommend his book The Righteous Mind. It goes into great detail about how and why people believe and defend their beliefs as they do. It is a fantastic book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307377903?pc_redir=1397219270&robot_redir=1

You might enjoy this - it was a fun read, full of great nuggets like the above.

http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194

So you want /u/UtilitarianOutcomes to somehow summarise the hopes and dreams of the likely several billion people who could broadly be categorised as "optimists"?


Honestly what fucking answer do you expect?

• They think the sun will rise tomorrow
  
• They think the world is broadly trending in a positive direction (they are) https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570

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.

1. People are animals.
   Miller, Alan and Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2007. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
   Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1999. The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism. Pp. 401-29 in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, edited by Helen Tager-Flusberg. Cambridge: MIT Press.
   Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2003. The Essential Difference. London: Penguin.
   Baron-Cohen, Simon, Svetlana Lutchmaya, and Rebecca KNickmeer. 2004. Prenatal Testosterone in Mind: Amniotic Fluid Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press
   
   
2. There is nothing special about the human brain.
   
   
   
3. Human nature is innate. (AMALT, AWALT, and AHALT) "The tabula of human nature was never rasa and it is now being read."
   Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2003. The Essential Difference. London: Penguin. Pp. 63
   
   
4. Human behavior is the product of both innate human nature and the environment.
   
   The scientific "arm" of people with the TRP mindset is Evolutionary Psychology.
   
   If you or your social circle have a scientific bent, I recommend having a look at Kanazawa's or Baron-Cohen's publications in the journal Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
   
   Or, if you're more into popular science, pick up a copy of Miller's "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters".

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).

Mistakes were made only covers a few fallacies, but with great depth. It's an excellent read. http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909/

I have no interest in wasting my time looking up citations when you are claiming I didn't provide a link to evidence you commit three felonies a day; the assumptions made in that argument and their applicability to you are there on that website and associated book.

The evidence is there, you can go and learn about something that disagrees with you. You can go and do some research yourself about how police plant evidence to convict the innocent, but I doubt you want to; I suspect you just are interested in finding evidence that you are right. If you actually want to learn something, go get Mistakes were made, but not by me which details all the special ways that we use cognitive dissonance to protect our mental selves. Which is, of course, something you are pretty good at.

Great post and great book. I just finished reading Haidt for an ethics and moral class. He also talks about a 6th moral pillar: 'liberty/oppression' and a conservative advantage in using these 6 moral foundations. I recommend the book to everyone in this sub.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

I think that there is a lot of exploration going on of the ideas that the author, Harari, explores in this book. We are at a crossroads as a species I believe and we really do have some major issues to sort out such as overpopulation, income disparity between the haves and have nots, providing a greater standard of living for more of the world's population, and the ever-present climate change.

For my part, I do not think we are approaching the end of days, and in fact I believe that there are many good things about our lives today (for example, BABYMETAL). On the other hand, many perils surround us (for example, triple baconator hamburgers at Wendy's, a plot if ever there was one, put upon us by some unknown force of evil).

The author Pinker, in his book Enlightenment Now offers a very upbeat outlook.

Thanks for the reference to the book. I now have two new books to read.

Before you challenge your father, or anyone on this, read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion There are multiple ways of perceiving morality, probably hardwired into the primate mind, liberal western values emerges only from the most cerebral of these moral systems. I can't speak for the more basic ones nearly as well as the author, I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand conservatives better.

Books:

• American Progressivism: A Reader has a collection of political speeches and essays from the Progressive Era, when a lot of the modern state was put into place. It lays out how Progressives created the foundations of modern America, and their vision is one still largely shared by liberals today.
  
  
• I always recommend The Righteous Mind by Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, where he talks about the different moral foundations for conservatives and liberals, how we have different foundational axioms that lead us down different paths to differing conclusions about the direction of society.
  
  
• If you really want to know about economics, there's an entire playlist of videos representing the semester course for college-level Macroeconomics you can go through; you don't need a book to follow along. There's another playlist for Microeconomics.
  
  
• Those two will give you a basic overview of economics, although I'd recommend reading more about behavioral economics and market failures as well. Dan Ariely, a psychologist/economist, has a book Predictably Irrational which goes through several examples of how people predictably act against the 'homo economicus' of Econ 101 teaching, although it's much more pop-econ, so it's not super informational.
  
  
• I'd also check out How To Lie With Statistics, which goes through examples of how statistics, graphs, etc are commonly misused in media, and what to watch out for, which can help you spot evidence that doesn't prove what the person showing it says it proves.
  
