0:00  
I'm going to give an overview of my philosophy ideas,

0:06  
we learn about reality by critical thinking and critical discussion. We make many mistakes, but we can find them fix them. Reason is about actively looking for errors and making improvements.

0:19  
The emphasis here is not on observation. Some people think it should be

0:25  
observations are useful because you can use them to criticize things you can say this idea doesn't match this observation. So that's a criticism,

0:35  
but observations do not guide us to the truth by themselves.

0:43  
They're just a tool.

0:46  
Some people think this is too negative, but it's important to look for bad things.

0:54  
You can't just focus on what you think is good and gloss over what the problems are.

1:01  
We don't know what the ideal is, we don't know what's perfect. But what we do know is, here are some ways that this thing sucks. And if you look for more of those, you can find more ways to make it better.

1:16  
And when you find a good trait, something you think this is why I like this one, it should translate into a criticism of rival ideas.

1:27  
If all of the alternatives have the same good trade, then it doesn't get you anything. But if some of the alternatives are missing that good trade, then you can criticize them for not having it so it only a good trade only differentiates things when some of them have it and some down so you can criticize some of them.

1:46  
epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge

1:52  
it's about how we learn how we think how we got knowledge,

1:58  
how we evaluate knowledge.

2:00  
Ideas are good or bad.

2:03  
It's the most important field because it's used by every other field. It deals with the methods of thinking and learning. So in every other field, you have to think about things. You have to learn things you have to evaluate, like, is this a good idea or bad idea? Is this true or false? And the way you do all those things, as with epistemology,

2:25  
it's the intellectual tool for dealing with ideas.

2:31  
epistemology is not like a specific opinion on how to deal with ideas. It's just the name of the field in general, for any approach to dealing with ideas.

2:42  
My epistemology, my approach to dealing with ideas has various features. For example, I believe that objective reality exists. And I think for every unambiguous question, there's a true answer. There's a truth of the matter about various issues.

3:02  
Not two truths, not three truths, not zero truth, one truth per issue,

3:08  
when it looks like there's more truth, it's because the issue is not specified enough when you have ambiguity. So the the problem could mean multiple different things.

3:19  
You know, if someone asks an ambiguous question, then there's more than one answer, depending on how you take it.

3:25  
So not only is there an objective reality, but we can know things about it. We observe reality, we deal with reality. We touch things that are real objects, so we have understanding of reality. It's not perfect, we're fallible, we make mistakes, but we can improve we're not doomed to any particular mistake. Anything that we're getting wrong right now about reality. We can make progress and fix that. So there's no limit on how good our understanding of reality can be. There's no limit on how connected are ideas can be to reality

3:59  
I reject

4:00  
Magic and religion so your house is not haunted. You're not psychic, you don't have telepathy. You can't bend spoons with your mind.

4:12  
You don't have bad luck,

4:16  
good luck, charms don't work, you know, etc, etc. all that stuff.

4:21  
I don't hate religion.

4:24  
Some religions have some decent moral advice. You know, don't murder people don't steal things.

4:31  
And there's a lot more detail than that.

4:35  
And even non religious people

4:38  
use a lot of common sense moral ideas that were created in the past when almost everyone was religious, and they were built up in a religious society and they have connections to religion style and I don't want to throw all that out just because God doesn't exist

4:54  
but God does not exist that is magical thinking

4:59  
by

5:00  
religious ideas and also maths like the old Greek stories

5:05  
have some good ideas in them. Like they have some point to them. Like they can show you things about life and how people act. But if you try to treat them as scientific truth, you will be wrong.

5:21  
Some of the key parts of reason or understanding that we make mistakes, and we need criticism to deal with mistakes. criticisms are explanations of errors. Why does this idea of fail to solve a problem and it's supposed to solve or accomplish the goal it is supposed to accomplish? Why does this idea not work?

5:42  
What's wrong with that? That's a criticism criticism. It's not flaming, insulting, attacking, saying something sucks or contradicting it or just saying no a criticism is actually giving reasoning about what's wrong with something so explaining their instead of just asserting their as an error.

6:00  
Or that you don't like it.

6:03  
So that helps us. Because in order to fix errors, we need to figure out what they are and got some understanding of them. And then we can think of what we can do about them.

6:14  
And that's the basic way progress happens. There's no way to just jump straight to the truth. Instead, we make guesses about what would be a good idea. we brainstorm things, we we come up with all kinds of ideas, and most of them don't work. It's kind of a trial and error process.

6:32  
But it's not just empirical trials. Those are good, but it's also intellectual trials. We

6:39  
try out our ideas in the critical debate and we expose them to

6:46  
attempted criticisms and we see if they survive or not, can they stand up to criticism, can they can they stand up to intellectual scrutiny?

6:56  
And if they can't, can we fix them? can we improve them or do we need a different

7:00  
idea.

7:03  
So the basic formula for learning is

7:08  
brainstorm solutions to problems, you have to have some sort of goal. First, you start with, like a goal, a problem, something you're trying to understand, figure out accomplish. You don't just like have ideas with no context. There has to be a context,

7:24  
some purpose for the ideas. So purpose comes first, brainstorming comes. Second, you try to come up with what might be some solutions, some answers, some relevant ideas.

7:36  
brainstorm is not just

7:38  
make things up or random. You can do some of that, like you can be imaginative, creative, whatever, but you can also you know, go read a book and look up information on the topic to get some ideas anyway, of getting ideas. That's fine. So brainstorm. It's not a perfect word.

7:55  
You could call it gathering ideas from any sources

8:00  
Not all sources are equal. But none of them are like 100% off limits.

8:06  
The use of sources or the methodology for how you gather ideas is itself open to criticism and error correction. That's an area where we can make progress.

8:18  
And then once we have ideas, so we have a purpose. And then we have ideas that are trying to deal with that purpose. Then the next step is criticism. We analyze the ideas, we try to look for reasons they won't work, things that are wrong with them, ways they're broken ways they'll fail,

8:35  
looking for good traits of ideas also helps because if you find this idea has a good trait, you can look out which of the other ideas are missing that good trait and you can find you can roll out some of the ideas that way but if two ideas both have a good trait, then you can't differentiate them with it.

8:53  
You don't want to say I like this idea because it has this good trait and then you ignore 100 other ideas that also have the same good trait

9:02  
So you, you have to think about, like all the ideas in front of you, instead of paying selective attention based on positive attributes, you don't want to be biased.

9:14  
And so learning is a, an ongoing process. There isn't really an endpoint you you use criticisms of the ideas and you evaluate them and you make a judgment call. There's no perfect answer that you just can't go wrong with. There's no follow all the instructions and got the right answer. You have to think for yourself, use your judgment and try to understand the SEO and do your best and if you don't do so, well, you can try to figure out what you did wrong and improve it for the future. And there's a bunch of guidance and things that can help you but there's no

9:52  
simple way there's no silver bullet. There's no simple way to always get the right answer. You have to think for yourself. You can just follow instructions with

10:00  
Thinking and being effective reasoner

10:05  
and it's also, it's up to you where to stop like how good of an idea Do you want what's good enough to solve your problem for now and let you move on. That's up to you. You know, you can just do a little bit of brainstorming on a little bit of criticism and say, This isn't very important. I'm going to stop now and move on, that's fine. But then if it's more important, you can put more work into it. And you can go back and forth. After you criticize a box, you can brainstorm some more because now you have a new perspective on the SEO

10:30  
and anyways, once you're done, you have some sort of solution, but you may in the future decided that it is lacking in some way and you want to revisit it and reopen the problem and try to improve it further.

10:44  
So this is all an evolutionary process

10:47  
its evolutionary in the sort of standard metaphorical sense that we're building up better and better things there's a gradual step by step improvement. You know, we do a little brainstorm.

11:00  
Criticism we fixed a few errors and then later we do a bit more. And then later we do a bit more and

11:06  
and then I tell my idea to someone else and he improves that. And then he tells us someone else and they improve it. You know, there's also the group effort to improving ideas.

11:16  
So things got better and better and we build up better ideas and thoughts kind of how the history of science has worked. But there's another aspect of evolution

11:28  
or learning is literally evolution. Evolution is the one and only known answer to how knowledge can be created. So in exactly the same way that genes of all ideas also can evolve

11:46  
the logic of how they work as identical. The underlying logic is replication, variation and selection. That's why genetic evolution works. The genes are able to replicate themselves the

12:00  
Copies have variation between them. They're not all identical. And some of those variations are improvements. Most aren't, but some are. And then their selection, the ones that are errors die out on average.

12:15  
And the result is adaptation to a purpose. In the case of genes, it's roughly along the lines of having a lot of grandchildren

12:26  
survival and replication.

12:30  
Humans can decide their own purposes. They can adapt and evolve ideas to solve problems they came up with

12:40  
you decide you want an idea for a particular purpose, like you want to answer a question.

12:46  
you brainstorm many ideas, you very those ideas, you're

12:54  
creating a idea pool just like a gene pool, and then you apply selection to the criticism.

13:00  
removes the ideas that aren't good enough that don't work.

13:05  
And even if this isn't done perfectly, if it's done somewhat effectively, then the result is if you iterate on this, I bet you've got ideas that are more and more adapted to the purpose you know, you got answers that fit the question better.

