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Nicky

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Posts posted by Nicky

  1. 2 hours ago, Eiuol said:

    I guess I'll leave the post up

    I don't care. You shouldn't be allowed to moderate your own conversations. This whole site has gone to shit ever since guys like you have been given mod powers, because you don't understand the basic rules of having a conversation online. You're either a mod or a participant in a conversation, asshole. You can't be both. There are other mods on this forum. You're supposed to let them moderate, when you decide to participate in a thread.

  2. 2 hours ago, Eiuol said:

    Well, your claims about psychology and Jung are the same way. Ilya has provided more cited sources, not to say he is correct, but (I claim) he is wrong for the exact same philosophical reasons as you. I don't know how you'll react to that, but I'd at least like to talk about it 

    I would too. But not with you. With someone at least modestly rational.

    This has been my position for years, by the way. Only reason why you're not on my ignore list is because I can't ignore mods. And you know this, so I have no clue why you keep trying to get into a conversation with me.

    Especially since the only tool in your arsenal is the delete button, every time someone calls you out on your bullshit.

  3. 10 minutes ago, Ilya Startsev said:

    Is that so? You are right that I don't know Biology (sic) so well, or maybe as well as you do. Can you tell me what the purpose of "junk" DNA is, please?

    Not really, no. Not definitively, because Genetics is a young science. I can tell you that it has nothing to do with the subject at hand though. You don't need Genetics at all to understand why what you posted is nonsense.

  4. 2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

    I can see you're heavily invested in this belief and have read a lot more on the subject than me.

    Too bad he never read a book on basic biology. The nervous system runs through the body, and sends signals to the brain through the mechanism of action potentials (a change in polarity that travels down an elongated cell)...which, in vertebrates, is in the skull. There are neurons (literally NERVE CELLS) everywhere in the body. They exist in even the simplest animals. Even some plants (like those carnivorous ones) have cells capable of generating an action potential. Doesn't mean they have brains.

    That's how sensory information gets to the brain: a specialized organ of up to 86 billion neurons, which processes sensory information, decides what is the appropriate reaction to that information, and directs the body to react appropriately.

    There are also ganglia through the body, which are clusters of nerves that are nothing like the brain, and simply regulate the automatic functions of individual organs (and handle communication with the brain). The heart has them too. You can get a heart to beat in a jar (or in the palm of your hand, when you rip it out of the chest of your enemies), for instance, because of this.

    In the heart, they contain approximately 40 thousand neurons. If my math is correct, that's 0.000005 percent of the ones in the brain. Very clearly, it's 40 thousand neurons that have nothing to do with anything except the function of the specific organ. No organism could ever evolve to move some of its central brain function to another organ. It would be ridiculously inefficient.

  5. 27 minutes ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

    The good news is that these problems are in long need of discussion. The bad news may be that nobody, including Ioannidis himself -- I am not familiar enough with his work to know one way or the other -- is discussing how government funding or other influence over so much of science is contributing to the problem. 

    Well people are challenging the "science" on nutrition, for sure.  This guy for instance demolishes the whole structure nutritional guidelines are built on. It's basically one giant, politically driven lie. The studies it's based on are a joke.

    Unfortunately, his suggested solution is to change the guidelines, not to get the government out of the nutrition business, but the actual effect of what he's saying is that he is making it very hard for anyone to continue taking anything the government organizations have to say on nutrition seriously.

     

     

  6. On 3/8/2019 at 4:41 PM, Boydstun said:

    .

     the fetus will have reached a development such that it could live outside the womb, live independently of its mother if supported by modern medicine and whomever pays for that. Roe’s mark there had two built-in considerations making the 6-month time not exact and not fixed against future contraction: (i) when a particular fetus might be viable outside the womb (judgment of viability in the case being made by attending physicians), with present technology, can vary somewhat from one fetus to another, though around 6 months was typical and (ii) with medical technological progress, the typical time at which viability outside the womb is reached could be pulled in to earlier and earlier times.

     

    Not sure if this made international news, but, recently in Japan, a baby boy who stopped developing in the womb and was born weighing 268 grams through C sectio, was nursed in an ICU for five months, and then released from hospital with a clean bill of health.