  ---
  Podcasts:
  
  
• Worldly is the Vox podcast for international politics, although it's not just exclusively Middle East, it does talk about it, including an episode on the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, and an episode on the war in Yemen being a proxy-war for two regional Middle Eastern powers.
  
  
• The Weeds is Vox's podcast for domestic politics, which is pretty good.
  
  
• Pod Save America is run by two former Obama staffers and is openly liberally biased, but quite fun.
  
  
• Revolutions podcast goes through the big revolutions of history; their causes, the systemic failures that allowed them to occur, the reforms that weren't done, the way each side was perceived politically at the time, the actual wars/battles that occurred, and the political results.
  
  The podcast so far has talked about: The English Civil War, The American Revolution, The French Revolution, The Haitian Revolution (the first successful slave-led revolution), The Venezuelan Revolution (and basically all of Northwest South America), The French Revolution of 1830, and they're now on The Revolutions of 1848.
  
  These revolutions as you listen to them end up having common themes and patterns, and their political ideas shaped modern political discourse, such that what we now consider the 'acceptable bounds' of political discourse was largely determined by these earlier revolutions.

Actually I'm indifferent to the question of whether to add a subway to staten island. If it goes through Brooklyn then the commute will still be long and it won't be a rush to move there. If there's a tunnel straight to lower manhattan there will be a huge rush to move there.

I think Triboro Rx would help more people since it would help three boros instead of one, and it would help connect the outer boros in a way that might let businesses open outside of Manhattan and ease the pressure on the Manhattan side. But at the same time I see the fairness in making sure all 5 boros have a subway. Hence my indifference.

> Are you saying that people should suffer long inconvenient commutes so property values are kept low? Who would want that?

Lots of people want that. If you read the book Traffic (https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194) they talk about how the average commute has stayed at 30 minutes throughout thousands of years of human history. Technological changes like cars and subways just allow us to live further out while maintaining the same average commute time.

So yes, some people want a very short walkable commute and are willing to pay a lot of money for that, some people are ok with a 30 minute commute for more moderate rent, and some people are fine with a 1.5 hour commute for even cheaper real estate. A lot of people would be very upset as the rents go up, just like they are in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx right now.

You live in that? Oh my. If that represents their very best ideas about how to design good traffic flow, I'd be terrified to think about what other "brilliant" ideas they come up with. My heart goes out to you.

For something uplifting, check out Tom Vanderbilt's fantastic book on traffic.

I've been reading The Righteous Mind and find it incredibly enlightening.

I come from a conservative background and am now a right anarchist (anacho-capitalist) and it helps explain my own moral journey in a way that fits global trends and humanity in general.

I really think liberals stand to gain the most from learning about the differences you talk about.

Good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmz10uQsTYE

I keep saying, atheists need a church. The social support structures provided by a healthy church group is incredibly valuable to the community.

That said, I also agree with the article's author (and Jonathon Haidt) that it's hard to motivate such organization in the absence of religious guiding principles.

I read a book on sociology that postulated that lifestyles (fitness, obesity, addiction) ARE contagious. The example was something along these lines:

Amy and Julie are best friends, and go jogging every week. Julie starts a new job and makes some new friends, who aren't very fit. Julie's friends are happy without jogging, and Julie skips her jogging date with Amy with greater and greater frequency before stopping altogether. While Amy and Julie are still friends, Amy now jogs alone and loses motivation. Through Julie and Amy are still friends, and Amy has no direct contact with Julie's lazy associates, their laziness has spread through Julie to Amy.

Gross oversimplification, but definitely food for thought.

I think that if she can learn to critically examine her own thinking and beliefs, and understand how and why people come to believe what they believe, that this will definitely be more effective than addressing just the factual problems.

Here are some book recommendations that I think can accomplish this, if she's willing to read them:

Why We Believe What We Believe - Newburg and Waldman
Mistakes Were Made - But Not By Me - Tavris and Aronson
The Outsider Test for Faith - John Loftus

I have a section on this in a PDF I recently wrote: Examining Church Claims

But take your time; pushing things will only create more resistance.

Good luck!

I read the article; thank you for providing it.

There is a huge gap in our assumptions (a la Haidt) and I don't think it would be fruitful to continue. I appreciate your good faith interaction.

Playing this game lead me to this book:

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do

https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-Everything/dp/0316036137/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536369847&sr=1-1&keywords=connected

Oh, I agree. Check out The Righteous Mind if you haven't already. Really, really, really good stuff. Helpful, even.

