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Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give.

My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable.

By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corner. Prior to SV eating the world, the only people that said that we all should be entrepreneurs really just wanted you in their Amway downline.

Society doesn't like to show the magnitude failures out there, or worse, the getting-by'ers. There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures, when they are the winners of Kokomo, IN.

Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.

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I don't think luck is as "random" of a factor as much as most people think it is. Checkout "Luck Factor" by Dr. Richard Wiseman.

I do think there are a lot of things you can due to get probability more on your side:

- Keep your eyes open for opportunities and look for the upside ("be optimistic" is the woo-woo version), but it's been proven in experiments that you'll catch things others won't

- Only keep friends around you that actually support you. It's really hard to try to make life changes when people are constantly telling you you can't or shitting on your parade.

- Start making analytical choices. Certain fields pay more than others. Certain businesses treat their employees better than others. A lower position at a better company will increase your probability of "bumping" into those people who might be life changing.

- Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.

Counterpoint: Luck (broadly seen, including your genetic disposition and where you’ve been born - you might not call it luck, but it’s certainly not something you’ve chosen or earned) plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.

Source and book recommendation:

Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...

> In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.

Good summary in his article in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luc...

I totally agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't consider it a counter point.

I said luck isn't as _random_ as some people think it is. You're saying it plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.

These are not mutually exclusive.

It might even emphasize the point -- because it plays a bigger role than most suppose, it is important to understand how to best take advantage of poor (or superior) circumstances.

I doubt the person you’re replying to made a counter point and what’s being written about is really just semantics (when someone references luck instead of just acknowledging determinism).

The knowledge that’s statistically likely to benefit someone that’s poor, may not work from unfortunate circumstances and that happen precisely when it will hurt the situation. That happens as everyone has a fairly unique life.

We also have to rely on if someone misfortune at birth (in some way), happens to be “lucky enough” to encounter the knowledge to hopefully benefit them or as I should say fate decided to allow it.

Some people do everything right contrary to a person doing the opposite and life can reward whoever the unique conditions happened to favor for each person.

Everything is decided at birth if we were to break everything down into cause & effect.

I agree with your points but they don't really support "luck isn't random". I would say the argument is more "if you increase luck surface area the expected outcome will be higher". Not as catchy.

> - Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.

A) You really want to identify gambles with positive expectation. If you constantly expose yourself to “more chances of success” with negative expectation (such as going to the casino for the chance of winning big), you’ll end up ruined.

B) Even if you can identify gambles with positive expectation, the more resources you have initially, the more you can afford to gamble. Thus, people initially deprived of luck might have less chance of catching up, let alone making it big.

Very much agreed on both points -- which is why I think studying that is important. The tide is definitely against you, but you have a greater chance of fighting it if you know how it works.

Speaking from experience, and also having known a lot of people with a deep understanding of probability, the kind of unluckiness described by OP isn't immediately resolved by a familiarity with probability. For example, it can work against a person where becoming aware of the number of small chance events, that you come to believe you're just wasting your time. But I do think understanding probability is useful in life and underrated.

So that is where good advice would step in to offer some guidance about how to actually apply this knowledge.

IMHO we are not only discussing luck but also our imperfect and fallible nature as people. All you say is excellent advice, but -- sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

I've said this before, so apologies for repeating myself:

Luck is making the better decision in a timely manner based on incomplete knowledge where each option appears equally valid. However, people generally are poor at calculating probability combined with risk/reward and simply make bad decisions. And sometimes, all choices lead to bad outcomes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19308323

To expand on this; if you are a healthy, intelligent adult I don't accept the idea that sometimes you don't have a choice, that somehow it is all out of your hands. That thinking leads to victimhood which is really an avoidance of taking responsibility for your decisions.

Yes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you - but you chose to take on the bear, whether directly or due to some previous decision (that didn't involve a bear at all).

Enjoyed watching "The Gentleman" the other night and a fan of films like Lock Stock, Two Smoking Barrels and the idea of events snowballing from the choices people make (and then the interaction of each individual's ongoing choices). But the situations that they find themselves in were a result of something they did.

Thank you fellow Taleb reader.

