DocWatts

I don't want Joe Rogan to get canceled, but I'm glad he's getting a ton of shit for using his podcast in such a flagrantly irresponsible way. I'd be okay with JRE episodes that spread misinformation about Covid getting de-listed from Spotify (so that Rogan would have to find alternative ways of getting those episodes out, were he determined to do so). Similiar how to you can find porn if you go out of your way, but you can't find it on YouTube. Rogan might call himself 'just' a comedian, but when you have 20 million people who take your opinion on these matters seriously (regardless if many of those people are morons), you don't get to use that excuse anymore. Back in the 2000s and 2010s John Stewart tried playing that card that he was 'just' a comedian, despite the fact that The Daily Show was being used as a primary news source for tens of millions of people. If it rung hollow for John Stewart (who was much more responsible about how he used his media platform), it should ring hollow for Joe Rogan. Pointing out that for profit media conglomerates are also problematic is a case of 'what about-ism', that doesn't change anything about the deserved criticism that Rogan's been receiving. Also, do 'all' voices need to be heard? Does that include cigarette companies advertising to children? How about fascist propaganda that motivates individuals to commit hate crimes against their fellow citizens? Or does the notion of 'personal responsibility' not extend to how individuals choose to use their freedom of speech, even in instances where it causes lasting harm to other people?

MSNBC is a corporate organization, so keep in mind that there's a profit motive at work there. Consequently its this structure as a for-profit organization, rather than hysteria about an imaginary 'liberal bias' from Bad Actors on the far right, that's actually worth being concerned about and keeping in mind. I'd recommend The Associated Press for direct reporting of events. And The Conversation as a possible alternative for high quality, complex news analysis that's non-partisian and not tainted by a profit motive. Vox isn't bad either, they're open about the fact that they're a Left leaning news organization, but they provide high quality news analysis and aren't run as a for profit organization. I'd stay clear of Young Turks, they tend to fall in to many of the same pitfalls as large corporate media (such as sensationalism), since they're reliant upon YouTube clicks to keep the lights on.

Science can tell you how nature behaves, but not what nature is. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory still work regardless of whether the substrate of Reality is physical, mental, or something else. Idealism isn't a threat to science, it only appears to be a threat to those that conflate science with ontological assumptions inherent to materialism.

That's it precisely. Thomas Kuhn was quite persuasive about this overall point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Investigation never begins from a 'neutral' perspective, what sort of problems are investigated are always guided by a pre-existing paradigm (whether one is strictly within that paradigm or pushing against it, it serves as an anchor point in either case). What often happens is that a revolutionary scientist will have an intuition that they develop into a theoretical framework, and this can happen before they have emperical data to validate thier claim For example, emperical proof of general relativity came years after Einstein developed his theory, carried out by scientists in Russia observing light bending around the moon during an eclipse, precisely as Einstein's theory predicted. In the case of Graves, my guess is that he had a pre-existing intuition that the hierarchical process of adolescent development that Piaget described continued in to adulthood, which gave him a framework to begin gathering evidence. And at some point (perhaps from his collaboration with Don Beck, or perhaps before this), that there was a further intuition that adult development had something interesting or important to day about collective psychological development for societies. The reason I brought up Hegel and Marx earlier is that both sought to identify and articulate a broader meta-paradigm via a dialectical framework, with Spiral Dynamics being a more modern attempt at such, with the added benefit of Spiral Dynamics having access to a more rigourous emperical method for grounding its claims than earlier attempts.

I guess that my own view is that empiricism is always going to run up against limitations when it's trying to model something that's inherently qualitative in nature, namely that of internal value systems. In order for a model like Spiral Dynamics to work, I would argue that its body of emperical evidence would have to be situated within something like an intuitive dialectical framework in order to be useful.

While Spiral Dynamics does use scientific evidence to inform and give credibility to its claims (and has been successfully used in places like South Africa), I would argue that its true strength is more akin to something like Hegelian dielectrics, or Marx's theory of alienated labor. In that it's more useful as a framework for re-contextualizing a particular set of problems in a systematic, meta-textual way.