Edit: I should clarify, it changed the way I think so much that I've been slow to put it into practice. Yet every time I walk away from an encounter that didn't go the way I expected, I slap my head when I remember Haidt. The other thing that is helping me is Pope Francis' language of "accompaniment," which he contrasts with "proselytizing." Basically, spend more time listening then talking.

That's literally the point. Rats are clearly more highly-evolved than us, as we have had to turn to natural phenomena (birds, tea leaves, bones, etc.) to get that same benefit.

> If a hunter shows any bias to return to previous spots, where he or others have seen caribou, then the caribou can benefit (survive better) by avoiding those locations (where they have previously seen humans). Thus, the best hunting strategy requires randomizing...Traditionally, Naskapi hunters decided where to go to hunt using divination and believed that the shoulder bones of caribou could point the way to success. The cracking patterns were (probably) essentially random...Thus, these divination rituals may have provided a crude randomizing device that helped hunters avoid their own decision-making biases.

and

>In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. Geographer Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler’s Fallacy, and lead them to expect floods to be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second…Kantus pay attention to others’ success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year. To reduce the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.

and

>I’m reminded of the Romans using augury to decide when and where to attack. This always struck me as crazy; generals are going to risk the lives of thousands of soldiers because they saw a weird bird earlier that morning? But war is a classic example of when a random strategy can be useful. If you’re deciding whether to attack the enemy’s right vs. left flank, it’s important that the enemy can’t predict your decision and send his best defenders there. If you’re generally predictable – and Scott Aaronson says you are – then outsourcing your decision to weird birds might be the best way to go.

All from here, reviewing this book

There is an argument using evolutionary theory that agriculture was only adopted to increase group fitness at the cost of indivual fitness.

Lots of civilisation diseases started with the adoption of agriculture.

So there is the argument that agriculture made civilisation possible but at the cost of pure indivual strength and physical prowess.

There is lots of evidence that early agricultural societies had less than healthy members compared to hunter gatherers.

When you think about it, the indivual skills of a warrior in a large army is less important than pure numbers, most armies in the past were farmers called to war once a year, and yet the prevailed most of the time against nomad societies whos way of life made them formidable indivual warriors like the steppe people, just by numbers alone.

Edit:

If someone is interested where these theories come from, I recommend these books:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0452288193/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0452288193

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0996139516/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0996139516


https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691178437/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=joseph+henrich&qid=1558984106&s=gateway&sprefix=joseph+henr&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Not-Genes-Alone-Transformed-Evolution/dp/0226712125/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=not+by+genes+alone&qid=1558984151&s=gateway&sprefix=Not+by+ge&sr=8-1

Good for you. May I recommend this book: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. It's not preachy or angry, just some very good observations.

I recently read a book The Righteous Mind that covers this collective behavior from a psychological perspective. It's a great book and really helps explain this sort of "crazy" behavior in a way that gives me quite a bit more empathy for these people instead of just seeing them as others. Excerpt:

> But human nature also has a more recent groupish overlay. We are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of groups with other groups. We are descended from earlier humans whose groupish minds helped them cohere, cooperate, and outcompete other groups. That doesn't mean our ancestors were mindless or unconditional team players; it means they were selective. Under the right conditions, they were able to enter a mind-set of "one for all, all for one" in which they were truly working for the good of the group, and not just for their own advancement within the group.

Another example provided: concerts or raves. Although they don't have the same supernatural underpinnings, it is quite easy to get "lost in the crowd" and go crazy in a similar way.

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

Traffic: Why we Drive the way we so and What it says about Us Is a book you would probably really enjoy. I can't remember it specifically getting into traffic lights very heavily, though I'm sure the topic is covered a bit. The book is infinitely more interesting than one would ever assume by the title alone. It's an easy read, not like a text book or anything, just full of interesting facts and insight on the human relationship with driving.

Best I could offer off the top of my head would be The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. He's been doing some particularly interesting work with the psychology that makes up the differences in liberals and conservatives.

Religion probably served a really important evolutionary function, as well, by ensuring social cohesion around a shared set of beliefs and identities, allowing for tight group bonding which gave some groups a selective advantage. Of course, in today's world this can actually become harmful- particularly when the shared beliefs require a suspension of the sort of objective and reasoned thinking necessary to function in this modern society, or when they inform or motivate antisocial economic or political activities- but I'm not sure it's fair to say that humanity would be better off without it. Maybe on net today, but it's also possible that we may have relied on it in our evolutionary past.

Source, a wonderful book which can really aid in understanding those with whom our worldviews disagree.

Thank you very much! These are some really excellent thoughts and I'm grateful for the additional context from someone who has not only been here for a while, but from someone who was a mod/head mod. I showed up on /r/mormon about a year ago when my faith transition started (I only used /r/latterdaysaints prior to that for a couple years), so that "battleground" context is probably very important.