Also: Scott Adams, in his book "How to fail..." has a chapter on increasing one's luck. Worth a skim if you haven't checked it out before.

>> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car.

As the proud owner of a 2004 Toyota Corolla and a 2011 Philosophy Minor, this line made my day. Honestly it is just plain good advice.

How many miles does your Philosophy Minor have on it? I've heard they're not very reliable

It varies by brand. Plato pretty much runs forever. Kant, even property maintained, will leave you scratching your head. People keep Aristotle running, but it’s not pretty. For what you spend Hume is a bargain—you can even take it off road in the forest...assuming there are unfallen trees. For the DIYer, Wittgenstein will keep you busy but Russell is known to have a computational design flaw. I recommend a late model Singer if you can afford it because they’re still making parts.

this was the best thoughtful chuckle I got in a while

In fairness it does break down constantly, but I can usually repair it on my own. I should mention that it handles well in difficult terrain, and it appreciates in value over time.

Philosophy will get through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no philosophy.

" Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." — Rumi

> Philosophy will get through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no philosophy.

Good quote!

I always feel philosophy is the abode for people who couldn't get sucked in by religion.

Isn't philosophy kind of like CS minus the computers? I remember my sister talking about how much she hated her philosophy class and what she described was essentially discrete math-lite.

This is interesting. Can you expand it a bit, please?

Philosophy major here (I jokingly tout myself as a trained philosopher). Philosophy is a big field with different schools of thought. In the US/UK, the primary school is known as "analytic (philosophy)" which is focused on tight arguments, precise language, and clarity of thought (see Russell, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Godel). This is contrasted by European -- in particular, French -- "continental (philosophy)" which waxes more poetic (see Nietzsche, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida).

The former deals quite a bit with logic (which was my area of focus in undergrad). Classes I took ranged from "baby logic" (predicate logic, first-order-logic), to second-order logic, to mathematical logic (mostly Peano arithmetic), to metalogic (learning how to prove things like Godel's incompleteness), to lambda calculus, to game theory. This was on top of ethics classes, history of philosophy, and other miscellaneous classes (took a very fun seminar by a Yale visiting professor -- I forget his name -- on the philosophy of food). Most of the graduate seminars I took were on philsophy of language and model theory.

Just about every philosophy class had a pretty strong "logic" undercurrent.

Also, the less logical bit of analytic philosophy is all about breaking down and understanding other people's arguments. It's a very similar process to teasing out business requirements from stakeholders!

Just to clarify, and defend the old continent a bit: while it certainly originated German Idealism and its descendants all the way to post-structuralism and (gasp) “critical theory”, today of course you can find proponents of both schools (the continental/hermeneutic/postmodern and the analytic) on all continents.

And regarding the gp: most philosophy programs will have classes in informal and some even in formal logic, to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and way beyond.

This was my undergraduate degree, many years ago:

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/undergraduate/logic-...

Since they said "philosophy class," singular, I suspect they're referring to the unit on logic: modus ponens, modus tollens, valid vs sound arguments, etc.

From what I remember, her class involved a lot of logical proofs using propositional logic, but in the form of word problems, not logical statements. I.e., if Bob is larger than Alice, then... instead of P -> Q. They also discussed probabilities, but I'm not sure to what degree.

Those two topics are discussed in entry level CS courses as well. So I assumed that the fields might be semi-related if they require the same mathematical foundations.

Possibly it is because philosophy is a lot like being bothered by a bug in your code, and you stress and strain to resolve it which provides growth in wisdom after the objective is completed.

I love my 2001 Corolla. It's got 164k miles on it (had about 140 when I bought it), and I hope to get another 100k out of it!

1998 Honda Civic, 225k miles. Drove it to the Microsoft campus everyday, and parked next to Porsches.

Same here - except 220k. Still running great, but looking for a new-to-me car because i'm tired of driving it.

I feel like a used car underachiever right now, looking forward to 2025 when I get a back up camera and bluetooth.

You can always buy a new stereo and install it. If you buy it from Crutchfield, for like $19 extra, you can get it prewired/harnessed so you don't have to splice the wires. Pretty sweet deal.

