I have an extreme problem with the yellow on that pyramid. I know this will surprise you that I hate most people and the feeling is mutual.
(yes, I’m joking on the surprise part)
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“Oh yeah? Well I had sex with your wife”
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That’s why the Everly Brothers split up
Google union busting. Employees wanted to unionize so Google hired a union buating firm. They then change the rules to make it to illegal to look a certain documents but never specify which documents. Union organizers and then fired for leaking and spying
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/googles-next-moonshot-union-busting-7bd2784dc690
Re the pyramid, I think anything ordered around “needs” is essentially bullshit, because humans create more “needs” whenever their current ones are satisfied; “needs” are inherently an egotistical way of approaching one’s place in the world. A less egotistical way is approaching the world in terms of ways of interacting with it, there are any number of ways you can break that down, but one I like is Emily Esfahani Smith’s “Four Pillars of Meaning”:
Smith organizes her research into four pillars of meaning:
1) A Sense of Belonging , meaning relationships “where you really feel like you matter to others and are valued by them, and where you in turn treat others like they matter and are valued.”
2) Purpose , or “having something worthwhile to do with your time,” says Smith. “It’s this pursuit that organizes your life and involves making a contribution to others.” Smith writes and speaks about the best ways we can find purpose in our own lives. This includes locating our strengths and talents, what our unique perspective on the world is, and bringing that all together to give back.
3) Transcendence , “those moments where you’re basically lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life and you feel your sense of self fade away.” Transcendence, for a lot of people, is part of a religious pursuit, experienced through meditation, prayer, and other expressions of faith. But you can also experience it in nature, or at work, explains Smith.
4) Storytelling , the final pillar “surprised me in a lot of ways,” Smith says. “Storytelling is really about the story that you tell yourself about your life, about how you became you. It’s your personal myth.”
Note that, aside from perhaps the fourth one, these are not “what do I need to extract from the world” but rather “what are the modes in which I need to interact with the world”. Ideally you want something to put in all the columns here, but you need at least one to keep you going.
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Not sure I really agree that the fourth one is required (it’s at odds with the third one imo), but it’s important to a lot of people.
Mrs. Columbo, later known as Kate Columbo, followed by Kate the Detective and then ultimately Kate Loves a Mystery is an American crime drama television series initially based on the wife of Lieutenant Columbo, the title character from the television series Columbo. It was created and produced by Richard Alan Simmons and Universal Television for NBC, and stars Kate Mulgrew as a news reporter helping to solve crimes while raising her daughter.
Katherine Kiernan Mulgrew (born April 29, 1955) is an American actress.
Lili Haydn (born 1969) … began her career as a child actress at the age of seven. She initially appeared in commercials and moved on to television and film roles. From 1979 to 1980, she played Jenny Columbo, daughter of Lt. Columbo and his ex-wife, Kate Columbo/Callahan (Kate Mulgrew) in the Columbo spin-off series Mrs. Columbo.
Peter Michael Falk (September 16, 1927 – June 23, 2011) was an American actor and comedian, known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo.
So Columbo knocked up a 14 year old when he was in his early 40’s?
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Earlier there was also this,
and this.
I thought people were doing a bit.
I wouldn’t say it’s at odds. Your own personal narrative is part of the “big picture”, so it’s consistent with the idea of transcendence.
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One of the breakthroughs I had in the treatment of my depression was realizing that we aren’t supposed to be happy and most of the things I thought I needed/desired (which in turn drove my feelings of failure/worthlessness that were central to my depression) were created by the external world, they didn’t originate as part of some actual need or desire, rather they were there because that’s what the world I grew up in and interacted with told me I need/desire. Seems silly/obvious in retrospect, but it was a big deal for me at the time.
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I love Chapo but their limitations are on full display with the WeWork episode. Matt somehow thinks the Saudis gave money to SoftBank to give to WeWork to prop up urban real estate values? They seem unaware that Amazon is profitable? Do some homework, fellas.
My main beef with them has always been that many of their takes are just lazy armchair homerism. Hot take: Although they are way smarter, more informed and entertaining, I think they are the closest thing the left has to Limbaugh.
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It seems like they dance around legitimate and interesting topics (subtle encroachment into independent time by employers, the economic futility of work for millennials, the gullible nature of elites, etc.), but they almost always just opt for the easy, incomplete or wrong answer (capitalism: BAD).
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I had something similar happen the first time I did ecstasy. I realized that if I can be the happiest I’ve ever been in my life just from the feeling of standing barefoot on warm pavement - then maybe I had some agency in my own happiness and it wasn’t just a function of the situation I’d been birthed into.
Or something like that. Basically it was the beginning of letting go of teen angst.
Also I know I’m lucky that I don’t have real depression - except when I do too much drugs - which at this point includes the serotonin crash from ecstasy hangovers. But man after that first time I was just glowing for a month.
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Yeah, exactly. They have exposed me to many leftist people and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of, but so often I’m left feeling like they didn’t do any kind of prep work or anything. I can’t remember who it was back before 2P2-pacalypse, I think maybe simpliticus, but someone put it best comparing Chapo to people like the Pod Save guys (or maybe it was the Weeds crew) as being the difference between C+ Brown students and A Harvard students.