13:23  
The question of how knowledge can be created from non knowledge is very hard.

13:28  
People have seen that it's hard in the case of biological evolution. There have never been any other answers besides evolution that were very good you know creationism is not a good answer. God made God did it. Well, where did the complexity of God come from? You know, it doesn't. That's just passing the bucket saying, well, all the knowledge about how to make animals just came from God who had it somehow

13:54  
it's just saying it was already there for some reason.

13:57  
So where can it actually come from originally? Like how can

14:00  
come into existence when it didn't already exist, like where can I come from, without an intelligent designer that already knows how to design eyes? That kind of problem is very hard. And there are no other answers to it.

14:15  
And I'll say more about that when I get to induction.

14:19  
So the basic point of ideas is problem solving. We're trying to improve our lives, accomplish our purposes, make things better.

14:29  
So reason is about how to do that. Anything that you don't like that you don't understand and want to understand anything that's unsatisfactory in some way. That is the kind of thing reason can help with it's very broad and just good. There's nothing bad about reason there's nothing objectionable reason it's just something everyone should like and be interested in

14:51  
one of the big ideas of reason as rejecting authority

14:56  
you don't seek the truth by obeying people.

15:00  
You don't seek the truth by finding out who has the best credentials? Or who has a crown on his head? Or who says that God spoke to him?

15:09  
Or who has the fanciest diploma on their wall?

15:14  
The only way to seek the truth as you look at the actual ideas, does this idea solve this problem? Why not? What are the reasons? Do you have criticisms about do you have criticisms of it? You have to look at the content of the ideas, not the sources, doesn't matter who thought of an idea and matters, is that true or not? Do you have criticisms of it? Do you see anything wrong with it?

15:33  
You know, how does it stand up to debate

15:37  
instead of so and so says so or so. and so's opinion? Is this you want to look at? What are the actual qualities of the idea?

15:46  
What problem is it trying to solve? How does it solve it? Does that make sense? You have to look at the actual issues not

15:55  
how famous is the person who says it's good or bad?

16:01  
A lot of people in the US kind of along these lines are somewhat anti traditional,

16:07  
they want to sweep away all about ideas and sort of reforged the world into a new and better world. A brave new world

16:17  
where everyone is more rational and has much better ideas

16:21  
Out with the old in with ideas that finally make sense. They see a lot of things wrong with the world. They see ways people are dumb. They see lots of mistakes people are making.

16:31  
And

16:33  
you know, sometimes they're mistaken and they're observing incorrectly and they don't know what's going on. But a lot of times, they're right. There are a lot of problems with the world. And smart people can look around and see a lot of the problems and be right about lots of them.

16:46  
But that doesn't mean you should just get rid of everything and start over. That's a really bad idea. And it's dangerous.

16:54  
If you got rid of everything and you start over. What will happen is people will make it

17:00  
New mistakes, you're not going to get everything right? This time, you're going to

17:07  
screw up in new ways. You're going to make this whole complex system, a whole, like new society, a new way of thinking, and new everything. And they're going to be so many new mistakes. And

17:19  
these people focus too much on the mistakes that they're aware of. You know, they see the problems with the current world, but they're not seeing the problems with their hypothetical imagine world. They don't know what's wrong with it. They don't know what all the errors are there.

17:34  
And they so they imagine utopia

17:37  
because

17:39  
but once they actually lived in it, they would find out all kinds of it has its own problems, and then they would be unhappy with those.

17:47  
So my approach is

17:51  
to have some respect for tradition. It's not sacred, you can improve it, you can criticize it, you can make changes, but you want to be a bit careful about it.

18:00  
And the basic goal is stop by stop reform. You know, find something that you can improve and improve it and do that over and over and over again. And things can get a lot better. If you want to have big changes, you should do it in a lot of little steps. little steps have a lot of advantages. they're easier to understand. they're easier to judge if it's actually an improvement or not. They're easier to revert, it's easier to say, Oh, no, this was a bad idea. Let's undo that.

18:25  
When you change a lot of things at once. Usually what happens is something's got better in some got worse. And it's very hard to tell like what changes caused the good things and what changes caused the bad things. You got a lot of debates about that like the government past, like 500 new laws this year, and then some things that better and some things get worse. And it's very hard to start sort out, like which laws are good and which ones are bad, and people argue endlessly about it. But if you do things more like one at a time, you can have an easier time figuring out what the effects of each of the things you're doing is

18:58  
it's hard with the government

19:00  
Because they're dealing with so much stuff at once, like the whole society, it's hard for them to do one to one thing at a time, because they have so many urgent problems to deal with. But for an individual in your life, like maybe you're a scientist and you have your career, you're working on one or a couple things at a time, you can make like a limited number of changes

19:18  
and see what happens. You're not as overwhelmed as the whole government

19:24  
with the government. what they should do is try to change like one thing at a time, like for each topic, so that it's less confusing.

19:35  
Well, you can do that too. You can change one thing in your romantic relationships right now. And another thing in your career

19:42  
and another thing in like how you read books,

19:45  
but if you try to change like 50 things about how you read books all at once, then it's going to be hard to tell what is progress and what isn't progress.

19:57  
Anyway, the tradition thing relates to evolution.

20:00  
The way evolution works is

20:05  
it's replication with a little bit of variation. Like the new things are mostly the same and a little bit new,

20:13  
you know, think of it as roughly 99.99% the same and point 00, 1%

20:19  
new stuff that's different. And that's how evolution works. If you change like half the stuff every time there'd be two little stability and

20:28  
animals will not be able to evolve.

20:31  
They're only able to evolve because of small occasional changes rather than just constant flux and chaos.

20:39  
And then on the other hand, you don't want total stability. If nothing ever changed is the change rate was point 0000000, 1%

20:47  
you wouldn't get anywhere. So the right way to look at change is you want like 1% change or point 1% change kind of around there. It's not half and half

21:00  
It's mostly things stay the same and you change a little bit. But you have to change more than nothing. You know, it's important to have changed, but not too much all at once.

21:11  
You can take that as like common sense advice as just sort of a reasonable way to look at it. But it's also like, literally and exactly correct. Because of the tie into evolution, which is not an analogy. We actually learn by evolution. And so those are the actual constraints on how learning works, and how we can make progress.

21:35  
And the progress we make, doesn't have boundaries. It's not like we can only get so good and then we're stuck. We don't hit the end of the road

21:44  
humanity has, if it wants it, an infinite journey ahead of us. We can learn without limit, we can just make more and more progress make things better and better, get better technology colonize the universe,

21:57  
the sky's the limit.

22:00  
Because there's nothing to stop us. Fundamentally,

22:05  
our brains are capable of learning new things and dealing with reality.

22:10  
We're constrained by the laws of physics. Like we can't travel faster than light as far as we know. And that if that's a hard limit, and we never find a way around it, that's okay. That doesn't. That doesn't ruin progress. You know, we can live with that.

22:25  
And as far as we know, you know, there's nothing in the laws of physics that makes it a terrible universe we can't deal with you know, there's nothing awful there. There's nothing to limit our improvement of civilization.

22:39  
There's nothing to ever stop us from having better ideas or becoming more moral.

22:47  
To some extent. These ideas will sound somewhat reasonable and familiar to a lot of people, but there are some major differences from other perspectives on science.

23:00  
Most people are inductive us. They think that we learn by induction, which means roughly taking data sets and generalizing patterns from them and believing that patterns are likely to continue into the future. And that we can therefore make predictions about the future which are

23:19  
not guaranteed but are probabilistic. Lee likely

23:26  
there's there's a lot of variations on induction. You know some of them are invalid, blessed and you know throughout the probability part but that's the legitimate

23:37  
so their focus is on data first instead of purpose first,

23:42  
and then it tries to derive answers from data instead of from critical thinking.

23:50  
And it focuses on mathematical patterns and sort of explanations of ideas and reasoning

23:58  
and it doesn't have much room for

24:00  
Criticism

24:03  
a lot of activists tack on for this ism later.

24:09  
But that shows their inconsistency because if your epistemology is based on induction,

24:17  
you should be thorough about that, you know, if we learn by observing patterns and data, where does the criticism come in, you're just adding that in separately because it's a good idea, not because that's part of inductive philosophy.

24:32  
And so you run into problems, like, Well, do you have multiple epistemologies like induction, and some other one that has criticism in it.

24:40  
Another major idea is that evidence supports ideas

24:48  
and not only supports them both supports them by particular amount, you know, this one is strong evidence for this and this other piece of data is a week evidence for it and it adds up to

25:01  
Slightly extra strong evidence or lately extra good idea or something.

25:08  
So they try to score ideas. They don't always use number. Sometimes that's words like good are great, but they're trying to

25:19  
evaluate ideas by sort of adding points or score to them based on how much evidence they have for the idea. And then the one with the highest score wins. And that is fundamentally anti critical, because

25:32  
the the idea with the highest score could have a criticism of it that they're just ignoring. And they say, Okay, well, I subtract the 20 points because you had a criticism and they ignore that the criticism is an explanation of why they cannot work. Why it's wrong, it's false.