Also, some stereos come with a backup cam. This has to be spliced in though.

HUGE NOTE: I bought a 4.5-star receiver on Crutchfield, but the receiver didn't have Sirius XM on it, so I basically don't have radio (unless I use an app on my phone to stream the radio). I don't listen to the radio often so it's not a huge deal for me, just something to be aware of.

I have two cars. 03 VW Jetta TDI with 270k miles and an 09 Nissan Altima with 260k miles. Though I do get plenty of chances to try my hand at being a mechanic.

Great advice.

I see a lot of people in tech with inflated ideas of what success means, and they're almost all tied strictly to salary/net worth.

Yeah, having money is nice, but if that's all you base happiness/idea of success on, its going to be a bumpy road.

>There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures

I understand how this can point of view can develop, but one of the things I'm most grateful for in life is struggling through a slew of minimum-wage jobs out of college before transitioning into tech. That first bump to "tech salary" literally doubled my income over night and it was only 70k in a high COL east coast city. I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.

Although I still pursue career advancement, it's not just for money. And if it were to all disappear over night (which is the case for a lot of people right now), I'm comforted by the fact that I've already had it "that bad".

> Yeah, having money is nice,

As someone who was broke for many years and now is less broke (cash is flowing, there's money in my accounts, but I'm deeply in negative net worth due to student debt), I think you're understating the issue, vastly.

Simply put, money is freedom. If you have it, you can do things people who don't have it can't. If you have enough of it, you can do just about anything. And, I'm not necessarily talking about luxuries, I'm talking about stuff like:

* If you have enough money in the bank, an unexpected car repair is a hassle, rather than a disaster.

* If you can afford to buy a home, then you don't have to worry about being evicted or not having a lease renewed.

* If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.

* If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.

As I said, none of these things are luxuries, but, to reach "don't have to worry about medical bankruptcy" levels, or even "I get to own a home and nobody can tell me I can't paint my front door pink" levels takes a huge amount of money relative to the median income today.

> I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.

That doesn't mean being broke is great, good, or even not all that bad. It just means you've gotten used to it.

> If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.

> If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.

I don't know where you're from, but most rich countries, and even some poorer ones, have free, quality education for all, and health care tends to be nearly free... if you get sick, the government will support you for as long as needed. If you're from a very poor country, sorry about that... maybe you should consider migrating to a better country, if you have skills that are in demand, that's pretty easy nowadays!

Take a guess which rich country I'm from. Hint: look who's #1 in global GDP.

I was being sarcastic :) of course I know in which country people usually have the concerns you mentioned... being #1 in GDP means nothing to the majority of Americans who don't get to have the peace of mind to not worry about even the most basic human necessities.

"* If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick."

Or you live in a country with a socialised medical system.

I see you caught my implicit punch line. None of those things above the level of "unexpected car breakdown" really ought to be things people in the country with the largest economy in the world ought to be worrying about. We need to do something about that, whether it's a move toward social democracy, or even full on socialism. But, there's such a "fuck you, got mine" attitude among our political class that we're never going to see it in my lifetime, I'm sure. If it hasn't happened in the face of a global pandemic shutting everything down, I doubt the elite are going to get the message that workers are the ones that create everything of value in the economy, so we should try to elevate the lot of the average worker, rather than keeping him so stressed, sick, and insecure.

I agree these things should not be what "people in the country with the largest economy in the world ought to be worrying about".

But Socialism is not the answer.

As Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

Socialism is great in concept. In class, which deals with the theoretical, it sounds great. For teachers, who can teach concepts and don't need to deal with the pesky nastiness of the real world, it is the thing to teach.

But in real life, Socialism, and partial socialism, and partial social by other names, are all TERRIBLE for the average dude.

Study history, for real. Look at the countries which have had all the "ism's". Democracy (and in many cases, even autocracy - which is also REALLY bad) are better.

I am not at all wealthy, live simply (no car, no smartphone, no whatever). I moved from the States to a socialy democratic country with an excellent public Medicaire system.

Even so, if I could make it more democratic and less socialistic, I would, and so would anyone else I know. A massive amount of my neighbors have moved to the States or are waiting for papers to do so. Everyone who can afford it has supplemental insurance.

