Eiuol

There isn't anyone I know of that thinks this. At least not any writer that I'm aware of. That it's a closed system does not make it a complete system.

I'll phrase it differently then, because there is a lot of overlap between the two. Exactly because some amount of duty is irrational, it is incompatible with family. There are other more fundamental aspects of family besides duty, even if duty is common. Yeah, that's not what statistics is for. Statistics is to deal with uncertainty and measure uncertainty. A scientist uses statistics as evidence of a phenomenon, but needs to use further reasoning techniques to induce a new idea rather than to deduce one. So I'm saying you didn't even try to make a causal relationship. We disagree what counts as evidence in the first place, or what makes for sufficient evidence. This is a huuugggggggeeeeeeeee leap in reasoning. You basically ask how could be otherwise, and stated therefor civilizations were built this way. I'm not asking you to write a book for your case, but I am asking you to have more than one sentence about us/them mentality. sNerd explained how this is not quite accurate. It's not about simply how many values you like that a person holds. I'm not sure where you get this idea that you judge a person based on how you like their values that they hold. You value a person for the value they provide to you. If a person helped raise you, they have literally provided a value to you; they allowed you to develop into an adult. To that extent at least, you owe them something. Because of this, likely they will share some values with you. You might like them more if they share more values with you, but it's considerably more complicated than that. Duty, in the sense most of us here are using it, is not even looking at the value the other person provides. You wouldn't need to justify valuing your parents because they helped raise you, you wouldn't even need to think about value. Saying they are your parents would be enough.

Do realize that part of your claim is that irrationality is not always immoral. We could argue about the details of exactly what the effects are, but the whole premise I'm working from is that rationality is moral, irrationality is immoral. I treat those as basic facts. If we don't agree on that much, the very moral foundation we are using is completely different. Much of your position so far is a historical one based on correlational rather than causal relationships. To be sure, aspects of irrationality will often coexist with aspects of rationality within a society. This doesn't mean that the irrational aspects contributed to the positive development of that society. Your reasoning is fine about family in general, yet again, you insist that duty is the aspect of family that change society for the better. Another issue is I think you conflate obligation with duty. Based on what 2046 said, the way Cicero meant duty is more like an obligation. You treat these words as identical. Obligation would be like, for example, if you were raised well by your parents, you owe at least something to them. Their value isn't nothing, and as a matter of justice, when you benefit from someone, you ought to pay them back in some way. Duty is more like *because* they are your parents and for no other reason you owe them something. If you add reasons like they were good parents, or they help get you into a good elementary school when you're going up, or they instilled some of your values like honesty, this would be an obligation. So when I say loyalty, I'm thinking of this. If they treat you well, or do right by you, you should acknowledge it and act in a way that reinforces it. I actually find history to be extremely important. All I've been saying is that you have failed to connect historical evidence to a moral principle. Historical evidence isn't proof, because proof requires additional inferences. Correlation is never sufficient. The same goes for etymological arguments. It is interesting to note that "blood is thicker than water" is a phrase has been around for a long time. Whether it demonstrates anything else depends entirely on how you used induction to conclude that duty to family is critical to the development of civilization.

No. I said it before. There is no such thing as the nuclear family before the 20th century. Not in England, not in America, not in the entire world. (Or just be a little more specific, so I know exactly what you're talking about, because nuclear family is a pretty vague term in this conversation so far) It's not that weird to think that people may claim that something is important, but if we analyze the phenomenon, different factors were at work more so. In other words, even if people might claim that something is important, we might find that some unacknowledged aspect of family is the part that actually mattered for the stability of one's life and even the development of society. For example, you're saying that it's interesting that a specific English notion of family correlated with the Industrial Revolution. Okay, fine, maybe there's a causal relation. You still haven't demonstrated that we should think that duty to family is what contributed to this. I would easily argue that there was a substantial shift in the way family functioned during the Industrial Revolution such that duty didn't matter so much anymore. Then people reacted to that, thus the development of stronger gender roles at home, for fear that the rapid development of technology was destroying society and family. It's not called "the gradual development of family for the greater development of society", it was a revolution. It's a very simple idea I'm arguing against. It's improper reasoning to say that a common attribute is critical to a concept. The more important attribute, a fundamental attribute, is loyalty rather than duty. I don't say that because it's common, nor do I make a historical argument that people have been doing it for a long time. When just about anyone talks about family in a normative way, they mean some type of loyalty and support to people but not necessarily love. Some may argue that duty is important, but it's not as if we require that somebody adheres to duty to any extent to say "aha! That's a family!" Historical examples are great ways to illustrate an idea and make an idea concrete, but they aren't proof. The first commentary you mentioned says this: "Is it anti-family to say that one should love one’s loveable, ethical, siblings and cousins, and one may ignore and avoid unlikeable or unethical family members?" I think the other quote you mentioned is using a different sense of the word love. But I'm not sure. Besides, it's not like you necessarily need to love a person to care about a person. == There are other points you made in your post that I think are interesting, at least as far as that Cicero quote. I'm not going to respond to that part yet though, because I really want to bring the focus down to *how* you think a little bit of irrational duty to family is important to a stable society and individual life. I know you think duty is necessary for family. I'm looking for a causal explanation, not simply "it's been around for a long time, so I guess it must be working pretty well".