25:46  
They're not thinking in terms of decisive criticisms. And like clear arguments, they're just fudging everything into I don't really know how to evaluate that. So I'll add 10 points or subtract 10 points or whatever and they

26:00  
Don't say it that plainly. So it can be hard to detect. But that is what the attitude amounts to.

26:08  
Moving on to a pretty different topic.

26:13  
memes are

26:18  
memes are not just jokes, and they're not just sort of a new fad.

26:25  
And they're not just like an analogy to genes.

26:29  
Ideas literally replicate themselves,

26:33  
just like jeans replicate themselves. They caused the replication and idea gets from one person to another. And now there's a copy of it. It exists in two places

26:43  
and there is logic to how replicates work. There are things known about this and they're important and they lead to

26:53  
they can be studied, we can figure things out

26:57  
in his book, The beginning of infinity.

27:00  
David Deutsch presents some particularly important ideas about memes. He divides them into two categories based on their replication strategy. In other words, what about an idea causes it to replicate? How does it get people to share it with other people and especially share it with younger people because for a meme to last long term it has to be trance, furred from older people to younger people.

27:31  
And it has to keep doing that or eventually it would die out

27:35  
because if you transfer it to older people, they're going to die before you. You need people that are going to die after you on average, to get a meme from you or the memes not going to last.

27:47  
So there are two replication strategies for how a meme that's transferred to a new person.

27:56  
The first one is a rational name.

28:00  
It gets transferred. Because it's a good idea. It's useful, it's helpful. It solves a problem and accomplishes some purpose people want to accomplish. So people share it because it's a good idea.

28:11  
The second type of meme is an irrational meme

28:16  
is transferred to people because people are unable to criticize it. It blocks their creativity and blocks their critical faculties.

28:27  
Something about the meme makes them have a hard time rejecting it or not transferring it to other people.

28:37  
So it's sort of a mind control type of meme

28:41  
a common way this manifests as people feel bad if they question or doubt it. You see that a lot with religions where it is painful for people to consider other alternative ideas they find it hard to move away from the idea

28:58  
you know, they're not sticking with it because it's

29:00  
Good idea. There's elements of that. But there's also something that blocks them from changing from thinking critically from rejecting.

29:09  
So

29:12  
there are a lot of irrational means on the world.

29:16  
This shouldn't be super surprising if you already believe there's a lot of irrationality in the world.

29:24  
So the reason people are irrational is they have irrational ideas they have, you know, they're not just doing it randomly. They're acting on bad ideas. And by and large, they did not create these bad ideas themselves. They've been passed down from generation to generation. Many of the bad ideas are very old

29:42  
and they're highly adapted. They've had many, many generations to get fine tuned. So it's hard for people to criticize them, reject them,

29:53  
look at them in an unbiased neutral way.

29:58  
So I wanted to talk about

30:00  
About what I view as some of the most broken parts of society.

30:05  
And I think this is caused by irrational means as the underlying mechanism.

30:12  
I don't want to just blame means that people make their own choices, they're responsible for their behavior.

30:20  
My general view is

30:23  
mind controlling a person is very, very hard. And

30:27  
what means are really good at doing is controlling a person when they abdicate responsibility. If a person doesn't control themselves, if they leave like a void of vacuum, if they're passive, if they don't make their own choices then means can fill that void and control them. You know, when the person isn't controlling themselves, then the main can control them. But if people choose to control their own lives and run their own lives, then they can do that so it's up to them

30:54  
if you want to be a responsible person and think everything through and reason out your

31:00  
Voices, you can do that. If you don't do those things then

31:06  
and you just sort of try to trust common sense and go with the flow and do what you vaguely think society says you're supposed to do. If you act that way, and you're just sort of passive and obedient, then your life will be run by static means irrational names.

31:26  
So the most important irrational means deal with parenting

31:32  
because parents and the behavior of parents and how they treat their children is the number one biggest factor in which ideas get passed on to the next generation.

31:44  
Remember, the most important thing for me is the transfer of ideas from older people to younger people and parenting is the biggest factor in that so the the fiercest competition for the memes

32:00  
to evolve and

32:03  
be best adapted to succeed and got replicated instead of others, there's only a limited amount of transfer of ideas to the next generation. So only the very best means can survive and keep getting replicated. And that means that are less effective die out.

32:20  
So you got the strongest, most powerful memes where you have the fierce competition

32:26  
which is parenting. So I think parenting is the number one most irrational area of life. It's what people are the very worst

32:36  
and it's an area where there are a lot of exceptions that are made, you know, you can't hit people in general, but you can hit your children

32:45  
yelling at co workers is considered really quite rude and bad, and so on. But yelling at your children is normal.

32:53  
If your spouse does something you don't like. It's pretty unusual to take his Xbox away.

33:00  
Or take his cell phone away and say he just can't have it for a few months or a few weeks or something

33:06  
but that's done to children all the time children are given timeouts, spankings

33:12  
and just they don't have much control over their life and they're not given all the rights and freedoms that everyone else's

33:20  
they got a lot of special treatment and that treatment is in general

33:26  
worse negative people want to grow up and stop being a child they don't like it they feel mistreated they have a bad time they cry a lot and

33:35  
people treat their crying as not a big deal and just part of childhood.

33:42  
My view is that

33:45  
punishing children is not educational. They don't learn their lesson when you hurt them hurting doesn't explain what a better idea is. It doesn't explain what's wrong with their idea what they did even if you're right punishing is not how you teach someone that you want them to under.

34:00  
Stand things you need to encourage their curiosity, answer their questions, give good advice, be a trusted advisor who they actually want to come to, you know, why do kids lie to their parents so much because their parents are not on their side and they know it. They know that if their parents knew the truth, things would happen that they don't want. So they try to hide information from their parents so that they can have a little bit of control over their lives.

34:28  
So in that kind of situation, it's very hard to help your kids and share good ideas. And

34:36  
what ends up happening in short is parents hurt their children in such a way that they destroy their minds and make them irrational

34:47  
and transfer irrational means into them so that they do it again to the next generation. And this is a perpetual cycle where all the parents hurt their children and then those children grow up to do the same thing and so on.

35:02  
Another exception with parents is there especially authoritarian in most areas of life. They don't act like a dictator. When it comes to their children. They say things like because I said, so they want to just Boss Boss their kids around instead of having to deal with reasoning and negotiation and discussion.

35:25  
So the next defender is basically teachers who act quite a lot like parents and play a significant role in parenting

35:37  
today, kids have to be forced to go to school, they don't like it. They don't find that it's helpful to them from their perspective. They don't find that it serves their goals serves their interests,

35:49  
they broadly just don't find it useful or fun. They find it boring and pointless.

35:55  
That's that is not because math is boring. That's not because history is boring.

36:00  
You know, the subjects at school are actually useful. Being able to write as useful. Being able to read as useful.

36:07  
Understanding things about the world and about history is useful.

36:12  
Not everyone should learn every subject. There's room for variation. Not everyone's interest in everything. But you know, chemistry, physics, dinosaurs, whatever art, those things are

36:24  
topics that should interest a lot of people. There's a lot of good things about those topics. So how do schools make them so terrible

36:33  
teachers give lectures

36:35  
and expect students to obey them.

36:39  
teachers do not see their role as helpers. It's not like the student is living his own life and trying to learn things and trying to make progress and then sometimes he runs into a problem or has a question and the teacher helps them out and he keeps going,

36:54  
you know,

36:56  
the basic format of school is not on the students own initiative. It's

37:00  
Not his learning project. The teacher has a curriculum and agenda that she's imposing on the soon

37:08  
the teacher already knows before the class starts, what the right answers are. There's no room for criticism. There's no room for debate. There's no room for different opinions, there's an answer key, right? The answers the teacher wants on the test or get a bad grade.

37:21  
So it's completely different than rational thinking and discussing and learning

37:26  
it's anti fellow blessed it's authoritarian the teacher thinks they know the truth and students are just shut up and listen and they interpret in general dissent as disobedience instead of being able to deal with the scent with arguments and reasoning and you know a lot of times the kids wrong you know if the kids doubting the thing in the textbook, sometimes the textbooks wrong, but the majority of the time the kid is wrong, but how you deal with someone who's wrong makes a big difference. You know,

37:54  
are you mean to them? Are you condescending? Do you just tell him to learn it your way or do you actually

38:00  
The beta like it's an open question and something to think about and your valuable to and where you're trying to seek the truth. Which way you do. It makes a big difference to someone's experience having a right answer forced on you that you think is wrong is psychologically the same experiences having a wrong answer forced on you that you know is wrong.

38:21  
You know, if an idea is being forced on you, and you think it's wrong, it's the same thing whether it's true or not. Because from your perspective, psychologically, you think it's wrong, and they're just making you accept this idea whether you like it or not, and they won't give reasons they want explain it to your satisfaction. They won't address all of your objections. And then they wonder why people don't learn things very well. It's because they didn't get all their objections address, they just copy down what the teacher said and regurgitated that

38:46  
why do schools have tests? You know, tests are not a good learning tool.

38:52  
It's not like tests are there so that you can check your understanding so you can learn it better if that was the actual purpose.

39:00  
They were designed for that. And they were good at it. Tests would be voluntary.

39:05  
You know, people would say, Oh, I think I learned a lot. I want to take a test now and check.

