when i was growing up, no one told me about tragedy and malevolence – not parents, school, TV, books. (fantasy books do present evil, but outside the context of the real world, as a fantasy.) so i was not prepared to face the human condition (which has positive aspects, potential and opportunity, but there's also plenty of weakness, sin, suffering, etc. the world is full of problems, some quite hard). i was told society is great, evil is rare and weak, reason and success are common.

it's been difficult finding out how fucked up the world is. it would have been easier to face from the outset instead of as a readjustment later.

One of the meanings here is: don't lie to children about the nature of the world to shelter them in certain ways (other ways of protecting children are good, and the distinction takes some serious thought to get right). but i don't think that's primarily it. i'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. neither my parents nor teachers knew what the world was like themselves!

when you read a book that talks about important problems in the world, you get to choose how much attention to pay. you can just read through it and miss a lot of the point. that's what people normally do.

to get more out of it, you have to voluntarily choose to analyze it more, and think through what the negative issues are.

learning about the serious problems of the world isn't just a matter of opening your eyes, it takes a large, active effort. you have to put work into understanding them and making them a part of your own thinking.

it's up to you how much evil, badness, chaos, misery, etc, to voluntarily bring into your life.

it's understandable, in a way, that people usually don't bring in a lot. they don't take a book like Atlas Shrugged or The Gulag Archipelago and read it carefully and think through all of the meaning.

and they have a lot of excuses. this isn't like leaving your lights off to not see that your home is dirty. it takes a major effort to understand the world's misery and disorder beyond what is well known. flipping a light switch is easy, but you can say you're too busy doing other things to carefully think through the full consequences of some long, difficult books. or you can say that you did read it and think about it a lot – and face some of the world's evil – while not doing enough to face even more of the evil/problems (stopping short and pretending you did near the maximum, when there's really a lot more which you didn't make the effort to be aware of).

bringing disorder into your life is serious business. most people are already overwhelmed with their problems, so maybe they shouldn't. as Jordan Peterson would say, you need to get your own life in order before you should take on a bunch of other challenges! (don't overreach!)

this idea helps clarify for me why people don't get a lot out of books like Atlas Shrugged and The Beginning of Infinity. it's not just lack of intellectual skill. these books are serious business and present major world issues, and facing those is a difficult challenge which most people do not wish to voluntarily face. and even people interested in such things limit their exposure, limit what sort of evil and chaos they voluntarily bring into their mind to grapple with.

the more you think through the meaning of important books and ideas, the more you're bringing hard problems into your life and exposing yourself to ongoing tragedies. that's a hell of a thing to do, especially for someone who's life is already chaotic. (my life is very well in order today. but i took on such things in the past when my life was not yet organized. i was pretty damn fearless and this worked out very well for me, but it doesn't work out well for most people who try it – who take seriously a lot of major world problems, and see a lot of the world's folly, without having their own problems and life under control.)

it's difficult because the best way to get your life in order really effectively is to get really good at reason, but learning about reason will reveal to you all kinds of ways the world is irrational and disordered.

what i've done, over time, is keep integrating more and more thinkers into my thinking. in a serious way where the ideas actually make a cohesive whole.

i think this is very rare.

i did David Deutsch first, then Karl Popper, then William Godwin, then Edmund Burke, then Ayn Rand, then Ludwig von Mises, then Richard Feynman, then Thomas Szasz, then Ann Coulter, then David Horowitz, then Leonard Peikoff, then Jordan Peterson.

That's roughly the order, though I worked on some people at the same time. Putting them in linear order is a loose approximation. I read some initial Rand before Burke. Rand is a particularly long project that's still ongoing.

That's a reasonably complete list of thinkers I've engaged with in a BIG way who lived after ancient Rome, and who are public figures. i've done lots of smaller projects like reading a couple good things from someone, but i'm listing people where i went through tons of material. i've spent hundreds of hours on most of these thinkers. I'd guess Burke or Feynman is the least time on the list, and I've done around 20 book readings for each.

i don't just learn these thinkers as points of view, frameworks, perspectives. i actually learned the ideas for my own use and integrated them into my own thinking, and I integrated all of them into the same single worldview. i made them all compatible (while dropping some errors, but retaining major pieces – if there isn't a major piece i can get major value from then i don't spend this much time on a thinker).

Jordan Peterson has done some of this. He often refers to Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and others. However, he missed some very important thinkers. He learned some Popper without going into enough depth, and he learned a little Rand and didn't appreciate it very much. Jordan Peterson is aware of Thomas Szasz too, but sadly didn't go into depth – that's a big deal which is directly related to his profession and to public advice he gives about anti-depressants.