  7.  

    On 3/2/2019 at 1:40 AM, MisterSwig said:

    Mystical explanations rarely make sense. Jones says that our minds have filters. We therefore need the drug to remove the filter and open the mental gateway to the alien dimension.  

    Well that's arbitrary nonsense. But if, instead, you said "open the gateway to an unconscious part of the brain", then that would be a valid hypothesis.

  8. On 7/16/2018 at 5:43 PM, Invictus2017 said:

    If a government says, "OK, now we let you do X", that does not in any way indicate a respect for the right to do X.  And it says nothing about whether it will change its mind later.

    If a government does not respect rights in principle, nothing it does should be regarded as "respecting" rights, and to read current events as evidencing a growth in that nonexistent respect is to profoundly misunderstand those events and their likely consequences.

    (The same critique applies to hurrahs when America's government announces that it will no longer violate this or that right.)

    Positive changes don't come out of thin air. Somebody must be acting on principle, to cause them. Probably not anyone actually in the Cuban government (though it wouldn't be impossible), but, clearly, somebody is a rational actor somewhere along the causal chain.

    It's important to keep in mind that very few things have a single cause, and the specific statement "the government does not respect X" is technically reification. It suggests either a single actor or a single minded group. They're both wrong. The first factually, the second for an even worse reason.

    If you want to be more exact, the source of policies in Cuba is a hierarchy with a variety of different people, on different levels of the hierarchy (some within the government, some outside of it, some exercising legitimate power born out of competence, but, unfortunately for the Cuban people, most not so much) all playing a role in a variety of ways. Some are totally rational, some are totally irrational, most a mix of the two.

  9. Yes, cowardly racists are the real victims here. Everyone knows they wouldn't actually have the balls to act out their beliefs. Only thing they can do is hide behind a hat with the initials for a meaningless catchphrase on it. It's so clever of them. What a great social movement this trumpism is.

    Just out of curiosity: what exactly is the Chicago PD supposed to do to help these poor victims you've been hanging out with? Free high speed Internet into their moms' basement for life?

  10. On 2/14/2019 at 10:14 PM, Eiuol said:

    Seriously, he derived some ideas from when he had some kind of psychotic break.

    Jung went through a period of severe mental illness, in his late 30s. He kept a journal through that period. He never published that journal. In fact, his heir refused to publish it too, for 37 years. The journal was only made available to the public in 2008, 37 years after his death.

    Describing that state of affairs as "he derived his ideas from a psychotic break" is willfully dishonest.

    P.S. The reason why Jung did not want those journals published is fairly easily explained by one of his most famous quotes: "beware of unearned wisdom". None of his ideas came to him through "mystic" experiences, psychotic breaks or LSD trips. He just happened to have a psychotic break, midway through a hugely productive, rational life, and he documented it in his private journal. That's all.

  11. 7 hours ago, Ilya Startsev said:

    The whole confusion here is over the definition of mysticism. ... Mysticism is heart-based and is prior to or outside of brain-reason.

    There's no confusion. That's the definition you, I and Jung are all working with. (minus the heart part, that's an odd metaphor to use for that which is outside of reason).

    As per that definition, Jung was not a mystic. Only action he ever ascribed to his heart is pumping blood. Everything else he did with his rational brain. He may have been liberal with his logical leaps, but he wasn't attempting to turn off his brain at any point, or take any knowledge from people who he believe did so.

    Of course, many so-called mystics use reason more than you'd think, it's just that they speak in metaphors to express it. So someone being classified a mystic doesn't mean rational people should disregard the wisdom they might produce.

    Quote

    Mysticism is not brain-based, nor is it reason in the rationalist sense.

    Jung called himself an empiricist (which is neither a mystic nor a rationalist). Empiricists have major flaws, but mysticism is not one of them. Also, Jung transcended a lot of those flaws, he just didn't have a better word than empiricist for describing himself.

    Quote

    Hence mysticism is an emotional way of connecting your soul with reality outside

     

    That inference (mysticism is outside of reason, therefor it's the consequence of emotions) could only be valid if you first accepted that emotions are necessarily divorced from reason. Jung didn't believe that. Not many people believe that. Certainly not on this board, but not in general either.