39:12  
The purpose of tests is to find out if kids are a Bane did did he lesson that he read the reading he was supposed to read? Does he remember the things I want him to remember,

39:23  
tests are part of the enforcement mechanism because kids are always not doing what the teacher says it's hard to make the kids obey everything.

39:32  
So the authority

39:35  
has ways of checking whether

39:40  
kids are conforming or not.

39:44  
So there's constantly vigilance and monitoring to stamp out resistance, rebellion revolt.

39:52  
So it's a really bad situation

39:56  
and the fundamental problems are that it's not

40:00  
Critical and it's not the kid trying to learn things to solve his own problems it's him being told what to do and what to think.

40:09  
And not even being able to ask many questions or give many objections and doubts

40:16  
in real learning you should be able to say like I disagree with us here's why and you can do that a lot even if you're wrong a lot and you learn more that way because you find out why you're wrong you know you you have to share your ideas even if they're wrong and get real answers to them and parents and teachers are really bad at that

40:34  
another area society have a lot of issues with is romantic relationships and monogamous marriages and love and dating

40:47  
and also a lot of social status stuff that is partly related to those things but it's partly separate you know you can have social status at work and career in trying to be famous trying to have a lot of Twitter followers there's there's a

41:00  
Lot of social status stuff where people compete not for having good ideas or being productive not for creating a lot of wealth or

41:09  
knowledge but

41:12  
for who can win a popularity contest and put down other people and appear better than them. And one of the common social dynamics rules is the law of least effort whoever appears to put less effort and as higher status whoever's chasing the other person on trying harder is considered low status and that's really awful and irrational because it it punishes people who care about things in our in our energetic and curious and interested in actually want to put effort in, you know, the sort of default assumption of how people judge social status is everyone is lazy and doesn't want to do anything and whoever succeeds the most of that is clearly the best person the

41:53  
the one with the most money and subordinates and so on.

41:58  
Anyway, romance has those dynamic

42:00  
And quite a bit more.

42:04  
It has ideas like soulmates which is magical thinking and unrealistic. It has promising to be together forever. How do you know you won't change your mind? How do you prevent changing your mind? People don't take these things seriously, like

42:20  
what stops you from drifting apart? Is it ever good to drift apart?

42:26  
Sometimes people think about these things, but then they also just go on promise. You know, we're in love, it'll last forever, etc. And it's hard to talk openly about these things. It's discouraged to share your doubts with your romantic partner.

42:42  
Rules for jealousy and exclusivity

42:46  
do not seem designed for practicality today.

42:50  
You can see how they were more practical in the past before we had birth control.

42:56  
People wanted to know that like this was their kid.

43:01  
I think if someone wants to sleep with someone else, and then they're prevented from it by

43:09  
just massive societal pressure. That's not a good situation.

43:16  
But that happens all the time. People all the time are tempted to cheat, you know, they see some upside and they see appealing it and then they don't do it because it would destroy their family. You know, there's a major downside. So there it's sort of like they're not doing it because of a threat. And that is not rational persuasion. That's not understanding why it is best to be exclusive. I don't think it's always best to be exclusive people act like monogamy is for absolutely everyone. And it's just the way relationships work and they take it for granted. And I think that's one option. And there are some good things about it on some bad things about it, and it shouldn't be treated as the automatic option for everyone.

44:00  
Lot of people

44:02  
clearly don't really want monogamy. So they do serial monogamy. They have a bunch of short term relationships so that they can date a bunch of different people and hook up with a bunch of different people. And

44:15  
like is it really making the world better? If it's if there's no overlap between any of those people ever? Like

44:22  
the reason they're doing that is because monogamy is just so ingrained in the world that they feel that they have to instead of being able to think rationally about it.

44:31  
I also think that sex and love and strong feelings are overrated they're not

44:39  
they're not as good or useful or important as people act like

44:45  
people exaggerate how fun Saxo somewhere to how they exaggerate how fun beer is, and how wonderful coffee is

44:53  
there are these

44:55  
symbols and our culture that you're supposed to really, really like.

45:00  
So people say they do

45:04  
and there's not a lot of room for people to

45:10  
make their own choices.

45:14  
I don't think most people should have weird lifestyles they'll probably fuck it up. They don't really know what they're doing. You know, they're not wiser than common sense. But I think that

45:26  
it's a lot more oppressive and pressuring than it has to be.

45:31  
People will know each other for like two years and then they're making a lifelong commitment when they're in their 20s

45:39  
they don't know what they want when they're 40 they don't know what will make their life better and then they don't know what kind of person they should be with and they they choose a lot based on sex appeal who they're going to be a co parent with, like, does that make sense

45:55  
this finding someone sexy mean they're going to be a good mother.

46:00  
It's well known that people got foolish when they have romantic relationships. And also that a lot of romantic relationships fail and then people got hurt. And I think those are bad things. I think something that causes people to be foolish and biased and not thinking clearly as dangerous. And people are not respectful of quite how dangerous it is, and something that routinely ends up hurting people in big ways. I also think that's dangerous and people are not respectful of how big a problem there is there

46:34  
the large majority of relationships and and breakups

46:38  
of marriages. Quite a few end up in divorce. And then of the ones that don't end up in divorce. A lot of them are unhappy marriages where they're staying together because of the kids or social pressure or

46:53  
just not changing things like not wanting to blow up their life and have a big event.

47:01  
So there's some really broken things there. There's some things wrong there. And

47:06  
this is not random

47:09  
courtship behavior

47:11  
determines who is apparent with who, in what circumstances. romances, the thing that leads up to parenting. And so it is fairly closely connected to parenting means it is an area where the rational memes

47:27  
would compete over a lot because it has influence on what ideas got transferred to the next generation.

47:37  
So that's a bit about some of the problems with the world.

47:43  
Moving on. I'm going to talk about some of my ideas. So so far, I've talked about ideas that I agree with, but I did not invent them. I studied a bunch of thinkers and read a bunch of different perspectives and thought about it myself and talked with people and tried to organize the ideas and

48:00  
understand them better. And the things I've been telling you are not original to me there. It's my version of it. I've said it in my own words. But you know, I've only made like relatively minor changes

48:17  
to what other people thought of before me.

48:21  
So now I'm going to talk about some of my own ideas where it is primarily something original to me some sort of significant new idea.

48:33  
So this is some of my work in philosophy trying to contribute progress.

48:40  
So the first ideas path forward

48:44  
this is about

48:47  
how to have discussion and organized and learning so that there's always a path forward which means a way that your mistakes can get corrected

48:58  
and the focus is on

49:00  
Suppose that I make a mistake.

49:04  
And for simplicity, make it about something important. And part of my public career.

49:10  
This applies the best to public intellectuals. So like people who write blog posts and write books, authors, scientists, stuff like that. So they're doing their career and they make a mistake and someone else on the planet knows it's a mistake. He knows a better idea. He knows the truth. Is it possible for the correction to get from this person? Who knows the better idea to the guy who just made the mistake? Is there a way for him to be told about his error and for it to be fixed?

49:38  
And if there is a way is it reasonable? Is it realistic? You know, is it really, really hard or the

49:44  
more actually going to happen?

49:47  
How difficult Are you making it for people to correct you

49:53  
and

49:54  
so I have ideas about how to do that and why it's important.

50:01  
that people are currently really quite bad at it. And a lot of what people do is they say, Oh, I'm really busy. So I only listen to prestigious people. And they just won't really take feedback from the vast majority of people on the planet.

50:16  
And I think that's really sad because it prevents error correction.

50:20  
And you know, we never have all the perfect answers so it's understandable that you're knocking know everything. But if someone doesn't know something that's really sad, if you don't get this knowledge that already exists, if you block it off from getting to you, so you stay wrong, even when someone knew the right answer, and was willing to share it with you. If you still stay wrong, something screwed up.

50:42  
So you need methods for dealing with feedback, criticism, comments, etc. which don't take too much time and don't block off a bunch of good ideas. And so I have a methodology for how to organize your intellectual work in your discussions and so on.

51:00  
In order to do that, well,

51:02  
and some of the main ideas are not ignoring criticism,

51:09  
and that might sound time consuming. So the basic thing you do is you need to reuse things.

51:17  
If you got a bunch of like, say, you have too many different criticisms, comments, arguments coming in, you define the a bunch of them are the same. And you just write one answer you right? Like an essay. And then for each person who says the same thing, you just link them to the essay instead of writing. And again, so that saves a huge amount of time. And you don't even have to use your own. So if someone already wrote that I say someone else wrote it, then you just link to their essay and you say here, this is what I think this answers your question. And so you can get very short answers when you reuse material that already exists. And then if someone points out of criticism, without Si, you know, now there's something new to say. And it's worth improving the essay and if this is done over and over and over again, the essay gets really good.

52:00  
has all these criticisms

52:02  
that has all these fixes to it, and points of clarification and footnotes that answer potential criticisms in advance, and so on and so forth. And it gets like really solid and robust. And if you do this with lots of stuff, you end up building up knowledge, making progress, you got better information in the world. And whenever someone has a criticism, it's important to remember that.