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Yeah when I look at the pyramid I don’t think “Well I’ve got level 4 solved, time to focus on level 5” - because as I mentioned, level 3 and 4 take constant work.
I look at it more as - well I’ve got my basic needs met, I’m not super stressed over money, so now I’m going to meander around in the top 3 levels (which are pretty similar to the 4 pillars you posted) like a worm burrowing through an apple.
Btw here’s the interview I was talking about. I didn’t know who Matt Berkey was before this Mike Postle thing, but I really like his POV and style - just complete no nonsense and always something illuminating.
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While the rest of the world is going in the wrong direction Australia is again showing the world progressive laws around sex work. Thumbs up @ChrisV
Sex Workers Celebrate the Passing of the Bill to Decriminalise Sex Work in the NT | Scarlet Alliance
I’m surprised you believe such things.
On the first point, “learning it in school” is the same as “believing it because told”! 95% of school is literally sitting in a chair being told what things you are supposed to believe, then writing the things you were told back down to verify that you’ve internalized them appropriately. On science specifically, there’s also a lab component, but there are honestly not enough lols for the idea that more than maybe 1% of the population has done enough scientific lab work to have anything like an empirical basis for almost any scientific fact. My most advanced scientific work was a freshman orgo lab, where I demonstrated that IR spectroscopy produces a uniform flat line regardless of what compound you fed into it, proved that over-the-counter caffeine tablets contain far less caffeine than stated on the label, and conducted a series of experiments that cast grave doubt on the idea that any organic synthesis, however simple, can produce more than a trivial amount of the desired product.
On the simplicity point, are you conceding then that you do believe in the big bang solely on grounds of authority? That’s really enough for the point I wanted to make, which is that the psychological act of believing in religion and angels is not far different from the psychological act of believing in (at least some) science. People tell you it’s true, they have the right social credentials to be believed, so you believe them. The thing that’s remarkable about cranks is that they believe people who don’t have appropriate social credentials, which is why most people (correctly) view flat earthers and Qanon people as weirder than Episcopalians. And appropriately worry that Q and the alt-right and Trumpism are becoming socially credentialed so that normies will adopt them.
More importantly, you probably don’t really understand any science. IIRC, you’re some kind of engineer, so maybe you do, but it’s more likely that you’re familiar with a bunch of empirical facts and rules and understand how to apply them within a framework you take on faith. (Which is ultimately the only way to do it, so no reason to feel bad about it!) Speaking as an extremely knowledgeable non-scientist/non-engineers, I can say that none of us genuinely understand any scientific fact. For example, take simple Newtonian gravitation. F = M1M2G / r^2, right? I know (from books I view as authoritative!) that you can derive Kepler’s laws of orbital motion from this simple equation. Why, to demonstrate it, I’ll just derive the fact that a planet sweeps out an equal area per unit time throughout its orbit. Let’s see, dA/dt = d(pos)/dt * (formula for area of sector of an ellipse, which is… maybe something involving radians? Maybe theta plays a role? Well, that’s too much astronomy anyways. Obviously that equation can be used to show that objects on the earth’s surface experience a uniform force in the direction of the center of the earth. To show it, we simply look up a few constants, and then integrate the equation over the space occupied by the earth and its density as a function of three spatial variables to solve for the force of the … oh, wait, I can’t do any of that. (In fairness, I believe that this could be solved much more easily granted that density is symmetric around the earth’s center. Which you would need to take on authority.)
But even for people who get Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian mechanics is false. Not in the trivial sense that it doesn’t properly predict the orbit of Mercury, in the fundamental sense that it posits mysterious forces that act instantaneously across enormous distances in the vacuum of space. This was a conceptual roadblock to universal gravitation–how can the earth be pulling the moon downwards? They’re not in contact! It’s nuts. But more importantly, it’s NOT TRUE. In reality, as far as we understand it, there is no force between two massive objects. Instead, each object warps space-time such that other objects are deflected towards it in space as they move forward in time. Again ~no one understands this (and I’m only like 50/50 confident that there’s no some giant conceptual error there that I don’t understand). In that sense, Newtonian gravity is just a bit of folk wisdom, like Aristotelean gravity before that, and like my toddler’s awareness that if he trips, he falls towards the floor and should stick his hands in that direction and move his head the other way.
Now, as to your second point, you must be aware that religious people also see their faith work every day. Devotees of astrology and roulette betting systems see confirmation of the truth of their beliefs. Confirmation bias is a thing. Perhaps you observed the truth of some of those popular social-psych experiments (the marshmallow test, ego depletion, etc.) that turned out not to be true. Or maybe when a depressed person takes Prozac and gets better, you marvel at the power of Science, but if they don’t you chalk it up to treatment-resistant depression?
Again, I’m sure this will be misinterpreted, but the point is not that you should be skeptical of science. It’s that you need to understand science as a social system for advancing ~true knowledge by leveraging people’s facility for social learning. The beauty of science is that, to make it work, you don’t need to tear down people’s inherent confirmity and rebuild them as New Scientistic Man who processes everything rationally. You just need to tweak the social rules about what kind of dogmas become socially authoritative and let the system do its work.
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