It would be a shame if the States lost what they have right.

Money gives you the freedom to start over in one.

Also, if you have an absurd amount of money, your days become 8-10 hours longer because you don't need a job to pay your bills, which effectively doubles your remaining (awake) lifespan.

Yeah, everyone knows that rich people live longer on average, but most people don't realize how much longer.

Check out Man's Search for Meaning.

I have plenty of meaning. I’d just like some actual freedom.

You gotta dig deep first if you want to build a skyscraper, as I always heard.

This is all-around great advice. I heard some similar things on Ricky Gervais' show After Life, and I wrote them down:

> It's worth sticking around to maybe make my little corner of the world a slightly better place.

> Happiness is amazing. It's so amazing, it doesn't matter if it's yours.

> You may not like living much, but you can make the world a better place. So don't give up, because then they've won. And they grow in numbers.

> There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures, when they are the winners of Kokomo, IN.

Heh. Unrelated but I've been re-watching a lot of KOTH during quarantine and this line reminded me of a scene from the first season

https://youtu.be/bQfyCg0i8sU?t=1m0s

Lots of good points about living below your means. Also define what you want. I'd hate for someone to live a safe and secure life and minimize risk only to get shafted by the system in the end. Some risk is worth taking. Taking on debt in certain situations is worth it. You just need to get aware of life in the event of failure and take that into consideration.

"Adjust worldview" sounds deeply pessimistic to me. Anyone can do make life better, specially at time when degrees mean less, they just need to persevere. Stay level headed. If I have to suggest I wouldn't say "Adjust Worldview" at all.

> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.

I'd recommend the following:

1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson

3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham

> 2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson

A note on this, since mentioning Peterson tends to spark controversy: I think I think the people who get the best out of Peterson don't treat him as a guru issuing rules written in stone tablets (in spite of the implication of the book title) but as a provoker of attention/reflection. This is probably generally true of anyone, but especially worth considering here.

I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.

> I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.

I've noticed the same thing. I think he's gotten into bad habits commenting on subjects outside of his area of expertise, but I did enjoy his YouTube lectures for the reasons you mentioned

Cut him some slack. When he's on JRE his conversations should be thought of as some guy talking about how he feels about events. Just like you or I.

He's smart and thinks. That guy also just happens to be an expert in an area of knowledge.

Whilst we're speaking philosophy... I think Pliny's "sutor, ne ultra crepidam" ("shoemaker, not beyond the shoe") might be the quip to match your comment.

>but as a provoker of attention/reflection.

Smart business choice, this is how you capitalize on ambiguity. Sarcasm as a business model.

Heh. It’s true and I think Peterson is guilty of not only taking advantage of the attention provocation brings but cultivating it to some extent.

But I did have something more specific in mind that I didn’t articulate well: I think he’s successful at provoking attention to some genuinely helpful philosophical questions... and at least calling attention to a segment of knowledge from psych/neuroscience and then to some extent literature and mythology that are relevant to the questions. I can see why the provoke part sometimes overwhelms the rest and limits his audience, he is not without sin, but I think he’s doing more than trading in ambiguous deepities. YMMV, it’s possible someone better educated in those fields can point to something better.

Is that your model? Because Peterson is cited and sourced.

He was always like that. His work with the UN and legal work had rough edges. The fame has made him bigger not different.

His lectures go more in depth and are not trying to hit a peak of condensed information. As much as Peterson likes nietschze, he can’t write like nietschze, with highly condensed sentences. Peterson has always been better in the long form.

Without opinion on the particular value of this list, I'll advise that if you are exploring philosophy (even of the pop kind), especially if this is new for you, you'll probably get the best results out of reading contradicting and contrasting results.

Be it foundational or just currently popular, following up a work by reading it's most talented detractors can multiply it's value to you. Learning about an entirely different philosophical approach will often be more useful to you than reading another book on similar ideas.

Oh, and really good popularizors are rare. Usually the original sources are far better - but by nature much less accessible. So you have a trade off to make.