The Righteous Mind comes to mind for all of us and whatever group we might generally align ourselves with.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is a great book that makes pretty much your exact argument. Highly recommend it for people who want to better understand the origins of morality.

And of course we have a right to be outraged by these people. They stand in the way of our progress as a species in order to protect their personal faith in antiquated belief systems which have remained unchanged despite millennia of scientific advancements. But if we have any right to condemn them for failing to question their beliefs, then we must exercise the ability to question our own lest we be admit ourselves to be hypocrites. So I ask that you take a moment to question your view that having religion is a sign of intellectual inferiority, emotional weakness, gullibility, irrationality, or some other human defect. This is a convenient belief to have and one which I had myself for many years, but it's shamefully naive and as detrimental as any religion is to our efforts to unite as a species.

This view of religion is a result of misunderstanding the problem religion is solving. It's like thinking that a hammer is terrible tool because you saw someone attempt to use it as a screwdriver. Of course religion doesn't explain the physical world. That's not the point. You don't experience the physical world directly. Religion is a tool our species uses to understand the world that we do experience. The objective physical world around us that science so neatly explains only enters our conscious experience through our fallible senses and after being subjected to myriad unconscious filters and biases. We have innumerable reminders of this in the form of illusions. Consider the Muller-Lyer illusion or the Brainstorm/Green Needle illusion. Knowing that one line is longer than the other in the Muller-Lyer illusion doesn't change the fact that you perceive one line to be longer than the other. Not only is the reality you experience different from the objective reality, but even knowing what the objective reality is doesn't prevent you from experiencing it differently. Then consider the "Brainstorm / Green Needle" auditory illusion. The underlying stimulus isn't changing, but just by focusing on one phrase instead of the other, you hear that phrase. Together these illusions as well as others like them make it clear that (1) our experience is an inaccurate representation of reality and (2) the state of our mind can cause the same physical stimulus to be interpreted in very different ways. It's thoroughly established that explaining the physical world is outside the domain of religion, but consider the possibility that maybe religion can serve a practical purpose as a mental model for the experienced world.

Our survival as a species depended on our cooperation. Beyond our instinct for self-preservation, we needed to be able to see ourselves as a part of a larger whole and to be committed to serving that thing which is greater than ourselves. We needed to have an instinct for accountability to prevent any individual from jeopardizing the welfare of the group for their own needs. We needed to recognize actions which were beneficial to our survival so that we could facilitate and encourage them. We needed to recognize actions which posed a risk to our survival so we could inhibit and discourage them. Undeniably you experience things as "good" or "bad", but these aren't physical properties of the world like mass or density. No matter how much you analyze or deconstruct some action or some object, you can't find any trace of "goodness" or "badness", but that doesn't change how real your experience of it is. We find ourselves in a world which is a far cry from the one our brain was meant to function in and we struggle to navigate it. Religion creates a system for describing our experience and guiding it. It does so in the format of a narrative, a format which our brains find easily digestible. Does believing in God help us make predictions about the world? No, but maybe it gives us an explanation for why we feel like there's something greater than us that we should serve. Are some actions holy and others sinful? No, but maybe it helps us understand why we perceive "goodness" and "badness" in the world.

You don't understand religious people because they reject a system for explaining the natural world. Religious people don't understand you because you reject a system for explaining the experienced world. Religion isn't just a glitch in human behavior, its a tool for easing the transition into habitats which evolved faster than our brains could. Yes you can't reason with religious people because they don't reason their way into religion. It was just something which allowed them to make sense of the phenomena of conscious experience which aren't directly perceivable. What we need is a way to express and understand our spirituality which doesn't rely on buying into a belief system that precludes moral progress.

I suggest reading The Righteous Mind by Johnathan Haidt as some of these ideas are present in the book. I apologize for any such ideas I've misrepresented.

Haidt is a thoughtful human, worth serious attention; he wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

From The Atlantic piece:
>Speaking spontaneously, in response to questions from reporters, [Trump] returned to his “many sides” formulation and the moral equivalency of the marchers and counter-demonstrators. The president of the United States said that there were “very fine people” on both sides.

>In that moment, Trump committed the gravest act of sacrilege of his presidency. In that moment, the president rendered himself untouchable by all who share the belief that Nazis and the KKK are not just bad—they are taboo.

It is basically garbage and a waste of my hard-earned taxdollars. The reason it is garbage is because the assumption is that building highways reduces congestion. This is not true. What it does is increases capacity which means more people will then drive as the capacity has increased...so you end up back where you started...a congested road. This is what will happen in the short-term.