52:28  
So first of all, you could be wrong. And second of all, if they're wrong, it's good. If they can learn something, you want to shut them down in a way where they can correct their mistake, which means sending them off to an explanation instead of just saying you're wrong or ignoring them. If you can give them a link so that they can learn something new. You do that all the time,

52:47  
then

52:50  
your critics will be able to improve and you'll get better feedback in the future because people know more

52:57  
and if you're a famous and popular enough that this is like

53:00  
Still too much work. Even though you're reusing ideas all the time,

53:05  
and just giving a bunch of links,

53:09  
there are two big things to do. One is

53:13  
where all these ideas coming from. Um, if you can find like patterns, if you if you can find broader patterns and more general principles to address, then you can make essays that cover more ground at once. And so that simplifies your job. You know, instead of having like, 500 different answers to 500 questions, you can realize, Oh, these 10 questions actually all relate to the same error and we can cover all that with one essay. You can organize your knowledge butter and that's the way to improve it and streamline things and the other thing is, if you're so famous that you're getting like you know, your millions of fans, then you ought to be able to have fans who help you and answer the easy questions for you. You know, you can have proxies who talk for you and

54:01  
You know, point people to your FAQ or whatever, and you can hire people to help you to. If you have that many fans, you ought to be able to afford some help.

54:12  
And, but for the vast majority of intellectuals, they're not that popular. They're not flooded with inquiries. So it's a lot simpler,

54:21  
but they never over the last do not have path forward. And there's various other things you can do. Like even if you're not answering every criticism, you can answer a random selection of criticism so that it's not biased. You can answer some some issues that were proposed by that were chosen by your opponents instead of the ones you want to answer. You know, you can let some of your critics choose a couple of the points that you're going to answer to try to prevent bias.

54:47  
You can periodically publicly answer what you think were the two best criticisms you got this month. Like I think a lot of intellectuals already spend enough time it's just answering critics engaging with people that

55:00  
Thinking about things, it's just not organized well,

55:04  
and so for almost everyone, they feel completely like shut off blocked off. There's just no possible way to make progress on pointing out any mistake the intellectuals making, even if they're right, there's just no way that he's ever going to listen as the general impression most people have with most intellectuals, and that's really broken.

55:24  
And so I have a bunch of essays about that. I think it's important that there's a lot of room for progress there.

55:31  
All right, next topic,

55:34  
powering up and doing easy slash official things.

55:38  
So

55:40  
activities, you do

55:42  
have a cost if you write an essay, it takes a certain amount of work if you build something that has a certain amount of effort involved, and the more you learn the more cheaply you can do things like you become a better writer, and then you can write an essay more cheaply,

55:59  
it takes less offer.

56:02  
So

56:05  
the basic pattern of life should be

56:11  
the more you can push the learning and the getting better at things earlier in time, the more stuff you're going to get done, because when you're doing it, you're better at it.

56:21  
This is why we have our education

56:24  
in childhood instead of in our 70s, you know, first you learn a bunch of stuff, and then you use that it wouldn't make sense to first do a bunch of stuff and then learn a bunch of stuff later. You know, so the order is very important. And to some extent, this is common sense. But I think it's not

56:42  
taken seriously enough and

56:45  
looked at in a thorough enough way.

56:48  
So

56:51  
my basic idea is that anytime you're doing something that's hard, that's inefficient, that means it is expensive, that means you're not very good at it.

57:00  
You're spending a lot of resources, time and possibly time, focus, attention, creativity, possibly money, materials, etc. Doing it.

57:11  
And

57:14  
anytime you're doing hard things that is taking effort away from learning is taking effort away from powering up from getting better at things. And so if if you want to do something, the most efficient thing to do is learn a lot until it's actually really easy. And then do it when it's cheap. And it doesn't take that much resources. So being really cost efficient. So I think the pattern people get into is they want to do things now they don't want to wait. And so they put learning off till later and they do some stuff and often it goes wrong because the the more marginal things are, the more you're on the borderline of just barely being able to do it, the more likely it is to fail or have setbacks whereas the risk of

58:00  
The better you get at things, the more the risk goes down if you're doing something that's like way below your skill level, so it's really easy, you're probably not going to fuck it up. But if you're doing something that you just barely at your skill level, there's like a good chance they'll screw it up.

58:13  
So people anyways, people are trying to do things like now they're in a hurry

58:19  
and they they put off learning towards till later and then they never get to it because their projects

58:28  
keep taking longer than they expect and being harder than they expect and things go wrong and errors happen and

58:35  
and so they're so busy because of their failed projects that now like they really don't have time for learning and they're rushing off to the next project. And

58:47  
so they you can get into a really bad pattern. But if you go the other way,

58:53  
if you really focus on practicing learning, getting better at things instead of

59:03  
Instead of doing some particular goals right away,

59:09  
then when you do do the goals, there are a lot cheaper and you have all this free time. And you can learn a lot more and do even better and more advanced goals. And those are also cheap. And then you can,

59:19  
it can be a really virtuous cycle. And you can have basically exponential games against someone who's doing it the other way.

59:30  
And a good way to think about this is in terms of investment and consumption. So you have a budget of resources and you can invest them in yourself in your future in in having a larger budget in the future because you're getting interest or you can spend it and the earlier you spend and the more you spend, you got a lot less money in the future than if you invest early on

59:56  
and so this also relates to overreaching.

1:00:00  
Which is one of the main mistakes I think people make in life.

1:00:05  
The idea here is

1:00:08  
over reaching is doing things where your rate of making errors is overwhelming your ability to correct errors.

1:00:18  
People are only so good at dealing with errors at finding out what they're doing wrong, correcting it and improving it at recovering from errors and so on.

1:00:30  
So if you do things that are too difficult, then lots of problems come up and it overwhelms your problem solving ability and you have a really bad time you got stuck, you got stressed out, you maybe give up

1:00:44  
and if you do something that's not too hard for you, then there's going to be some problems. Some things go wrong, but it's manageable, you know, it's not scaring you. It's within what you know how to cope with and deal with and then it goes fairly smoothly.

1:01:00  
So I think people get really behind on learning and they don't learn enough. And then they do projects that are way too hard for them. And then they're not that great at problem solving and dealing with errors and problems and mistakes and things going wrong.

1:01:15  
And then they have a lot of those, you know, tons of it,

1:01:20  
because they're doing things that are beyond their skill level.

1:01:23  
And so they they can't deal with all those errors. And then what happens is they give up on truth, they give up on error correction, they're not able to make everything work, right. So they just start fudging things and taking shortcuts and then you get into a really bad state that way and you also get a lot of short term thinking because their long term plans just chronically don't work out how they planned it.

1:01:48  
And so they reach for a lot of short term benefits that sacrifice the long term

1:01:54  
yes or no philosophy is about

1:01:57  
evaluating arguing.

1:02:00  
ideas, criticisms and a yes or no way a binary way rather than on a continuum with a score with

1:02:12  
good, better, best,

1:02:15  
only two outcomes, yes or no.

1:02:18  
So it's a very decisive approach and I think that it makes epistemology a lot more elegant and cleaned up and correct.

1:02:28  
And it got solves a bunch of the problems popper ran into when he was

1:02:35  
reimagining epistemology. He he made major revolutionary changes by rejecting induction and developing an evolutionary epistemology and

1:02:47  
talking about things like criticism. And

1:02:53  
I think that if you take his work and then you add on top of it, this binary evaluation of ideas and criticisms

1:03:00  
It fixes up the issues that had and makes it work better.

1:03:08  
So the basic thing I object to is the concept of a strong argument or the strength of an argument

1:03:15  
or the weight of an argument. Well, also evidence works the same way.

1:03:21  
So I think that the right way to look at criticisms as they're either decisive or they're nothing so a criticism should say why this idea fails to solve this problem why it doesn't work

1:03:33  
and you need to evaluate either the criticism correctly refutes the idea so we can reject it or it doesn't it's one way or the other I think all the the fudging the hedging the equivocating just makes things worse and ambiguous.

1:03:48  
For each of these things. I have essays and other materials with a lot of details.

1:03:53  
Um, I've been doing this for a long time I've got a lot of material with more explanation. So this is only an overview if you

1:04:00  
doubts and questions and so on, you're welcome to Ask them or go search for more information on my websites, I'll link you to them later.

1:04:10  
So

1:04:12  
ideas do not have solve problems. Either it works or doesn't work. Either it meets the criteria of a solution or it doesn't. And there there's a lot of confusion about this because of vague problems and vague evaluations. So

1:04:29  
people think there's like a half solution because it like sort of partly works. But that's because the problem didn't clearly define

1:04:37  
what constitutes success.

1:04:40  
Like people think the problem is make a bunch of money and then they'll think if you make like 20 grand, that's like a really good solution. I can make like 10 grand it's like half a solution.

1:04:50  
But

1:04:52  
the problem is, the problem is, Vega didn't say how much money constituted success. If you make your problems more clear, and you say the problem is make 15

1:05:00  
Grand or more than you can evaluate which idea solve the problems better. And you can consider which is the problem I want to solve, make 10 grand or more, make 15 grand or more, make 20 grand or more like what is the actual goal. So clarity about those things, improves thinking, discussion, etc.

1:05:18  
So when an idea seems to have solve a problem, what it's really doing is solving a different problem with lower standards like making a smaller amount of money.