After my working life had induced anxiety, panic attacks, and a host of other issues which really started to rear their ugly head I’ve become a much more religious person. On top of the professional help I’ve sought out for these issues, it has also helped a lot in my case when you internalize deep that work/money/material success really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme and there’s a greater goal to work towards.

What is this greater goal you speak of?

In my experience, religions are happy to hand out pre-baked sets of objectives. Live a life like X. Stay away from Y. Put your money in Z. If you have trouble deciding what direction you want to go, religion can point you somewhere and surround you with a community that will encourage you to keep moving that way.

For some people, that’s really valuable. You see this especially with people who’s prior independent experience didn’t work out very well. Maybe they grew up in an abusive home and want instructions on breaking the cycle and raising their family better. Maybe there was criminal behavior, substance abuse, relationship or career stagnation. For many people, a pre-packaged world view from Religion X can be a big step up from their prior experience, ESPECIALLY when it comes with a supportive community.

The problem, of course, is two fold.

First, life isn’t one-size-fits-all. Eventually the pre-packaged beliefs will be sub-optimal for your personal situation. The better religious communities are flexible enough to accommodate this. The uglier ones lock you down or cut you out.

Second, the pre-packaged beliefs usually assert their own universal and exclusive validity. Even if the one you pick happens to be correct about this, it encourages toxic behaviors that will isolate you from non-community members. And of course the claim is preposterous on its face; The interchangeability of religions undercuts their claims to universal truth.

So, to summarize: Religion is a reasonable place to get a default world view and community, especially if you’re existing beliefs/community aren’t serving you well. Long term they are suboptimal because they don’t adapt to your personal circumstances very well.

I've actually taken an essentially opposite view, interestingly enough. As a younger person I read widely, rebelled in a very thoughtful way against my religion (in my opinion! haha!), took things very seriously, tried to really understand both atheism and other religions, etc. I think all of that was important. Through life experiences I've come to appreciate, strangely, the rituals of religion and the not-making-sense-ness of it. So I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously. The concrete actions do something on a primordial level, as they're what my ancestors have done for oh about eight generations.

The actual pre-packaged beliefs? Meh. I'm less interested than I ever was in arguing the particulars of Paul with anyone. So, to summarize, for me religion is a reasonable place to get a default set of rituals and perhaps community, and long term that's the useful part because the rituals can continue even as my beliefs and circumstances change.

This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I’m glad you’ve found a fulfilling spiritual practice and community. I hope they are supporting you in this difficult time.

> I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously.

That’s pretty interesting to me. I certainly agree that the rituals and community are the best part of organized religion. I’ve enjoyed them in the past and I miss them now. I actually considered returning to the church when I had a young family for exactly these reasons.

I just can’t untangle the practical from the philosophical. The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs. It’s hard to take the community without the beliefs. At least, I haven’t been able to do it successfully. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I could have, but I would have felt like a fraud. I think that would limit my ability to integrate.

> This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)

Absolutely. The principal applies to many places. Employers, even. Many start ups want you to drink the kool-ade, own the vision, play ping pong... you can opt out of that and just do the engineering and paycheck!

> The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs.

No. The community is above the beliefs.

Humans benefit greatly from acting within a group. Yes, it always grows a "here are The Best Practices" division. (It's just a sad side effect.) But one can identify with a smaller and humbler subgroup with the wink-wink approach to rules: switch to the higher levels, seek new goals, etc.

As an atheist, I took me years to notice this minority. Talking with deeply religious people often reveals that stuff they are actively pursuing is not only very interesting, but it's far above what you can achieve just by pondering about some Nietzsche text in your armchair taking mental notes "oh this definitely goes on the top of my todo list now". The group is the magic ingredient to the real-life results.

Disturbingly big part of modern atheism is actually sheer laziness. If I've written my final conclusion "Therefore all religion is useless." it's easy to come up with hundred semi-honest-but-true arguments to reach that conclusion. There is a lot that goes under the radar, like supporting the self-improvement of your children/family and coping with bad problems in your own life, chiefly including suffering and death. Atheism mostly says: better be rich and be able to afford some good professionals.

Writing as someone who is mostly baffled by religion, this was a very useful and interesting post to read. Thanks.