Most people only use one thinker at a time. On this issue they are a Kantian, on that issue a Marxist, and on a third issue they've got some environmentalist ideas they picked up at college. They don't learn from a bunch of different thinkers about the same issue and figure out how to put the ideas together into a better whole. It takes a major act of creation to do that. It takes figuring out a new idea which incorporates value from multiple prior thinkers and also stands on its own, and which is overall superior to any of the prior ideas. That's hard but very important.

i was linked to one clip of Jordan Peterson, on some specific political point, about 4 minutes long.

i watched it. i didn't love it. it's not his best work. i agreed with it, but i already knew it.

nevertheless i saw enough promise in it to find another clip, and another, and i soon found some which impressed me more and i watched dozens. and then i watched whole lecture series (not clips) and more. and i've started reading his old book and his new book.

if i'd missed that first opportunity to discover JP, i would have found him later. he's been in news articles of the type i sometimes see, been tweeted about by people i follow, been involved in things of interest to me (e.g. he interviewed James Damore), etc.

But I didn't miss that first opportunity. I took it and ran with it, energetically. I try to spot opportunities like that.

Similarly, one day from a google search I found one old blog post by Robert Spillane. The comments were moderated and my comment was never approved, and the blog doesn't get new posts anymore, and never had very many.

Nevertheless, from this one lead I immediately found his books, read some, contacted him, had some discussions, etc.

After I read FoR, I then, on my own initiative, found the author's website and went through all the links (a dozen) and read things, and some of those links had their own links with more to find (e.g. the old TCS site with maybe 50 articles was one link on DD's site), and I kept going from there by e.g. joining the TCS email group and IRC chatroom, which led to talking with DD and others, etc.

People don't pursue FI with this kind of vigor and jumping on the opportunity. This has been visible to me for many years, and I've pointed it out but that doesn't change it.

They also rarely pursue anything in life, which is intellectual, much like this. Sometimes they try a new TV show and then immediately jump on it and watch all 3 seasons. Sometimes they hear a song and listen to every song by that band. Those things aren't common. If it's actually intellectual, and requires judging something to be intellectually good (instead of fun or similar), then it gets a LOT rarer.

People get into computer/video games, and from 15 minutes of trying it out they then want to play for 25 hours in the next week. But usually that's only in a casual, for-fun way. It happens much more rarely with a serious, competitive approach to the game (usually only for people who are already very skilled and serious at some other game).

You need some energy – some caring about life and taking opportunities and running with them (and caring about reason not just "fun") – or you should not expect to get very far with philosophy or much of anything worthwhile.

Life is about doing things. Most people live in a state of half-alive, half anti-Objectivist. (Most people means you, not "other people".)

12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson:

On Quora, anyone can ask a question, of any sort—and anyone can answer. Readers upvote those answers they like, and downvote those they don’t. In this manner, the most useful answers rise to the top, while the others sink into oblivion.

Some useful answers rise – and so do some bad ones. Some great answers sink into oblivion. This is well known, yet also contradicts the claim that the most useful answers rise. JP is overstating the wisdom of the mob.

Quora tells you how many people have viewed your answer and how many upvotes you received. Thus, you can determine your reach, and see what people think of your ideas.

Their viewing and voting patterns do not tell you what they think. It omits why they like things – their reasoning, their thoughts. It also leaves you with no way to tell if they're being honest (you can't spot dishonesty through votes and view).

As of July 2017, as I write this—and five years after I addressed “What makes life more meaningful?”—my answer to that question has received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133 upvotes), while my response to the question about aging has been viewed by 7,200 people and received 36 upvotes. Not exactly home runs.

JP's goal is popularity. He judges a home run not by what he thinks of what he wrote, but by what other people think. His stated goal – his criteria of success (a home run) – is to get views and upvotes, not to please himself.

My goal, when I write, is truth. I don't judge ideas by popularity. I go by arguments. If someone has a criticism – even one single criticism from one person – I'll consider the reasoning and address it or change my mind. But if a thousand people downvote me without giving any arguments, I don't regard that as making any difference intellectually.

The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list. They commented on and shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing this list out and keeping it as a reference. Simply phenomenal,” and “You win Quora. We can just close the site now.” Students at the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to me and told me how much they liked it.

JP is a second-hander (see The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand to understand the term more). He's judging his work by the opinions of other people instead of by rational evaluation of the content of the work. He's concerned with who thinks what (social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand called it) instead of what the rational arguments about the material are.

If I were sharing a success story like this, I wouldn't quote reason-less praise. I'd be concerned with the rational benefit of the popularity. Did it get me any questions or criticisms I learned from? Did the audience have enough intellectual merit to help me improve the ideas? It's nice if people like you're work and they're helped, but that must not be a creator's primary motivation or reward. Yet JP focuses on it.

I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.

JP writes this like it's 99.9th percentile quality, when he's only demonstrated 99.9th percentile popularity. These are completely different things which JP blurs together.

Quora provides market research at its finest. The respondents are anonymous. They’re disinterested, in the best sense. Their opinions are spontaneous and unbiased. So, I paid attention to the results, and thought about the reasons for that answer’s disproportionate success. Perhaps I struck the right balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar while formulating the rules. Perhaps people were drawn to the structure that such rules imply. Perhaps people just like lists.

