“why is he torturing logic in order to rescue his rightness from the evidence?” LogicDenialSam HarrisIntellectualization Author:Bret Weinstein
“There is something indescribably important about having that one person in your life who you absolutely bond with. You have an understanding of who they are and they have an understanding of who you are in a way that no-one can match. They are capable of providing a reality check, and just simply being non-negotiably there. There really is no substitute and if there's one thing I would wish for younger people that would upgrade the quality of their lives and make them more secure and more capable it would be that they find a person with whom they can build such a relationship, and build it.” LoveRomanceRelationshipsRelationshipTrue LoveMonogamyThe One Author:Bret Weinstein
“...whatever it did, it created people who are not well constructed to do shit.” SocietySocial JusticeAmerican CultureMeritocracyAdultingMillenials Author:Bret Weinstein
“In effect, we know from Darwin that there are only four characteristics necessary in order to get adaptive evolution, right? If you have reproduction, variation, differential success, and an environment of limited resources, you're going to get adaptive evolution. When we set up an economic system, or a political system...*it evolves*. Things evolve within it. And if we don't anticipate that what we write down in our documents about what we're trying to accomplish does not have the capacity to overwhelm whatever niche we have set up and that we will ultimately see the creatures that are supported by the environment that we created, then we will never get this right. Because we will always be fooled by our own intentions, and we will create structures that create predators of an arbitrary kind. So we need to start thinking evolutionarily, because that's the mechanism for shaping society into something of a desirable type rather than a monstrous type. [...] So let's say we're talking about a political structure...and we know we don't like corruption...and we're going to set a penalty for attempting to corrupt the system. OK, now what you've done is you've built a structure in which evolution is going to explore the questions, 'What kind of corruptions are invisible?' and 'What kinds of penalties are tolerable from the point of view of discovering how to alter policy in the direction of some private interest?' Once you've set that up, if you let it run, evolutionarily it will create a genius corruptor, right? It will generate something that is capable of altering the functioning of the system without being spotted, and with being only slightly penalized -- and then you'll have no hope of confronting it, because it's going to be better at shifting policy than you will be at shifting it back. So what you have to do is, you have to build a system in which there *is no selection* that allows for this process to explore mechanisms for corrupting the system, right? You may have to turn the penalties up much higher than you would think, so that any attempt to corrupt the system is ruinous to the thing that attempts it. So the thing never evolves to the next stage, because it keeps going extinct, right? That's a system that is resistant to the evolution of corruption, but you have to understand that it's an evolutionary puzzle in the first place in order to accomplish that goal. [...] We sort of have this idea that we inherited from the wisdom of the 50s that genes are these powerful things lurking inside of us that shift all of this stuff that we can't imagine they would have control over, and there's some truth in it. But the larger truth is that so much of what we are is built into the software layer, and the software layer is there because it is rapidly changeable. That's why evolution shifted things in that direction within humans. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to be responsible for altering things carefully in the software, intentionally, in order to solve problems and basically liberate people and make life better for as many people as possible, rather than basically throw up our hands because we are going to claim that these things live at the genetic layer and therefore what can we do?” ScienceFreedomKnowledgeSocietyEvolutionHuman ConditionDarwinismNature Vs NurtureNature Vs Culture Author:Bret Weinstein
“There is data [on race and intelligence]. My claim is that it doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't enough work; there aren't enough people who have done the work – and the definition...I mean, trust me: "heritable" is a serious problem. Because...for example, let's say that there was a belief that people who had a brow ridge, or something, were stupid. And that belief was widespread. And that brow ridge was genetically encoded, and it resulted in people going into the world and facing discrimination in school, let's say, because the brow ridge connoted to the teachers that they were not likely to be intelligent, and therefore they were given simpler lessons; they got dumbtracked or something like that. That would show up as a genetically heritable difference in intelligence between brow-ridged people and non-brow-ridged people. That does not mean that it was encoded in the genome and that it was the brain that was blueprinted...what it means is that some feature that was encoded in the genome caused the environment to interact with the individual in a way that then produced a difference in intellect. [...] It is so early in the study of this stuff, we really don't know. And the taboo nature of those questions is causing a vacuum that is being filled with an artificially pure (and probably not correct) perspective.” ScienceRaceEnvironmentRacismPrejudiceBiologyBigotryGeneticsEpigenetics Author:Bret Weinstein
“For anybody who's tracking actual predictive power, The Fringe will surprisingly keep being the place where reality is spotted first.” TruthCultureMainstreamOutsidersConspiracy TheoryTruth TellingConspiracy TheoriesFringe Of SocietyLeading Edge Author:Bret Weinstein
“The whole idea of: "Well, surely if you're going to make progress on this set of [science] puzzles, you will want to know everything everyone has done on the way there." [But] by the time you learn everything everyone has done on the way there you will have spent a huge amount of time and made no progress. And even worse, you will be entrained. You will be entrained in the thought process that got them stuck in the first place. And this all very counter-intuitive: Do you want to know everything that is known before you try to add anything? The answer is: You probably don't. You'll ask better questions [if you don't.] You'll ask some bad ones [too]. You'll ask some questions that other people have figured their way past, but you'll ask some good ones that nobody's asked yet and that's where the breakthroughs live.” CreativityProgressResearchInventionNew IdeasInventingResearchingResearch MethodologyNew Insights117darkhorse1hr07 Author:Bret Weinstein
“Fun is something you're supposed to have in the process of accomplishing something [meaningful]. When you start thinking that 'fun is the whole point' rather than 'fun is the reward to get you to be active and do something [meaningful]'... What we find out is that people who have a life [where fun for its own sake is the whole point of life,] often are not wonderful people; they're spoiled brats. It doesn't satisfy you. It actually leaves you rudderless.” FunMeaning Of LifePurpose Of LifeDirection In LifeWhat To Do With Your LifeWhat To Do In Life133darkhorse Author:Bret Weinstein