1:05:29  
So that's one of the ideas that helps enable more clear cut black and white

1:05:36  
evaluations by deals.

1:05:40  
It also helps with the path forward stuff because if everything is muddy and grey, and you can never really agree or disagree with anything, or rule anything out or reject anything,

1:05:53  
then

1:05:55  
there's no real way to answer critics because the criticism just mounts up and you have for food every

1:06:00  
thing and it's all a matter of arbitrary opinion and whatever, you kind of get a mess. But if you can actually categorize ideas as either refuted or non refuted and the non refuted ones needs to be addressed

1:06:14  
and you can actually organize ideas and a good way, then you can make progress butter and you don't have to just start

1:06:22  
deciding what to ignore, you can actually deal with the issues.

1:06:28  
Alright, moving on now to economics and politics.

1:06:33  
I'm a liberal, and liberalism means freedom from violence interact voluntarily for mutual benefit or leave each other alone. That means peace and free trade. This lets everyone left by their own ideas instead of being enslaved. So this is not what liberalism means day in America because people use the word wrong, but liberalism is supposed to have to do with liberty and it is a long tradition of thought that is associated with free trade and free

1:07:00  
You know,

1:07:01  
and small government basically

1:07:05  
and

1:07:06  
rebellion against authority or limiting authority, at least having the government not just be like limiting the Kings authority and saying that citizens have rights and the king doesn't just have arbitrary control over everything, you know, putting

1:07:22  
checks and balances into the government putting restrictions in place limits on power, that kind of thing is liberal. And today the so called liberals on the left are in favor of big government, more powerful government, more paternalistic authority, controlling your life

1:07:40  
and more controls on trade more regulations

1:07:45  
instead of leaving people to be free.

1:07:50  
So I view that as more and more slavery instead of letting everyone left by their own idea and be left to their own devices. They're being told what to do. They're having

1:08:00  
less control over their life. They have masters in the government who are making some of their decisions for them.

1:08:09  
So there's a lot of confusion about the word freedom.

1:08:14  
The important thing is

1:08:17  
freedom means not having violence used against you.

1:08:21  
It means you can live your life and be left alone.

1:08:26  
It's not a positive right to things like health care. Not having health care doesn't mean you aren't free. Free means that you can do your best with your own resources to improve your life and live according to your own ideas, your own values, your own judgments of what is a good life.

1:08:48  
freedom means you can perceive yourself interest and you can make your own choices and you can think for yourself and you can have unconventional ideas. You can be an outlier and no one's going to stop you. No one is going to use violence.

1:09:00  
To prevent you from living your life,

1:09:04  
that doesn't mean they're going to give you stuff. It doesn't mean they're going to help you. They're just not going to punch you or shoot you or take your property away from you.

1:09:15  
Violence is bad. And not just because it hurts people. You know, suffering is bad, but also violence is irrational. Violence is not truth seeking when you punch someone to get your way

1:09:28  
it doesn't matter who was right if you were right and you punch him you got your way if he was right and you punch him and you get your way

1:09:38  
might makes right is not truth makes right it's not looking for the truth. It's not critical thinking. It's not trying to figure out what's best

1:09:47  
property is part of living your life and having control over it.

1:09:52  
Just controlling your physical body is not enough to have a reasonable life. You need to be able to

1:10:00  
shelter, have clothes, have tools interact with nature and do things like make a fishing pole or make a trap to catch an animal

1:10:10  
or more advanced things in the modern world, have computers, iPhones, etc.

1:10:16  
Being able to have those things as part of how you use your mind and your ideas and deal with reality.

1:10:25  
You deal with reality, partly by controlling your muscles in your body, moving your hand on a certain way,

1:10:31  
turning your head in a certain way, looking at something gathering, information observing

1:10:36  
but also, you know, you deal with pieces of reality objects and to be able to have some control over those objects in a long term way,

1:10:46  
like building a house.

1:10:49  
So property is

1:10:53  
being able to maintain some of your changes to reality, some of your ways of dealing with reality.

1:11:00  
Over time,

1:11:03  
and he just can't have a reasonable life without property

1:11:08  
without

1:11:11  
without some stability of what physical resources are available to you

1:11:16  
being able to know like, this is mine. And if someone disagrees with me, it's still mine. I can do whatever I want. And he can just do his own thing separately.

1:11:26  
There has to be some way that you can acquire resources and then your decision controls the resource so that you can make plans about the future that don't get disrupted.

1:11:40  
So when people disagree, there's basically three things they can do.

1:11:47  
They can talk about it and try to agree

1:11:50  
they can leave each other alone and go their separate ways or they can fight they can try to hurt each other. They can try to control or enslave each other or kill each other, you know.

1:12:02  
So liberalism is a very, very in favor of peace and non violence. Yeah. If you want to voluntarily try to interact, discuss, persuade each other, come to agree about something great

1:12:17  
if you find it easy and you're able to trade ideas or property or whatever, great and if it's not working,

1:12:26  
um,

1:12:28  
do not resort to violence. Just go your separate ways.

1:12:32  
Violence doesn't improve things,

1:12:36  
defenses, okay? Because

1:12:39  
when you're defending yourself, the outcome was going to be violent. Either way, if you don't defend yourself, and you just let him shoot you. It was decided by violence and if you do defend yourself, it was decided by violence by defending yourself. You're not making things worse. You're not deviating from truth seeking you're not changing something that would have been determined by the truth.

1:13:00  
into something that's not going to be determined by the truth. And when I say the truth there, I mean your best judgment of the truth, because we don't,

1:13:07  
we're not omniscience like we don't know the ultimate final perfect truth. But we have our best understanding of it. And we want that to inform the outcomes of things.

1:13:17  
So I'm in favor of capitalism, which means free trade. It means if I want to have your thing, and you want to have my thing, and we can agree on it voluntarily, if we think it's in our mutual best interest, if I think it's in my interest, and you think it's in your interest, then we can swap

1:13:35  
and we don't, we can, we can swap not just goods but also goods that are called money, you know, gold coins or paper dollars or whatever.

1:13:46  
And we can also swap services including labor, I can work for you or vice versa.

1:13:52  
And that can be a one time thing or it can be ongoing, you know, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, you know.

1:14:00  
That's no one's business but ours

1:14:03  
that only the people involved in the interaction should really have a say in it.

1:14:08  
And if they both like them, it's just between them.

1:14:13  
And it's not other people's place to butt in and say, well, you both think that that would improve both of your lives, but we're not gonna let you do it.

1:14:23  
That's an attack on freedom.

1:14:27  
And there's, there's a lot of economics for why capitalism works and helps people and so on. And if you're interested in that, I've got some authors I can recommend but I'm not gonna do a economics lecture right now.

1:14:44  
One author that's particularly good as George reason if you go to his website capitalism.net You can find his treatise on economics on the sidebar on the left.

1:15:00  
The book is called capitalism a treatise on economics. And it is really, really good.

1:15:07  
And he also has a couple dozen short ebooks on Kindle that you can find

1:15:14  
and he will be linked in the video description.

1:15:19  
Alright, so another important idea of liberalism is the harmony of interests doctrine.

1:15:27  
The idea is that there are no conflicts of interest between people fundamentally

1:15:34  
fighting each other is never in anyone's interest. There's always a solution that's best for everyone. It's a win win solution. There is a truth of the matter that everyone should prefer to any other alternatives.

1:15:47  
There don't have to be winners and losers. We can all be winners

1:15:53  
now that includes leave each other alone. It's not saying that we always have to interact that's completely fine and legitimate that sometimes we

1:16:00  
our separate ways and no one loses. That's fine.

1:16:05  
It's not really much of a win. But you know, it's better than violence. And there's nothing wrong with it. But the point is, no one has to lose.

1:16:14  
It's like neutral outcomes are okay. But, but people actually losing, being hurt, being sacrificed, been screwed over. That's not okay. That shouldn't happen. It doesn't have to happen. When that happens. It's a mistake, something someone's made a mistake and better ideas could solve the problem.

1:16:32  
So people think there are a lot of conflicts like it's in my interest to get this job and it's in your interest to get the job. We're both applying for the same job. So I think that's a conflict but

1:16:46  
it is actually in both of our interests that

1:16:49  
employers be free to

1:16:53  
hire the best person if you didn't have that situation as the general context, then there wouldn't be a job of

1:17:00  
Available Anyways,

1:17:03  
I'm not losing. If I don't get a job that I wasn't the best candidate for,

1:17:08  
I can go find a different job.

1:17:12  
If I think that my interest is to get a job that I don't deserve. If I want the unearned I am trying to fight with reality and reason. And that's actually not going to make my life better.

1:17:26  
I think a helpful way to look at this as there are no conflicts of interest where violence is the answer.

1:17:34  
So

1:17:37  
they never justify violence.

1:17:41  
It's never a situation where someone's going to be screwed in such a significant way

1:17:46  
that they're actually better off going to war over it than losing out so you can see that easily with the job situation. You know, I might not be thrilled that I didn't get the job but it's not it doesn't merit violence.

1:17:58  
I'm better off applying for another job.

1:18:00  
than trying to shoot you and take the job.