No, I mean to say that there's no such thing as nuclear family until post-war Western society. Anything before then is something else, even if it might resemble the nuclear family of the 20th century. I think you're using the term and you don't know what it means, or trying to use a historically nuanced version of the concept I'm not familiar with. Whether something is important to a concept is different than saying many concepts of family have included duty. At least, that's what I mean to say. Historically people may have thought that duty is important, even if the causal patterns of culture did not in fact have anything to do with duty. For instance, I would say that the development of the nuclear family was in any important way importantly connected to concepts of duty. People just insert duty into the concept after the fact because it's traditional, familiar, easier, etc. You haven't presented evidence. You presented evidence about families in general, but didn't explicitly or successfully lind that to requiring duty in a way that benefits society, individuals, or anything for that matter. I mean, I don't think I need to go over with you all the reasons that Rand argued that duty is bad, so all I want to know is how the bad parts about duty go away when we start to talk about it in the context of family. I'm not sure either that you understand the Objectivist position of the way people should be valued. You're not completely wrong, although I think you miss out on the way that accidental circumstances on -your- end can contribute to all sorts of reasons to value someone else. I think you also miss how although even of the people who put some amount of duty into family may also have very good and rational reasons to value those people anyway. See, then we have to go into a discussion of whether Christian values are more good than not. There is some good to be found, but I don't say that the good is found in Christian notions of family Your overall argument appears to be that some altruism is necessary for a healthy society, so it follows that some duty to family is necessary for healthy society. I would argue that it's not Christian values at all that helped build Western society, but Roman values that preceded the Christian era of Rome. So, yes, I don't think any of us would disagree that our notion of family is incompatible with Christian values. The more you talk about duty to family, the more I think you're actually trying to talk about Christian families specifically.

The nuclear family is an American invention during the 1950s. Very often, family includes much more than the mother, father, and their kids (with extended family visiting once in a while). Living conditions were close quarters 200 years ago, including those who weren't blood relatives but people you choose to consider family. The nuclear family couldn't exist until technology and the economy grew to the levels after WW2. Besides, nuclear family is not synonymous with duty to family. It could include it, but it doesn't have to. Anyway, I don't dispute the potential value of a family, my dispute is to say that duty really matters either historically or morally. Sometimes there has been duty, sometimes there hasn't been. Let's take the single-parent household example. You're right, growing up with exactly one parent correlates with various issues of development. On the other hand, there's nothing that says the parent must be a blood parent. For children, the issue is if they only have one adult figure. If there are family friends, extended family, school (if the kids are old enough), the community around them. If a child has consistent adults around them who are parent figures, this is fine. So, yes, family in general is very important. This doesn't demonstrate that duty is important to the concept family, or the genetic component of family important to its value. You were making a historical argument that duty is inherent to family. So I was presenting contrary historical evidence. I think that historically, most concepts of family have been duty-based, but it isn't hard to find examples that put the city-state or nation first. They aren't special cases so much as they are different conceptions of family than you are talking about. But suppose that you demonstrated that my two examples really are duty-based family ethics. The Spartans never became a dominant force compared to the Athenians, and even though the Iliad is fiction, many bad things occurred for the Greeks in the story exactly because people sometimes held irrational loyalty to their family. I can't think of a society that turned out well that emphasized duty to your blood family. Just read the Wikipedia page, especially the description of the Latin word familia.