This, coupled with trends of one-car ownership and the beginnings of driverless cars, means this is a waste of taxpayer dollars as the demand won't exist either so there is not a need to build more highways. This is what will happen in the long-term.

Indeed, sticking what what already exists may be enough to meet the demand of a reduced car culture and more efficient and computerized driving patterns.

Arguably, a better solution is to build out more efficient regional public transportation such as trolleys, busses, rail, bike lanes, etc for a more long term solution. In the short-term shore up what already exists.

Great book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194

Yeah i wasn't being snarky. just dorkily name-dropping. (cause im uncool like dat)

In fact, as somebody who almost seriously went to graduate school for linguistics and/or cognitive science, I can attest that though Pinker is an old hero of mine, when he started getting all positive about the world i wasn't all in at first..

But he is persuasive.

.

For those playing "life sucks but i want to believe it is getting better" along at home here's a start:

​

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539983039&sr=8-2&keywords=books+by+steven+pinker

​

https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Progress/dp/0525427570/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539983039&sr=8-1&keywords=books+by+steven+pinker

​

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1487001681/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i11

​

​

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a nice book precisely on this subject, The Righteous Mind. It's a pretty good read, you should give it a try. My answer is going to be based on what I got from reading it.

> why? Consider happiness and lack of pain of people as the moral compass.

We don't just choose our moral compass, we're born with it. It's a biological tool for social life which evolved through millions of years, and it's not just about pain and happiness: ask a million people whether there is something wrong with incest between a couple of adult, consenting, simblings who use perfect birth controll and are never discovered; 90%+ is gonna tell you it's wrong, even if it doesn't cause pain and does cause happiness, even if they don't know why they find it wrong. See this for a better approximation of our moral compass.

> Now tell me which choice would be wrong following this simple rule...

At the individual level, it would cause anomie. That's just too simple a rule, and the human mind needs to be constrained by a social enviroment; too much liberty is unhealty. Then people start thinking they're cats...

At the social level, it would create a society of individualists who only ever follow the rules if they're afraid of being punished, without internalizing them; they would definitely not make self-sacrifices for the common good, since they'd have no concept of a common good (the common doesn't feel pain or happiness); and since they'd expect the same from others, they wouldn't trust each other very much. Expect mass tax evasion (sounds familiar?), little charity, low level of social capital, a lot of social conflict. Such a society would be very fragile and weak, and in the long run it would lose out against stronger societies.

Asking redditors to explain conservative goals and values is the perfect political Turing test. The answers are always awful.

The more time I spend online, the more I keep agreeing with Jon Haidt's research. He's a self-described liberal that uses his moral foundation theory to explain the underlying moral values of each party, and why it leads to the "Conservative Advantage" - that conservatives are way better at understanding liberals than vice versa. In other words, conservatives generally think liberals are naive and misguided, while liberals generally think conservatives are evil, insane, etc.

He wrote a whole book about it called The Righteous Mind, but this is a good intro if you're interested in learning more. I've never been able to look at politics the same way after reading Haidt's work. He was a life-changer for me.

One thing it really drilled home for me is just how important our physiological state (if we're tired, hungry, stressed, etc.) is to our emotional reactions. That's an easy thing you can thrown into a story for added realism. It also helped me pin down what an emotional reaction actually is in a way that makes it easier for me to think about.

It doesn't really help with motivation, though. I think that's a separate topic. For character motivations, I find Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory and his model of social intuitionism really useful. His book The Righteous Mind is a nice introduction.

Just a comment on EP (much agree with the rest btw). EP is a very solid science, with two big caveats:

• it's incredibly easy to misuse by beginners. Just say "yeah, people are like that because in our ancestral environment..." and fill in the blanks with whatever sounds about right. There are ways to make it hard science, but you won't find them in casual discussions.
  
  
• for humans, EP actually works on two completely unrelated levels. There is the genetic component, which is why everybody thinks about when talking about evolution. And there is the cultural, memetic component, which can be studied with much of the same framework, is a lot more fast moving and (like you say) a lot more relevant to our discussions.
  
  You may want to read this btw. It's not about EP, but I have a feeling you'll like it.
  
  
  
  
  

> it seems like a better idea to spread out traffic in 2 lanes than have 1 busy lane and one just for passing and turning

It's much more efficient and the road would have higher throughput if everybody used all lanes equally. Nerds who are really interested should get the book Traffic: Why we Drive the Way We Do.