1:18:06  
And why is it that I can go peacefully do something else. And that's okay. Because there are other good things in life. There are other ways for me to get ahead and get things I want, you know, I haven't been blocked and screwed over. I'm not stuck. I'm not being forwarded from having a good life.

1:18:25  
I may not have

1:18:27  
made progress on this particular path. But there are hundreds of other paths that are not blocked for me to make progress.

1:18:35  
My favorite I say on this is called the conflicts of interests. I think it's chapter four of the virtue of selfishness by ein Rand.

1:18:47  
All right. What about government what's the proper role of government is to protect men from violence.

1:18:54  
The thing we want a government for is to

1:18:59  
protect our free

1:19:00  
defend our property, prevent violence,

1:19:04  
have a peaceful society and deal with criminals.

1:19:10  
When the government does other things like handout, food,

1:19:14  
or

1:19:17  
certify who is allowed to be a doctor,

1:19:21  
it is stepping outside the boundaries of its purpose. And that's bad.

1:19:26  
Why is it bad? Because the government has men with guns, it

1:19:32  
normal businesses, you pay them voluntarily. You want their product or service, you pay them you've got something in return. If you don't like it, you can take your money elsewhere. The government takes taxes whether you like it or not. And then it spends them and it enforces it laws with armed men who have guns.

1:19:54  
So those are all very dangerous things.

1:19:57  
There are things that you don't want overused. You want to minimize

1:20:00  
Those you know

1:20:03  
guns and violence and stuff those are bad we want the lovely little of that as we can have so because the government is involved in very very dangerous things you want us to be as small as possible it should do the things that it's there for but nothing else anything else that does not require guns violence etc tax funding

1:20:23  
if it doesn't require those things just let a normal business do it that doesn't have any guns and that's much safer and there's much less chance of anyone getting oppressed

1:20:34  
so because the government has like special powers

1:20:38  
it needs to have the most limits on what it does so that those special powers don't get abused

1:20:45  
so that is why basically I want a bare minimum government with nothing extra no social security no Medicare

1:20:55  
nope no corn subsidies.

1:20:59  
Alright, next time.

1:21:00  
industry, not environmentalism.

1:21:03  
So I'm in favor of technology and industry. I'm in favor of machines and fossil fuels and using energy and motors to replace human muscle power. Humans only have a certain amount of strength and they get tired out pretty easily. If you use tractors and cars, and so on, you can get a lot more done. And I think that's a good thing. And I'm in favor of industrial society. And I think it's made life better for the people who live in it.

1:21:30  
It's made things cleaner, healthier, richer, we're more prosperous, we have more leisure time we have better medicine, all these things are connected and really, really good.

1:21:41  
And a lot of why science has made progress is because people were trying to make better products. They were trying to be successful businessmen

1:21:50  
and better serve the consumer

1:21:53  
and that gave them an incentive to make scientific progress. And I think that that's a lot better.

1:22:00  
Rather than government funded science,

1:22:03  
which is not the proper role of government

1:22:07  
anyway, this contrast with environmentalist views that are very popular today

1:22:14  
where people want to preserve nature

1:22:18  
as it is, instead of thinking about what is the best way to improve the lot, the

1:22:25  
situation that humans are in, they look a lot and how to leave nature unchanged.

1:22:32  
And there's a lot of fear mongering and pseudoscience

1:22:36  
before the global warming scare. They had a global cooling scare

1:22:41  
their weather forecasts are not very accurate. And instead of using rational arguments, they say things like 98% of the experts agree

1:22:50  
and they try to intimidate people and call them unscientific if they dare to dissent

1:22:54  
and they basically think dissenting from their claims is out of bounds and

1:23:00  
Even if they're right about their claims, what are their solutions? It's always

1:23:06  
less industry, socialism, more government control over the economy.

1:23:11  
They want to regulate businesses and

1:23:15  
make the world less wealthy

1:23:17  
and reduce economic activity.

1:23:22  
But

1:23:25  
from a broad philosophical perspective, they're always going to be problems. They're always going to be things going wrong, they're always dangers and the best thing we can do about those dangers, as make rapid progress, get really, really powerful and smart and so on, you know, make the best, most awesome civilization we can. And then we're in a better situation to deal with unknown dangers, whatever comes up, the better technologies we have, the more wealth we have, the better we're going to be able to deal with it. You can see this with like tsunamis when a tsunami hits a poor country. A lot of people die when a tsunami goes to a rich country, not very many people buy

1:24:00  
Having riches left to deal with things like tsunamis

1:24:04  
and it's the same with all kinds of other dangers,

1:24:08  
so we can never be perfectly safe. But we can get good at dealing with things and changing the world more to our liking. And then whatever problems come along, we can deal with them.

1:24:20  
And that is a better approach than live a more primitive life and hope no big problems ever come along. And if they do, we just die because we don't have enough technology and machines and so on to deal with it.

1:24:34  
I forgot to talk about socialism. socialism is

1:24:39  
group control over the means of production.

1:24:44  
It means that

1:24:46  
you don't get to

1:24:50  
have control over

1:24:54  
ways of producing wealth.

1:24:58  
You're not allowed to run your own business.

1:25:00  
You're not allowed to be self employed,

1:25:03  
anything productive is owned by the group, not by you. So you can't really live your own life.

1:25:11  
And how does this state of affairs come about? Because right now, people do on the means of production. So it takes a massive, massive amount of violence to take all this property away from the current owners,

1:25:27  
and how would this make things better? Supposedly, the group ownership or the government ownership would make things like fair and reasonable and we've seen historically how well that worked out in Russia and China and so on.

1:25:41  
But also it just doesn't make sense. Currently, there are many competing businesses that own means of production and offer jobs to many different people and even compete for workers.

1:25:53  
And

1:25:55  
if if you have one single group collective owning the means of production that

1:26:00  
monopoly,

1:26:01  
they want to create a monopoly where there's only one employer. There's only one group that owns everything. And that's the only employer.

1:26:09  
And it's not just in one industry, they're going to own everything in every industry.

1:26:14  
And so there's only one person to go to one group, one entity to get a job from. And that is just irony that gives, you know, choices. And you can't even be self employed, you have to have a job and it has to be from this one single source. So that's the worst of monopolies really about idea.

1:26:33  
All right. Finally, mental illness is a myth. It is a part of the authoritarian

1:26:42  
worldview. It is a excuse us to rationalize violence and coercion.

1:26:49  
It's an attack on freedom. mental illness is if someone behaves in certain ways that I don't like instead of saying, Oh, I don't like him or I disagree with them. I say he's mentally

1:27:00  
I say it's a health issue. I say it's a medical issue. I say his brain is broken. And this justifies

1:27:07  
psychiatric prisons. it justifies locking him in a padded cell. it justifies involuntary commitment and justifies drugging him.

1:27:15  
People get locked up without a trial,

1:27:18  
sometimes for days, sometimes long term because a psychiatrist an expert authority side so

1:27:27  
it's circumvents the legal system. It's very dangerous.

1:27:32  
It's not evidence based, it is about misbehavior. It's about who gets along with who,

1:27:39  
when people behave in ways that other people don't like when they're unconventional, and they don't fit in when they're deviant,

1:27:46  
that is when they got called mentally, oh,

1:27:49  
there's a way of attacking people for nonconformity, and it's true that a lot of nonconformity is about idea

1:27:58  
many people called mentally I'll do not have

1:28:00  
Very good life they have a lot of problems but you know what everyone has problems and they should be free anyways

1:28:07  
one of the mantras of psychiatry is danger to himself or others they don't want to be very clear about it is he really a danger to others as the a threat

1:28:17  
if so we have criminal rules for that for what the burden of proof is and for and what situations you can say someone is a clear and real threat and they have to be locked up even though they haven't heard someone yet

1:28:31  
if you want to take someone to court

1:28:34  
because you know they're they're planning a murder and you find all their documents on their computer or their planning a bomb and you find all the bomb materials and plans and so on you know that's fine but that's not what's like that's not what mental illness cases look like people got involuntary committed when there's there's nothing at all like that, but shows they're actually going to hurt anyone. And that's why they say danger to themselves or others and they basically

1:29:00  
Try to criminalize suicide and lock up people because they might kill themselves. Which is there, right? It's their life. It's their choice.

1:29:11  
But also a lot of these people,

1:29:14  
there's no actual, you know, objective evidence that there, they were going to commit suicide. There's no real danger. It's just an excuse. And also some of them commit suicide because of psychiatrists because they know they're about to be locked up, or because they've been locked up and abused for a while.

1:29:31  
And when I say abused, I mean fucking tortured. electric shock. And the bottom here are still things they just renamed them. They still do them in the us today.

1:29:42  
So if this interests you, I'll recommend some books later.

1:29:49  
Alright, so who am I? Where did I get all these ideas?

1:29:54  
I didn't want to do this at the beginning, even though it's introductory because the ideas themselves are a lot more interesting than my own.

1:30:00  
History, but I think that this helps give some perspective on where I'm coming from. So I started studying writing philosophy in 2001.

1:30:08  
I'm American.

1:30:11  
I'm a part time freelance software developer, it's hard to make a lot of money with philosophy. So software's easier. But I prefer philosophy. So I don't work a whole lot, because I'd rather spend time on philosophy.