The breakdown of what specifically about families? I think you would find that the only thing we would reject around here is the notion of a traditional (blood) family being crucial to either a flourishing society or flourishing individual. We would certainly support notions of family based on meeting certain standards of virtue that even friends must meet. Blood family can be part of this, because of proximity and duration of relationships. The bond, however, would be based on the virtue of the family members. I understand that you are saying that you can add a layer of duty to the concept the family that you can't add on to other relationship concepts. The issue I have is the assumption that this entails stability. There are plenty of stories where duty to family destroys families or creates extreme turmoil. Part of the Objectivist argument against duty is that duty is anti-individual and therefore immoral, so we would expect that families based on duty aren't the kinds of families that flourish best. You need to keep in mind that blood family isn't the only kind of family. I think you also neglect the importance of considering stability in terms of attaining happiness and quality of life. It might be easier to say you have duty to family and be done with it. The harder thing would be to say keeping family in your life depends on their virtue and goodness, which is something like conditional love. I don't think so. I mean, as harsh as it is, there have been cultures that left their babies out to die if the baby didn't conform to the standards they expected. These are cultures that might put the city-state above individuals and certainly above family. If the Spartans throw a baby off a cliff, that doesn't sound very oriented towards family duty. Agememnon, in the Iliad, sacrificed his daughter so that his ships could sail to Troy. Literally killed her. He did it to please the gods and to put Greek society above his family. Whatever you might call this, duty to family was not the standard here.

I think you need to demonstrate that in fact voluntary connections (we can call it voluntary family, or chosen family) are necessarily more turbulent than blood family connections. As far as I've observed, this is rarely true. You've taken for granted that blood family is necessarily stable. Your discussion here seems to be premised on the idea that a blood connection is necessarily stable and strong. If anything, you underestimate the stability when you can choose your family. When there is a duty to family if some of them are immoral people, or cool people, or unjust people, or abusive people, you perpetuate harm and suffering, problems arise. Chosen family can include children, with just a little creativity. I don't want kids myself, but probably a few of my friends would. In theory, one of these friends could be close enough to consider family, and their children would too. This can also make it so that future blood family are connections you want to maintain out of mutual benefit and selfish value. So I don't understand why you think blood relations are necessarily the most stable. You can claim that blood creates an automatic obligation, but it's a further claim to say that with an automatic obligation, it is more stable than a friendship group or chosen family. I'd be willing to discuss this, because I think automatic obligation is what creates turbulence. Any family, blood or otherwise, is only stable to the extent that the individuals want to be together out of mutual value exchange. The "extra effort" to stay connected is created by an obligation to principles, which in this case is obligation to support people that are extremely important to your well-being.

I'm not sure why you put the link to an essay writing website.

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the exercise?

You probably exaggerate what the average woman does, and you probably underexaggerate how long it takes you to shave and take care of your skin after shaving, and anything else to look good. A good and proper shave takes 15 minutes, sometimes even 30 minutes depending on what you're going for. And you mentioned a lot more than just shaving your face... And even then, it really doesn't take that long to do more. Maybe if the makeup was extravagant, but most makeup would only take about five minutes to put on at most? It wouldn't even be that weird for a guy to put on concealer. And if you skip makeup, it really doesn't take long at all. Clearly proper clothing choices and jewelry choices takes time. But this only takes women longer because there are more choices. Male clothing is so limited that it is rather boring and unexpressive. The only difference between genders (in America) is for whatever reason, guys on average don't care. They don't care about looking like slobs. They don't learn how to shave properly. If you only take 5 hours per month to meet grooming standards of men today, you're doing something wrong.

I don't think it's so sinister. It's a misattribution that without context doesn't say anything much negative because it's too ambiguous. I found the quote here, about four minutes in:

The fact is, you can't really know this. This is why some sort of transparency or directness would have been wise. The only way you can know is to ask her, particularly because you gave every indication that you were not interested in her.

Sure, but you've ignored basically every suggestion before. The hole continues to get deeper. What you've described is mostly self-sabotage. But is this a real scenario? The last thread you made, you admitted that it was fabricated.

The context is different because the person in that podcast has a crush on a girl who had no romantic interest. In your context, it's a girl who did show interest, but you chose to do nothing. The advice there kind of presumes that you acted on your feelings and were honest about them, enough so to figure out what the other person thinks. Are you looking to talk about something specific? Or are you looking for advice?

I think that's the right conclusion. But there might be a simple solution to resolving your feelings. If you realize now that it was a major mistake to not take her up on her offers and overtures, you can admit that. You can tell her that you know now it was a mistake, and now that you lost the opportunity, you feel bad about it. If you resolve things maturely, at the very least, you might actually feel okay being her friend. Who knows. Maybe she will appreciate the honesty.

The blog post you linked is basically expanding on something like Rand's stated view on romance, she didn't have healthy romantic relationships, and I think her marriage contradicted those views. Using her love life as an example is very messy, and many things went wrong. I don't think any of us could say why she loved him (only she could really know), but we can be sure it wasn't because of a manifestation of power. I think you're right about her view about her husband. I like the idea that intellect is extremely important! I like to think of it as one of the most important features of your personality. We just need to remember that there are many ways to have intellect besides the analytical kind.