Thomas Jefferson once said "A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20"

Other permutations are something like what is often attributed to Winston Churchill "If you are young and conservative you have no heart, if you are old and liberal you have no head."

http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/25/john-adams-said-it-first/

I highly recommend this book, and after reading your thoughtful comment, I think it would blow your mind like it did mine.

> I see what you are getting at -

I'm unconvinced of arguments involving game theory and utilitarianism. Although, it's easy to latch on to them. Going down a path of "articulated objectivism" in a world dominated by new atheists touting Science as above morality and philosophizing, there isn't much else to fall back on. So I understand why one might want to base their arguments such.

My own break from this approach involved (1) reading "The Evolution of Cooperation", which is as Game Theory and Dawkins as it gets, with its thesis based almost entirely on computer simulation, then simultaneously reading (2) Greg Mankiw's piece on "When the Scientist is Also a Philosopher", which to me was largely an admission from a top Economist, then finally (3) reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" that showed me the possibility of an entirely alternate perspective. Particularly impactful were his citing of Fehr & Gachter's Altruistic Punishment in Humans, his case about Kant and Bentham being autistic - implying they weren't socially capable of understanding how people actually functioned in social settings, and his takedown of the New Atheists including Dawkins.

> in part rhetorical :)

Yes, in part, the other part being sincerely open to being convinced otherwise :) .

> I think there is so much more that ails the legal system today

What do you believe ails the legal system?

To me, Dharma is at the least evolved for India, in comparison to Western canonical law. Dharma is still well embedded in our cultural consciousness, we grow up on stories involving Dharma. If you're thinking in terms of Schelling points, Dharma should be an obvious solution to many of India's societal woes. It is at the least far more intuitive for us Hindus. Western legalese on the other hand is mostly about being "technically correct" "as per the law". Maybe it works for the West, probably because it bakes in their Schelling points, but I don't see how it's good for India.

Of course I'm not suggesting overhauling legal vocabulary, but instead, dumping vocabulary altogether. Being technically correct is not the same as being correct. Subjective judgements should be acceptable. The Western legal system, for all its rhetoric about living "by the rule of law", never got around subjective judgement of judges.

> 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).

There's a great book that explains so many people who end up on this subreddit. "Mistakes Were Made (Not By Me)". It's a pretty entertaining read on the psychology of these people.

If you haven't read Jonathan Haidt's, The Righteous Mind, I would recommend checking it out. It's a fabulous book that looks into the psychology of people with different political beliefs. What qualities do people value more and how those qualities translate to supporting one belief or another.

Check out The Righteous Mind, a great and deep analysis of morality.

One of the takeaways I found fascinating is not that liberals and conservatives align differently on morality -- that's not really a surprise -- but that conservatives overall consider multiple different categories very important (e.g. sanctity, authority), while liberals HEAVILY consider fairness as a category that far outweighs the other moralities.

The short version is, it may feel satisfying to say that "Democrats will be fine with all that shit" and just sweep it under the rug, but I don't think that statement is true. I think the Democratic approach to leadership has plenty of its own flaws, but fairness is not one of them. I think Democrats tend to hold their own to higher expectations of fairness behavior than what we're seeing in the GOP.

>It didn't really change anybody's mind, and one's view on it was 99% shaped by what they were already thinking.

These books are about why they think that way. Hillbilly Elegy is about communities (mainly the non-urban communities that gave Trump huge support) that feel left behind and the recent history and thinking of those groups. The Big Sort is about the homogenization of social groups and thinking in the US, leading to why people feel comfortable throwing "grenades". The Righteous Mind is a book on the psychology of morality and politics in the US and why the ideologies are so different.

Trump may have won big with white voters of all stripes, but he also did better among Latinos than Romney, so it's obvious that it isn't just "poor uneducated whites", but if people don't try to figure out why the division is so strong and where the other side is coming from, what chance do we have for uniting and restoration?

I live in the most liberal district in one of the most liberal cities in the US. I have no difficulty in understanding that perspective and its driving forces. The other view is not so well illuminated

Edit: though I shouldn't have said anything in the first place. This is the one place I can go to avoid all the cross-talk about politics and ideologies. I like all of you guys and our light conversations about shoes. I'd rather not ruin that for myself.

I think Liberals and Conservatives alike could benefit from understanding a few things. One, personality usually dictates political leanings. So very likely many of the good things that you like about the man are some of the reasons he leans Conservative politically. Things like conscientiousness, work ethic, being protective of society at large and those he cares about can be part of a Conservative's mindset. You're a woman, so you're more likely to lean left/liberal from the get go. Women are higher in openness and empathy (in general).