1:30:26  
The ideas I've talked about in this video are not popular. You're not going to be able to tell your friends and have them say, Oh, you're so smart. Those are all great ideas. You might be able to pick and choose some that some people will like, but as a whole,

1:30:41  
I have shared these videos with a lot of people and people tend to get offended and not like them and not want to talk about them.

1:30:50  
Some a minority of people will debate a bit but there's usually some sort of limit on it. You know, at some point, they just say, Oh, that's too unreasonable. I'm not going to think about it.

1:30:58  
So why do

1:31:00  
This has happened. A lot of it is because there's, there's too many controversial ideas. If you take like any one of the ideas, you can find people who agree with it, you can find people who have perspective along the lines of me about science or about politics. But when you put both together, there's a lot fewer people have both of those ideas. And then you throw in the parenting ideas and the relationship ideas on the psychiatry ideas. It's very hard to find people who are even open to all of those ideas, who think they're within the bounds of like, reasonable position someone can hold

1:31:35  
usually

1:31:37  
they find something that they really don't like. And they just think that that is over the line. It's too taboo. And they're done thinking.

1:31:46  
So my intellectual influences I got into philosophy by reading the book, the fabric of reality by David Deutsch.

1:31:57  
Before that, I played chess I did

1:32:00  
programming. I did some math. I like science.

1:32:05  
I had some interesting ideas and a little interest in politics, but

1:32:10  
it wasn't very well developed.

1:32:14  
And I read the fabric of reality and I thought was really, really good. And it presented up here in epistemology and science stuff.

1:32:24  
And

1:32:25  
I was really inspired. And I started studying those ideas. And I found the discussion group where David Deutsch talked about his parenting ideas.

1:32:36  
And so a lot of what I've said about parenting and education and school and relationships,

1:32:42  
as David Deutsch his ideas,

1:32:46  
but they're not most of that is not in his books. His books deal with science and epistemology, and a bit more like there's a little on environmentalism,

1:32:56  
but it doesn't cover everything.

1:33:00  
And so I started having discussions with him and asking him questions and debating with him.

1:33:05  
And we did that for many years. And he was my mentor, basically for a while.

1:33:13  
So he's a big fan of Karl Popper.

1:33:17  
He got his epistemology ideas primarily from popper. So I learned about popper first through Deutsches summaries But then I also read popper

1:33:29  
in order to learn that more thoroughly. And

1:33:33  
yeah, get more details.

1:33:36  
And

1:33:39  
William God when is the most obscure philosopher on the list. But I studied him a lot because I really liked him. He is a liberal from around 1800

1:33:49  
and he

1:33:52  
understood fallibility and reason and non violence and

1:33:58  
he was consistent and

1:34:00  
bold enough to apply that to children to understand that

1:34:05  
if the parent has a good reason he has good arguments and reasoning, then he should explain that to his child and persuade him.

1:34:14  
And if his reasoning and arguments fail to persuade,

1:34:20  
that is a bad justification for using violence.

1:34:25  
Ein Rand is,

1:34:29  
in my opinion, the best philosopher of all time,

1:34:34  
I think popper made a major breakthrough in epistemology, and ein Rand is just really good at everything.

1:34:42  
So she understands a lot about politics, liberalism, small government, economics, etc. And she also talks about morality and how to live your life and

1:34:54  
how to be virtuous what kind of person to be, and she wrote novels so you could see it vividly and got

1:35:00  
A lot of examples and she also wrote nonfiction philosophy books, and she's a extremely good writer with short articles and essays that are very powerful in a fairly compact

1:35:15  
text.

1:35:18  
Ludwig von Mises is an economist from the Austrian tradition. He moved to America and wrote a bunch of econ books, and they're the best in the field.

1:35:33  
And Thomas saws is the guy learned about psychiatry from and he's written around 35 bucks about it, and they're a lot of them are pretty short and easy reads and they're really good and can open your eyes to

1:35:54  
the problems with psychiatry, especially if you already have some pro freedom.

1:36:00  
classical liberal type views

1:36:03  
because a lot of people with those views are getting psychiatry wrong right now, even though the principles that they already have should lead to different conclusions.

1:36:15  
Thomas saws died a few years ago. I emailed with him for about a year before he died.

1:36:21  
He was open to criticism and extremely reasonable and interesting to talk to.

1:36:27  
I've been doing this stuff for a long time. I've talked to a lot of people. I've written a lot of things

1:36:34  
and

1:36:37  
most people don't care very much.

1:36:40  
It's hard to get people to care.

1:36:42  
If they do care there. They get offended quite easily and they're just not very tolerant of different ideas than the ones are used to usually

1:36:53  
and everyone says that they like reason and open mindedness and so on act of mine necessary

1:37:00  
Better than open mindedness. By the way,

1:37:03  
it's

1:37:04  
more of the correct concept and what people ought to talk about.

1:37:10  
Because like an open mind could just passively lead in a bunch of bad ideas. You want an active mind where you're looking for the truth and trying to figure things out and thinking about things.

1:37:21  
Anyways, a lot of people say how great that is and how, how interested in reason they are but

1:37:27  
my experiences they don't act like they're not very open to discussion or it's pretty limited.

1:37:34  
If you say something too controversial, they just, they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to think about it.

1:37:41  
So it's, it's a bit of a sad state of the world. In my opinion,

1:37:47  
I find academia some of the worst that professors

1:37:53  
aren't really open to being challenged about their ideas and don't want to hear alternative ideas,

1:37:59  
which is sad.

1:38:00  
Because it's supposed to be, you know, a place of learning and curiosity and so on.

1:38:07  
I find in general, the people with authority, the people with prestigious are worse. They got that kind of social status on purpose. They put a lot of effort into that instead of into being smart and reasonable.

1:38:21  
So I find a lot of like, independent people

1:38:25  
who don't have like, official credentials are often more reasonable, more willing to consider ideas.

1:38:34  
So

1:38:35  
if if that kind of world situation if you don't like it, or if you think there are different or something,

1:38:42  
um,

1:38:44  
I urge you to get involved study philosophy, try to help contribute to better ideas and changing people's minds and spreading good ideas and so on and, and don't rush into spreading the ideas like really seriously try to learn them really, really well before spreading them. You don't want to be spreading the wrong

1:39:00  
ideas. You know, you want to have gotten your ideas criticized as much as you can deal with every objection and then spread it.

1:39:08  
So don't think that like, you're nobody and you can't help

1:39:15  
if you're interested in reason, and you're being honest, and most people aren't. But if you are, then you could help. You don't have to be a genius. And

1:39:25  
there are a lot of problems with the concept of genius. But regardless, there's there's plenty to do and not enough people doing it.

1:39:34  
So even if you don't, you know, come up with a great new idea. You could still help a lot just by understanding there's there's so much more that's known than what is like commonly known.

1:39:45  
There's already an existence much better ideas than most people have.

1:39:49  
So the problem The main problem is not creating even better ideas it is

1:39:56  
organizing and explaining I'm sharing the idea

1:40:00  
that already exist

1:40:03  
and dealing with the many, many contradicting ideas, the the counter arguments, the

1:40:10  
the propaganda, the myths, the biases and so on.

1:40:16  
So you can find links to my stuff at Elliot temple.com most of it's free. There's essays, a blog, YouTube podcasts. I have an email newsletter, you can go

1:40:28  
around every two weeks, you'll get some links to some of my new material and other things I like and sometimes some short explanations or something else. I have a discussion forum if you think you have good ideas. If you're thinking of spreading ideas or doing some sort of intellectual project, run it by us ask if anyone has criticisms see if there are objections,

1:40:51  
you should seek out criticism from many forums, including mine and others as well before you make a big difference.

1:41:00  
Based on something being correct, like do your best to find out if anyone knows that it might be mistaken in some way.

1:41:07  
I also booked my foundations and a digital store and I'm going to show you the website.

1:41:15  
So this is Elliot temple calm and yeah, here are my different websites, essays, book recommendations, blog, essays, essays, yes or no philosophy. This is a paid product with videos and essays

1:41:30  
to I think it's my best work and that it could help educate people on that topic.

1:41:38  
Learn objectivism. I have a close reading and analysis of some chapters from Atlas Shrugged, the beginning of infinity as David Deutsch his second book and I have a website about that it has my interview with him and an excerpt from the book and reviews and stuff and the newsletter sign up and up here, YouTube podcast Twitter.

1:42:00  
ebooks discussion forum. So if you're interested, there's a lot of stuff to look at.

1:42:09  
And of course, here's my email. If you have any comments, you can post them on YouTube or you can email me or you can go to a discussion forum.

1:42:19  
And first sources on things go to the book recommendations. And

1:42:24  
so you can find Thomas's books that will tell you a lot about psychiatry and mental illness, being a math and so on.

1:42:33  
And

1:42:34  
you can find

1:42:36  
which sections of Karl Popper to read if you want to understand his epistemology

1:42:41  
and you can find

1:42:43  
the conflicts of interest the

1:42:46  
that's the one with the example of two people applying for the same job and why that's not a

1:42:52  
conflict the right perspective on that

1:42:58  
you can follow me on twitter at Carrie.

1:43:00  
42 there's a link here and Like and Subscribe on YouTube. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai