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
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'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
He's smart and thinks. That guy also just happens to be an expert in an area of knowledge.
Smart business choice, this is how you capitalize on ambiguity. Sarcasm as a business model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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!
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.
On this forum, a good analogy is the difference between a huge Agile© event and a small team-only standup meeting.
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.
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.
When did he say that?
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.”"
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.
“”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...
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.
yikes
In. Simple. Ideas.