I recommend reading this book, it's good science on how good people different in politics and religion: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521426339&sr=8-1&keywords=the+righteous+mind

But my personal take is as a society we've become so polarized that we won't just listen to each other without immediately thinking someone that disagrees with us is the enemy. I think if we could be more open minded, we'd find wonderful people that choose to vote differently but complement each other because we bring different qualities and perspectives that can balance each other out. The alternative is seeking a sycophantic partner that echoes our beliefs and doesn't challenge us.

There's a wonderful book that outlines the psychological reasoning behind this problem. Eric Hoffer, the author, writes that people only really join movements, even if they agree with everything they stand for, if they have only the wreckage of the previous society to keep afloat. If they've got their Jet's game, heat and air conditioning and a job that's getting them by then they're not going to spend months out Occupying Wall Street.

The longer this goes on at Wall Street I fear the only people left will be those who can mentally afford to stay there and that's going to be the radicals. It's a shame because this truly is a populist movement. I think more shit has got to hit the fan sooner rather than later.

Here's a link to the book, absolutely recommended reading if you're interested (and intellectually motivated as well as emotionally) in affecting real change:

http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movements/dp/0060916125

How about my favorite book on this topic? Besides the Centrist Manifesto (obviously), I'd suggest: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

It's a brilliant explainer on why we are so tribal in our politics... and what we can do about it.

This is actually the optimal way to drive. Every bit of road should be used. You may seem like an asshole if you're the only one doing it but ideally everyone would do it. It leads to better traffic flow. Source is somewhere in here:

http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397025677&sr=1-1&keywords=traffic

> Quite possibly the worst is the cult-like encouragement to indoctrinate your kids into Christianity.

Every so often I like to mention the book The God Virus by Darrel Ray. It goes into considerable detail on that point, and the book is just fascinating. Darrel has a way with words and is good at making a point, and I think he has a pretty compelling argument here. If you've not read it, it's honestly worth checking out.

I don't think "knuckleheads" is the right word when our natural need to divide ourselves into fiercely competitive non-family groups is something that makes us uniquely human and successful at accomplishing grand things. Source: this book.

>You accused the left of not being patriotic

Wrong. I did not. Let me re-phrase: It is when left-of-center folks shun patriotism (especially where all can see and hear) that they lose all influence over the right-of-center. This does not imply that the entire left is not patriotic. I am left-of-center and consider myself patriotic. But it seems to have become cool in liberal circles to publicly hate on the US, and that's how we end up with someone like Donald Motherfucking Trump as president. Moderate conservatives were won over by such a dipshit because all he talked about was "Make America Great Again!" If you haven't read the book I recommended, you need to.

>Three examples that clearly don't bother you

Wrong. You are assuming. Please note that I said nothing about Russians whatsoever. Don't pin that shit on me.

I get the feeling that what you're thinking of patriotism and what I'm thinking of patriotism are not the same thing. Is colluding with Russians to win an election anti-patriotic? Of course it is. However, so is saying things like "my country is arrogant and the general populace is stupid". Totally an over-generalization and I guarantee you if any democratic candidate says anything of the sort, moderate conservatives will be turned off.

Traffic calming and safety can be counterintuitive. There's a great chapter in Tom Vanderbilt's book Traffic that compares injury rates in a section of a street that has a high degree of separation between roadway and sidewalks (distance, barriers) and another section where the separation is minimal. Confusingly enough, it turned out that the sections that had higher separation/protection actually had more fatalities. It's not always as simple as it seems and sometimes what we think are good ideas can actually backfire.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, by the way. An absolutely fascinating look into something we don't think that much about (at least in-depth!)

Your experience is a good example of Jonathan Haidt's findings in his book, The Righteous Mind.

A person's mind is kind of like a rider on an elephant. The rider is Reason and the elephant is Passion. The rider just follows wherever the elephant wants to go. As David Hume said, reason is a slave to the passions.

To get someone to change their mind about something important in politics, you have to talk to the rider. If the person talking about the moral case against the Drug War had mentioned libertarianism positively, that would've immediately caused your elephant to dig in its heels and not listen any further, and that would prevent the rider, Reason, from doing anything else.

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.

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770/Genetic-Evidence-for-Unequal-Effective-Population
^ This is the basis for most of the interpretations. Twice as many women reproduce as men.

https://www.amazon.ca/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X
An interpretation of Wilders stats

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-evolving-father/201311/non-dads-or-childless-men
An interpretation of Australian's differential between childless men (13%) and childless women (10%).

and
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf
Look at tables on page 17 and 18. Which indicate a greater amount of sexually inexperienced men (my euphemism) by 40 compared to their female counterparts.