Those differences aren't genetic. You can get better at all of those things. At best they are partially genetic, but still in large part under your control. But there's a few more things you're assuming. What does it matter if she's better at you at some things? If she's better at you at some things, why does that mean she cares? Having more friends doesn't make her a better person; having more suitors doesn't mean they see her mind as valuable; being wittier doesn't mean your sense of humor is boring to her. If she goes further than you, how does that matter for romantic compatibility? It's the whole wrong look at it. Think in terms of what values can be mutually admired and enjoyed. It's not as if you need to gain points to earn the girl, as if she's an achievement you unlock. You don't need to defeat her. You just need to be valuable. It's not about your real-life stats, it's about finding people to grow with. What counts as if you are in the same league morally speaking. You make me think of this song: Notice how he isn't angry or even upset. He's feeling bad about what might have been. It's the Platonic fantasy ("more than just a dream") that got him down, not the actual girl. Whoever he's thinking of, makes him feel very happy. I don't think he literally means he can't get the girl - he means he can't get the girl that doesn't even exist. It's a song basically about what happens when you get what I call the "out of my league" syndrome.

That's a very broad and vague way to think about it. There is a lot more to intelligence in general than raw thinking power. Imagine you were a pretty good chef at a restaurant, but not particularly great at academics or school. Then imagine she were some PhD student in physics. Is her mind overall better than yours? Not really. To be a good chef, it requires different types of thinking and skills and practice. There is nothing that would make you inferior as a person. You would just be a different person than her. The quality of your mind is more about being a virtuous person. If she doesn't want to be with you romantically, it doesn't mean you're out of her league. You could be, if she cared about things like that, but you wouldn't want a relationship with someone who thought that. On the other hand, maybe she does value someone in academics like her, someone who can talk about those complex and abstract subjects important to her. You probably admire this about her. But the truth is, physics isn't that important to you. You don't like to read books about it. You prefer to think about other subjects. While the fantasy of being with her romantically makes you very happy, your values don't really match up. You might want to blame being not smart enough, or there's something inferior about you, but there's no reason to do that. If your values don't match enough, it won't matter. There's more to any relationship, friendship or otherwise, than what you imagine could happen. What you imagine isn't how things are. If you find out the future you hope for isn't going to happen, that doesn't destroy the value you have now. If you get value out of her company, don't abandon that. She does something good for your life. Why be vindictive and cut her out just because she didn't give you what you wanted? If she isn't interested, the easiest thing to do is focus on the value she provides today. Nicky offers great advice - just take the short-term pain. You'll be rewarded in the long run, with emotional maturity for getting through it and possibly lifetime friendship.

Like what?

What do you mean unattainable? I mean, it's not like relationships are about acquiring people, like acquiring cars or houses. You don't need to worry about getting her. A better question is to ask whether she is a good fit for you anyway. But just because she might be a bad fit romantically doesn't mean she's a bad fit as a friend. I think this is part of what Nicky is saying. I asked what you mean by unattainable because some people think in terms of people being out of their league. This might mean you don't think you're the best person you can be, or there are a lot of flaws in yourself that you see that you think should be improved upon. That would make sense. If that's all it was, all you need to do is improve yourself. But maybe you mean that you think you're too low on the social pecking order. This isn't so great because you'd be devaluing yourself about something that has nothing to do with whether you're a good match. If that mattered to her, then you need to reevaluate whether she's someone you want to even pursue in the first place.

It is fine to admire the achievements of various people. If they happen to be from your native country, that's fine too. It's also great to admire the achievements of people that you know personally. But it's important to remember that this really has nothing to do with the history of your family. Whether someone is your grandfather doesn't matter, because birth family doesn't have any bearing on what makes someone admirable or not.

It doesn't seem like there's any more agenda than you would have on many measures of cognitive performance. Sure, we should nail down better what it is you mean by "best answer". But even on pattern matching tests, where you have 7 items in a sequence and need to select the 8th item, there are best answers. You could say that technically any answer is correct, because the pattern is man-made. From what I can tell, most puzzles like this are developed with some specific conceptual common denominator or fundamental characteristic. I don't take it as any more serious than a crossword puzzle or logic puzzle. I like how you draw out the ways we can ask what makes the best answer. But how would you explain psychological tests of cognitive performance? Those don't seem to take much effort to know what people mean by best answer.

Can you link the original source? Or is this full context?

Just so I know where you're coming from, are you getting the terminology 'logos' from Jordan Peterson? It would affect my response. I've heard it in other contexts such as stoicism and Christian theology in case you meant those, but the only contemporary use I've seen is from him.