    Emotions are only divorced from reason in totally irrational people (which is a theoretical concept, because such people couldn't survive).

    You correctly identified that mysticism is outside of reason. But that also means that it's outside of most emotion. Mysticism is based in arbitrary propositions, and the emotions resulting from such propositions. It has nothing to do with most emotions (which result from rational thought, and possibly intrinsic archetypes, if Jung is to be believed).

  12. 1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

    But he is a mystic, regardless of his denial. Are you familiar with Jung at all? I mean, his theories of personality are based on dreams, alchemy, collective unconscious.

    None of that is mysticism. The first two for obvious reasons (dreams are obviously a real thing, and it's beyond clear that they're related to reality, and alchemy is the precursor to science, practiced widely enough and for a long enough time that it very plausibly produced knowledge science is yet to reproduce...especially in the field of Psychology, which is far behind other natural science), as for the collective unconscious, if that's mysticism, then so is tabula rasa...because neither is empirically proven fact.

    And yes, I'm familiar with Jung at all, thank you for your concern. I know for instance that he never claimed "unus mundus" as his position. Not even close. He had about as much to do with unus mundus as Rand did with the question of gay deviancy. Jung wasn't a physicist.

  13. On 4/19/2017 at 1:22 PM, Ilya Startsev said:

    Jung is more serious than Freud. Besides, I love Jung exactly because he was a mystic. Mystics have heart and soul, non-mystics don't.

    Sorry to post in an old thread, but this jumped out to me as I was searching for something unrelated, and I just can't help myself:

    "Everyone who says that I am a Mystic is just and idiot. He just doesn't understand the first word of Psychology." ~Carl Jung

    *MOD NOTE, EIUOL* Split from another thread

  14. Quote

    But, I will say that those who cross the border without "clearance" (documentation) for doing so are put into the position of receiving the un-earned

    I submit to you that navigating the dangerous journey from South America or even Mexico to the US in hopes of a better life is an astonishing act of courage, and that, as far as you can possibly say that a handout or an entitlement is "earned", these people have "earned" it infinitely more than anyone who never actually did anything remarkable to improve their life, and is the beneficiary of it simply by "virtue" of being born in the right country.

    Quote

    In the meantime, I am left with supporting effective border crossing controls and inspections (fences, patrols, technology, etc.), but we could at least eliminate immigration quotas/limits NOW.

    There's a stalemate over immigration policy in the US, and, if anything, the gap is widening between the sides (because of Trump's populist, disgraceful electoral platform that gave no choice to the opposition but to polarize in the other direction).

    So there's no "eliminating quotas", or any other change in immigration laws. That's not realistic. In fact, quotas are being tightened through executive discretion. The only realistic pathway for most economic migrants into the US is the illegal way. There's also no "effective border crossing controls". The US-Mexico border is massively long, it couldn't be locked down even if Congress, by some miracle, gave Trump all the money his putrid heart desires.

    So I suggest you forget about the "effective controls coupled with lifting quotas" pipe dream, because neither side of that equation is happening. Make a realistic choice, between:

    1. turning a blind eye to the majority of "illegal" economic migrants who are peaceful and here to work for employers who hire them in voluntary employer/employee arrangements (I don't just mean illegal border crossers; a lot of "illegals" come in the Ayn Rand way: legally, but then overstay their visa)... but, at the same time, trying to police the minority who are criminals, and the employers who use force and threats to attempt to enslave "illegals" (best the authorities can do that; it's not gonna be perfect, or anywhere close to perfect, because immigration, especially when it's illegal, but even when it's legal, will result in higher crime rates).

    2. attempting to stop all of them (in an unrealistic scheme that involves building a $10B+ wall that will only stop some of them...in all likelihood, the most peaceful, non-criminal portion, while driving everyone into the arms of the cartels and the exploitative black market).

    P.S. Point number 1 can be coupled with a "macro" approach, that looks at what kind of people are coming into the country (intelligence agencies can be tasked with this, they're quite adept at snooping on foreigners, and it's mostly legal for them to do so), and, if there's an ACTUAL danger (as opposed to the manufactured one Trump fed to his mouth-breather base), action can be taken. The executive branch has a lot of power in deciding who to let in and who not to let in/deport if they sneak in, so the legislative stalemate doesn't prevent the White House from keeping the country safe from any threat to the American way of life...including purely ideological/political (initially non-violent) threats like Marxism.