You're free to interpret that data as you wish however. If a percentage of men are sexually inactive for whatever reason, and a lesser percentage of women are not: those women are having sex with someone. To the point that even if every woman only slept with one person in her life that X amount of men would have to sleep with more than 1 partner for this to be possible.

Ultimately you have some men for whatever reason having more partners than others as is evident by the % of men who at the very least have no partners in contrast to the women. This is interesting for instance because North America is a female majority continent. If sex distribution was uniform it would be expected for more women to lack sex due to a lack of partners given the slightly lower male population. Whatever social,political, economical, biological,etc factors are at play there isn't an equal distribution between men and women. If there was the stats would favor men given that it is a female majority nation which on paper is only beneficial for men.

> We need to abandon the fear of being wrong before we will accept the possibility of being wrong.

I'm reading a book right now by Jonathan Haidt called "The Righeous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" that has an interesting metaphor: humans are 90% chimps and 10% bees (not literally, of course--we're 99% chimps ;-) We evolved in an environment that made us competitive with other individuals, but were able to form groups and hives outside of kinship to become much stronger through cooperation.

So in addition to pride and the avoidance of humiliation, we have the urge to stay loyal to the hive, even if it means hypocrisy.

/r/changemyview is sorta kinda like a hive where your identity and status is determined by how much you relax your grip on fixed viewpoints. If this sort of thing actually works, and gets copied to other forums and institutions, it might begin to permeate human culture and get people to re-base or re-form their hives on different precepts.

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.

I mean, literally all of us are driven more by emotion than reason. It's part of being human. The best we can do is try to be aware of it and develop habits to catch ourselves when it happens.

I highly recommend this book on the subject if anyone's interested.

Here is a great essay on where gender roles come from, how the males ones are constricting, and why female roles were relaxed first:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

And here is a book where the author expanded on the original essay:
http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

> You've now handwaived my entire response, the question I posed is one neither one of us can answer, so I'm a little bit confused at how you came to a conclusion.

Because we were talking about de roover not about hedebouw. So either de rover made a comparison and then laughed with himself as everyone wrongly saw that as a joke, or he made a joke where people and himself laughed with.

​

> This might be a bit too forward of me, but if you ever have the time, I'd highly recommend this book. It doesn't take political stances, instead it showcases research on why political debates never end. I massively enjoyed reading it years ago, and gave me some introspection into why I took the positions I did back then, and my immobility of changing my point of view at times.

Recomending a book is never "too forward in my opnion.

​

And i'll check it out, thx.

> It does not make sense to talk of minimizing the unquantifiable,

It's not the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics saying that, this what they say the experimenters use as a justification.

> Is it your position that the experimenters are lying (not merely being inaccurate) when they say it's okay to experiment on these animals because they are not like us?

I don't know, I can't read minds. I suspect some may have some nagging doubts but most probably just assume that non-human animals are not morally irrelevant.

> My point was that two different senses of 'like' are in operation here and thus no contradiction exists.

Granted, it smacks of equivocation. But I think the unstated assumption is that animals are morally relevant. I would go even further and argue for moral agency in animals. I believe that our morality evolved alongside our physiology.

The primatologist Frans de Waal has written several books on this topic.
http://www.amazon.com/Primates-Philosophers-Morality-Evolved-Princeton/dp/0691141290

And a compelling TED Talk here.

"What happens when two monkeys are paid unequally? Fairness, reciprocity, empathy, cooperation — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share. "

http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en

Once you're done with that, read Is there anything good about men? by the psychologist Roy Baumeister. It covers her story along with many others, and explains the differences in evolutionary terms. Brilliant stuff up there with the most insightful stuff JP has to say. Here's a short essay he did on the same topic as a sample-

https://psy.fsu.edu/~baumeisterticelab/goodaboutmen.htm

Personally I wouldn't bother telling them. It is unreasonable of you to expect cult members to be reasonable :)

If you can live your life away from them and only visit when you need to, then perhaps just do that. This book has some pretty good tips on dealing with religious family: https://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519

Not All Conservatives.

Just because the right doesn't want grown men in dresses using the restroom with their daughters doesn't mean they want gays thrown from rooftops. They're on the side of traditional family values.

Really good book on the relationship between the right and left here:

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777

Highly recommend it if you get the chance.

There is also much research that shows that the more rules you give someone, the less they think logically. This creates a problem when things happen that do not have prescribed rules as the driver/biker is used to a operating in an environment on "auto-pilot."

The book "Traffic" is a fantastic read and details a couple of studies, a really great read, highly recommended:
http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334102136&sr=1-1

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.