Market research is the wrong approach to truth-seeking. Who cares if people like lists? JP should be considering if lists are the best way to present his work – according to his own judgement about the issues themselves.

JP seeks to figure out what people want to hear, in what format, instead of creating original work and structuring it as he thinks best fits the content.

JP is better than this. He is, in various ways, an original and independent thinker. He does good work. That's why this error stands out. It's an internal contradiction he has, which conflicts with some of his very substantial virtues and makes things harder for him.

I started reading the new book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson.

In the forward by Norman Doidge, he states one of JP's themes:

if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.

This is an anti-overreaching view.

The liar's paradox is an ancient philosophy problem about confusing sentences like, "This sentence is false." If you say it's true, it contradicts itself. If you say it's false, then it seems to be true. People have identified that part of the issue making things weird is that the sentence refers to itself.

To understand it more clearly, I recognized that the sentence is shorthand and wrote out the implied words. It means: "The final, completed evaluation of this sentence is false." In other words, it's asking you to evaluate if the sentence is true or false, and then compare what you come up with to see if it matches "false".

This reveals that it's, in a way, referring to the future. This is a better explanation than the self-reference explanation. Consider the sentence, "Joe loves philosophy; he'd never be an altruist." In this sentence, the word "he" refers to Joe. That's self-reference because the sentence refers to a part of itself; but this self-reference is harmless.

You're supposed to evaluate if the sentence is true or false. And to do that, you're asked to compare two things:

1. The final, completed evaluation of this sentence

2. false

But (1) doesn't exist yet at the time you're evaluating the sentence.

At the time you're first evaluating the sentence, (1) is undefined. That's the problem and the source of the "paradox".

Sometimes when you read a sentence, you can't figure out what something means until you finish the rest of the sentence. That's OK. It can be due to forward references or the need for context. The problem is that you need to already know the evaluation of the liar's paradox sentence (from the future) at the time you're creating the evaluation.

In terms of lisp computer code, we could write it something like this:

(equals? (evaluate self) false)

But what is "self"? It's (equals? (evaluate self) false). And what is the "self" in there? It's (equals? (evaluate self) false). Each time you expand the self to its meaning, you get another self that needs expanding to some meaning, and you can never finish expanding everything. So the sentence is poorly defined.

Or we could look at as ruby code with a blatant infinite loop:

def liars_paradox()
  return liars_paradox() == false
end

This is no more paradoxical than any other non-halting program like one that loops with while true.

(This problem has been solved before, e.g. this link makes the same point as my lisp code answer. I don't know how original my English language explanation is. I reinvented these solutions myself rather than reading them.)

I tried 3 weeks (9 meals) of Blue Apron to compare to Gobble (which i used for several months). These services deliver a weekly food box for you to cook. It contains exactly the ingredients you need to make specific meals, along with the recipes.

gobble meals are significantly easier and faster to prepare, cost 20% more, and were more gourmet. selection is similar (around 7-8 meals to choose from per week. maybe blue apron had slightly more. they seem to always have 3 vegetarian meals, so if you usually don't want those then you don't get a lot of choices.)

gobble puts more effort into side dishes, more complete meals, a bit fancier meals, and sauces. i also like their packaging better because they group everything for a meal in an outer bag (except meat separate). blue apron groups up the small things for each meal in a bag but then sends several loose things to deal with.

gobble sends more food that's already partially prepared. e.g. partly cooked rice or mashed potatoes that's done in 2min in microwave. or they've sent me complete raviolis with filling. or they'll send garlic shallot confit ready to add to your dish instead of making you chop garlic. they've also sent cooked meat that you just have to heat sometimes when they want it prepared a specific way that's harder or takes longer. and they'll send complicated sauces they already put significant effort into making to save you time. i also liked all of gobble's salads (and i'm not much of a salad person), but blue apron sent a lazy simple salad that didn't impress. blue apron commonly has you put stuff in the oven for 20-30min, whereas gobble tries to get meals done in 15min. i don't really mind time leaving things in the oven but blue apron is also significantly more time preparing the food.

blue apron was fun for a bit to compare and practice cooking (since you do more actual cooking from closer to scratch) but gobble is way better overall IMO. blue apron isn't bad though, i'd use them over going to the grocery store. both services work well and consistently provide good food.

i cancelled my blue apron account (for some stupid reason you can only skip deliveries one by one, but you can't skip everything by default). next time i feel like putting higher effort into cooking, i'll try a different service (there's a bunch like chefd, peach dish, and hello fresh).

oh and on the subject of food i've gotta recommend Fasta Pasta. it's a special plastic container for microwave cooking. i cook all my pasta with it; it's easier and always comes out perfect (microwaves are more consistent about how much they cook stuff). it does rice and some other stuff in the microwave too. i used it instead of a pot on the stove for cooking some pasta from my meal kits.