    Even the notion of blocking entire countries (who refuse to cooperate with US efforts to investigate would be migrants) is justifiable, as long as it's, you know: JUSTIFIED. With evidence instead of demagogy and populism.

  15. On 2/3/2019 at 5:05 PM, softwareNerd said:

    IQ tests do measure some types of mental computational abilities. With all their issues, I think an employer could be right to say... I don't want anyone who score below NNN on an IQ test. So, maybe an employer uses  a cut-off of 80 for low-skilled jobs.

    There are many kinds of physical jobs, including relatively high skilled ones, that require very low computational abilities. I think a lot of low IQ individuals have to the potential to do impressive things. There are likely some highly successful athletes, for instance, with IQ under 80, including some in team sports where the selection process is extremely unforgiving, and you need both physical and social skills to advance through the many levels of selection standing between a talented kid and a professional career.

    Those athletes could just as easily be productive (significantly productive, well above minimum wage) doing all sorts of regular jobs that require physical agility, endurance, and the ability to work with others in a stressful atmosphere...as long as someone believed that it was worth it to prepare them for such a career. What's keeping low IQ individuals out of these jobs isn't that they lack the capacity for doing the job, it's the bias created by the Psychologists that built IQ up into the be all end all measure of a person's worth on the job market. And the fact that the education system is built on that premise.

    Jordan Peterson makes the argument that even the US military, which desperately needs personnel, turns away low IQ individuals. But he forgets that the military needed personnel far more than they need it now, at times in the past, and yet they happily turned away blacks when there was a societal, pseudo-scientific stigma attached to their skin color. And they turned away 50% of the population (women) from combat roles until this decade. So that doesn't mean anything. In general, the correlation between IQ and financial success doesn't prove anything. The cause can be the low IQ, or the general bias against low IQ. We would only know which if we actually gave these people a chance to prove themselves (that would involve changing the education system, where the bulk of the damage is done to the self esteem of people with low IQ...because school curricula and IQ tests are developed on the same premise that this narrow set of abilities are the only ones that matter).

  16. 36 minutes ago, Tenderlysharp said:

    This got me thinking about another statistic Jordan Peterson was talking about.  That 10% of Americans, the outliers, do not have a high enough IQ to be allowed into the military.  They are not smart enough to be shot at, yet they still need to be kept occupied with something productive to do so they don't run around tearing the world up.  One can have very low IQ and very high trait conscientiousness and still do a simple repetitive job much better than a robot can.   

    If IQ is an objective measure of intellect, then we have problem. But, like I said: Jordan is jumping to conclusions in a field outside his expertise. IQ is not a good measure of intellect, I don't care what the US military says (in this case...I actually do rely on US military studies on language learning, but this makes no sense whatsoever: the language learning stuff relies on studies, this does not). He's basically just saying "the US military says so, for unspecified reasons, so get on board...which is not a good enough reason to get on board.

    And, again: this is a pretty throwaway point he makes when people obsessed with the issue probe him on it. It's not his field of expertise. (check out his take on Islam, on youtube...that should illuminate his capacity for refraining from definitive statements on things he's not an expert on).

    He doesn't believe personality (which IS his field of expertise) is set in stone/genetics, so why would you ever take his word on the notion that intellect (especially once freed from the arbitrary bind to IQ) is set in stone/genetics?

  17. 2 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

    What are you going to do with this assumptions? Do you seriously thinking 40% 60% etc. while talking to people? If you are actually having a conversation, It does not take much to start forming an opinion of another person... at which point class probabilities are rendered pretty useless. And, if you start to assume that before hand, you will hinder your own ability to be objective, and will therefore miss spotting reality.

    Jordan Peterson (who I think is a brilliant thinker and public speaker) makes a very interesting point about social statistics: the real issue isn't the 60/40 split between the masses. The real issue is between the outliers: when there's a 60/40 split between two large groups of people, the spit between the extremes (the people who out-perform the group, meaning the over-performers) is far greater (95/5 to 99/1).