@Abc109 I think the problem is the way that the issue is being framed: that there's two narratives, a 'mainstream' narrative, and a counter (conspiracy) narrative. And that the truth is somewhere in between these two. The problem is that framing it in this way is that it gives the false impression that experts are roughly 'evenly split' between the two narratives. Fossil fuel companies for instance used exactly this tactic to disinform the public on climate change, by creating a false impression that there was broad disagreement among climate scientists and the issue was largely unsettled. Cigarette companies used basically the same tactics to disinform the public about thier products. Rather, a less misleading way to frame it would be that for something like vaccines or climate change, %99 of professionals in that field are in agreement on the 'mainstream' narrative, and %1 of thier colleagues have a counter narrative that they're promoting.

Worth pointing out, and this is just my personal experience, but the individuals that I've known who've fallen in to a conspiracy rabbit hole have tended to have serious unmet deficiency needs (such as a failing marriage, poor health, a terrible and unfulfilling job, etc). Or just more generally they were people who were in want of a purpose in life. While this could be just a sampling bias from the individuals of my various social circles, my intuition is that this speaks to society not having enough outlets for people to build meaning in thier lives. In want of healthy outlets for individuals to find meaning and community, should we be surprised that a society plagued by widespread alienation, cynicism, and loneliness is also one where pathological ways of finding these things are as common as they are?

I'm gonna guess it's probably in the ballpark of something like a Ted talk, which has a ticket price of around $5,000. Difference being that Jordy's audience doesn't consist of highly affluent socialites and entrepreneurs, so much as young men with access to YouTube...

I've been interested in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but I've been having some trouble wrapping my head around his ideas (they haven't been clicking for me the same way that say, Hegel's philosophy did). Would anyone here be able to suggest some resources for making his work more approachable? What's the gist of what he's trying to convey in something like Being and Time?

@Bernardo Carleial Thanks! That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I've been putting off Heidegger for a while since I knew his work had a reputation for being somewhat impenetrable, so having some contemporary sources to help make his ideas more accessible is really helpful.

While it would have been interesting to see a novel argument against Idealism, his argument falls prey to a common assumption that a shared, objective reality has to have a material ontological basis. I'd be genuinely curious as to whether he's aware that objective idealism is something that exists, as the main thrust of his argument seems to be directed towards solipsistic subjective Idealism. I won't go so far as to call this a strawman as a lot of people aren't aware that there's even a distinction to be made between different types of idealism. If I were to try and make the strongest case possible against Idealism, I might have focused on the entropic heat death of the universe. I would have asked why an ontologically mental universe should present itself to us as a metaphorical clock winding down towards eventual thermodynamic equilibrium. And if time's arrow is an extrinsic appearance of an excitation of a transpersonal mental field, what is it an extrinsic appearance of exactly?

Fair enough, and I can empathize with someone being in an irritable mood from being in physical pain. From what I've watched of him, even in discussions where he's not being triggered, there seems to be a somewhat surprising lack of self awareness for someone whose chosen field is psychology, and who talks as much as he does about cross paradigmatic study and analysis. Not that I'm placing these two figures in remotely the same league, but compare JP to someone like Ken Wilber who has enough self awareness to recognize that he's developed a shadow around Green from his time in academia, and admits as much. I don't think most reasonable people would have a problem with JP if he were upfront about his biases, and if he wasn't treated as an authority by millions of people on issues where he's very clearly uninformed and/or highly biased.

I'll give her major credit for being open and upfront about her perspective (as a conservative), and for at least trying to engage with other perspectives in Good Faith. By those metrics she's leagues ahead of her father.

Thanks for posting this by the way, after watching it I feel like I understand Mr. Girl's perspective better, even if I'm not any more endeared to him now than I was during that Vaush stream. I think the problem with using an intentionally inflammatory rhetorical style is that it entails giving a huge benefit of the doubt that the person is actually operating in Good Faith and has a salient point to make (rather than being a toxic asshole). Maybe I just find it an extremely off-putting way of trying to communicate, even if that doesn't necessarily invalidate the larger points he brings up. And more of a meta-point, but I'm not sure that a message can or even should be separated from the style and tone of its delivery.

Thought it might be interesting and helpful to have a thread to discuss the challenges of development. For me, it's been being in a place of having developed fairly keen meta-awareness of my habitual propensities to judge and criticize conflicting value systems, without being able to fully transcend those habits. Which is a bit of a weird place to be in if I'm being honest, though I suppose it's better than the alternative (going the rest of my life being unaware of this tendency). While I recognize that I'm pretty good at being open minded about integrating new perspectives into my conceptual system and not inflexibly hitching myself to any one paradigm, I also recognize that I'm still working on integrating aspects of the lower stages so that I can empathize with them more fully (Red in particular in my case).