On par w/ Meditations I'd also add Self-Reliance, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Dunno about Jordan Peterson. Some of his advice may be OK but he's also profoundly weird / not very self-reflective .... only eats meat? Meat cures all?

IMHO the Socratic Dialogues, as basically the foundational text of all Western Philosophy, and being pretty friendly and approachable, are the right place to begin. Helps you figure out how to figure it out for yourself. You can make your own calls from there.

He went on an elimination diet because his family has some nasty immune problems. It’s mundane, I don’t get the controversy.

It's controversial because it sounds pseudo-scientific. Why would removing all vegetables from his diet help with an autoimmune disorder? His daughter's blog called "Don’t Eat That" had the tagline "The food pyramid is a lie, fat is good for you, and many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone." (though, it does now say "Do not take this as medical advice. I am not a doctor. This is my story and this is what worked for me.")

https://web.archive.org/web/20180320101920/http://mikhailape...

His other health choices don't really help his case. He went to Russia to get weened off of an addiction because "North American hospitals had misdiagnosed him". The Russian doctors are "not influenced by pharmaceutical companies to treat the side-effects of one drug with more drugs," and they “have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines.”"

People used to believe that eating fat makes you fat, and eating sugar makes you sweet (okay, the latter is maybe an exaggeration), because it seemed so obvious. Later they realized that actually eating lots of sugar makes you fat. That's progress. The sugar producers want you to believe the old version; they love to emphasise how "low-fat" their heaps of sugar are. (Every time you read "low-fat", translate it mentally to "contains lots of sugar". Every time you read "low-sugar", translate it mentally to "contains lots of artificial sweeteners". Hint: the actually healthy stuff, such as fruit and vegetables, doesn't need to protest too much.) Education about this part is a good thing.

On the other hand, removing vegetables from diet goes completely against the currect best knowledge. You should eat a lot of vegetables, preferably raw. Like, okay, you can cook your broccoli; but then eat some other raw vegetable, and some fruit (uncooked, without extra sugar). -- However, I have never heard Peterson recommend removing vegetables as a general advice for others; it was always in context of finding out what works for his autoimmune disorder, because the standard medicine didn't help him much, so he experimented with crazy things.

So, these are two different things. One is highly controversial, the other not at all.

I have my own problems with his daughter’s profiting off his back. I don’t see what you posted there as more click bait than anything else.

Many research bodies and authorities on health have flipped the food pyramid around. The CSRIO supports a low carb diet over the traditional carb heavy food pyramid. She’s just repeating what the experts have said. That part is the opposite of pseudoscience, and it’s lazy parroting.

Jordan has reactions to foods we don’t normally have a problem with, as does his daughter. They share methods that work for them and hold up the idea of eliminating everything and then working foods back in as they prove to be okay for them.

There’s been countless documentaries about the effect of big pharmaceutical money on the likelihood of certain drugs being prescribed by doctors and the money the docs make. It’s standard fare in America, no judgement about that from me.

Apart from a few eccentric behaviours and saying dumb things occasionally like his comments on godel, Jordan states the obvious in an inflammatory way and people are surprised when he’s actually rational under the flames. Zzz.

His daughter:

“”I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”

The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.“

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

> Meat cures all?

When did he say that?

I’m making a point, not quoting the man.

Come on, all you have to do is google "jordan peterson meat" and you get pages and pages of when-he-said-thats.

I've listened to probably hundreds of hours of JP and he never said that. He only said that, in his particular case, a lot of the terrible ailments he had went away after he switched to a meat-only diet. He doesn't say that meat is a cure for anything - his main theory is that he just has a ton of strong food alergies and, by eating only one thing he's not allergic to, he avoids them.

I've read 12 Rules for Life and disliked that Peterson uses a lot of Disney movie and bible references to support his claims. He makes some good points every once in a while but the book is unnecessarily verbose. I recommend reading the cliff notes to understand 90% of the book.

He uses Disney quotes to support his contention that there are profound, yet universal archetypes and myths that pop up everywhere - even in Disney movies.

> 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson

yikes

Well some people need to be told.

In. Simple. Ideas.

Go tidy your room.

"Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable."

There is some good advice, for everybody!

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