    For instance, in NYC (or NYS, I'm citing this out of memory, so I'm not entirely sure which), an overwhelming majority of genius level IQ tested high-school students are ethnic Ashkenazi Jews. A crazy amount, something like 49 out of 50 "genius" IQ students in NY are Jewish. That's a natural consequence of Ashkenazi Jews being, on average, about ten points above the average population, in IQ. Which is not that much. But small statistical differences result in overwhelming differences when it comes to outliers (in this case, geniuses).

    Another good example of this, often cited by Jordan Peterson, is the radical split in prison population, by sex...pretty sure it is above 9 to 1 in "favor" of men...despite the fact that, on average, personality traits that favor criminality, between men and women, tend to be around 60/40 percent...which, on the surface, doesn't seem that significant until you look at the results in outliers.

    And, of course, outliers determine the future of a society. It's hard to argue with that. Albert Enstein (a person who can be objectively judged to have had superior intellect, without an IQ test) was more important than 5 billion people, all added together, who lived since. Clearly. If high IQ really does equal superior intellect, then no one else really matters in the NYC school system on a societal level, except Ashkenazi Jews. And no one really matters on the African continent, period. So, if you buy into IQ (like Jordan unfortunately does...but with a caveat: he does not claim any kind of omniscience, he is open to counter-arguments, and I think he would be blown away by someone challenging his definitions, I don't think he ever met someone able to do that), you can't really dispute these types of conclusions. The only possible avenue of attack against that position is attacking IQ (and social sciences in general, because Jordan is correct: IQ is one of the better parts of social sciences).

    Jordan, as far as I know, only makes one decent argument for IQ: there's a strong corelleration between IQ and financial success in the West. Which is somewhat of a non-sequitur.

  18. 6 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

    If you want an Objectivist answer, Independence is a virtue and you won't be able to practice it with her.  She wants dependence and if she doesn't get it, she's gone.  

    According to happiness, she was attracted by his initial rejection (which she interpreted as independence, even though it wasn't), and dumped him because he got too clingy (which is psychological dependence). So how did you get from there to the exact opposite?

     

  19. My advice is blunt. If you don't want to hear it, don't click on the spoiler tags:

     

    Stop playing the victim. Every thread I see you start is about you being the victim of something or somebody. It's the worst possible way to go through life. Start taking responsibility for the things that happen to you.

    Here's how I would rephrase this story, if it happened to me (actually, it happened to me more than once...happens to almost everyone except the most confident, assertive 5-10% of young men):

    I met this girl at work, there was a mutual attraction. She flirted with me, but I'm not that good at it, plus I'm deathly afraid of rejection, so I pretended not to be interested for months. And what better way to avoid rejection than to never start anything in the first place? However, it didn't work, because she isn't a typical, passive, agreeable woman. She's in that minority which has an assertive personality, so she took charge and got what she wanted. Except, you know...that's not what she really wanted. What she really wanted is what every woman wants: for the man she likes to take charge and ask for what HE wants, so that she can simply give it to him.

    So, naturally, things went downhill pretty quickly. We both screwed up: she screwed up for not realizing that there's a reason why women are not supposed to take charge in a relationship: it won't work. And they're the reason why it won't work: women will stop being attracted to a man who lets them be in charge of the relationship. Men don't necessarily have that problem, most of them are fine staying attracted to a bossy, physically attractive woman. That's why they end up bearing the brunt of the breakup: they're still attracted, she is not.

    Speaking of which this Johnny character she moved on to seems to fit that description pretty well too. So it's probably the same exact dynamic we had, and it's gonna end the same way. Hmmm, maybe once it does (not before, because she won't be receptive to it before) I should mention some of this stuff to her, help her realize what she's doing wrong. Of course, that would involve being honest and admitting my failure too, instead of playing the innocent victim.

    Anyways, back to the story: And then the rejection came, and I didn't handle it well. Which, frankly, is the bigger problem, because it means I can't even practice getting better at this relationship stuff: I'm too afraid of another messy, way too painful rejection. So perhaps that's the first thing I should work on: figure out how to handle rejection without turning it into this huge, emotionally draining drama.

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