Thank you! Perhaps someone more developed than myself can have a productive conversation with anyone in absence of that shared context But for me I find that without some way to ground the conversation my other option is to cede Reality to that other person, which my ego isn't prepared to do. Or at least not for discussions around topics which have consequences in the real world. Around the SD-Stages that I haven't fully integrated, this expresses itself as a defensiveness and me being less willing to give that person the benefit of the doubt that they're arguing in Good Faith. While I don't niavely assume that every opposing view is operating in Good Faith all or even most of the time on every issue, I do have enough meta-awareness to recognize that I'm much more willing the benefit of the doubt towards Stages that I've integrated. Of course meta-awareness is one thing, and translating that meta-awareness in to action is a lengthy process. Or at least it is for me, at any rate.

@Carl-Richard I'm actually in the same boat in that I also saw people lile Dawkins and Harris as somewhat infallible when I was much younger, and had little understanding of things like metaphysics and epistemology. I'd say for Richard Dawkins, the limitations of logical positivism are fairly obvious to someone with philosophical literacy. I think his body of work on biology and evolutionary theory (such as The Selfish Gene) still stands up to scrutiny. So long as you don't take his meta-paradigm too seriously, his scientific works have a ton to offer an inquisitive mind. When I say that Richard Dawkins has similarities to JP, I'm mostly referring to his being locked in to a paradigm and being not curious about other perspectives. Unlike Jordy P and Sam Harris, I've always found him very honest and forthcoming about his views, and never got the sense that he was obfuscating aspects of his world view.

Probably has everything to do with what stages you've integrated, and what stages you've developed a shadow around. I don't find it too difficult to have productive cross-paradigmatic discussions when there's a shared context that can ground the discussion. On the contrary, I actually quite enjoy discussing metaphysics with people hitched to an Orange materialist paradigm because I understand where they're coming from, and it's something that I myself embodied earlier in my life and can empathize with. Trying to do the same thing with say, Red, for example has typically been a frustrating experience because there's not a whole lot I can empathize with from the stage, even if on an intellectual level I realize that it's a necessary developmental stage. Or more generally I suppose with someone living in a completely different version of Reality where there's not an easily identifiable place where the Venn diagrams overlap that can ground a productive cross-paradigmatic discussion. Obviously this is a limitation of my own perspective, with Red for instance, it's only through the luck of the Birth lottery that I wasn't born in to challenging Survival circumstances where Red was necessary to meet my physical and emotional needs.

I'm comfortable saying I'm very familiar with Richard Dawkins, and have read and enjoyed many of his books. I can't say I have nearly the same familiarity with Hitchens, so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other. In my mind I associate Hitchens with aspects of Dawkin's paradigm that I find less interesting than his work on evolutionary theory (namely his anti-religiousity and his advocacy for atheism), but I realize that might not be doing justice to Hitch's body of work.

Richard Dawkins has a particular paradigm that he's locked in to every bit as much as JP is, and there's limitations to his worldview for sure, but he manages to embody that worldview with integrity. That and unlike Jordy P, Richard Dawkins can actually answer a question in a straitforward manner without the sense that he's being evasive and trying to obfuscate. If and when Jordy P writes something half as well written, thought provoking, and important as The Selfish Gene I'll consider taking him seriously as an academic.

In your view are there any contexts at all where it's okay for a white person to say the n-word? By that I mean are the any scenarios where it would be non-offensive in your view? (I'm genuinely asking by the way, not trying to lead towards an answer one way or the other).

Ancient Greece was home to some of the most actualized and forward thinking (for thier time) people in all of world history. Athens was not only the brithplace if democracy, but one of the birthplaces of philosophy (and by extension, science). I'm not sure if technological achievement should be the bar that we use to evaluate earlier cultures (or at least it shouldn't be the primary way of doing so). None of this is to take away from the ingenuity behind some of the technology the Greeks were able to employ. Between the video above and Archedemes Claw, it's very cool very impressive stuff. Actually as someone interested in the history behind computers and computer science, this kind of thing is right up my alley.

Oh okay, I was missing some of that context, as I haven't seen the Destiny discussion that you're referring to. I tend never to know in advance whether Vaush's discussions will actually be productive or turn in to a trainwreck, where I end up questioning why I just listened to two people talking past each other for an hour... Something like Theories of Everything or HealthyGamerGG is a million times better in that regard, which considering that both of thier hosts embody Tier2 values is hardly surprising...