What are /r/InsightfulQuestions' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Edward Bernays invented PR, which I would argue has been hugely influential this century.

Watch Century of the Self, the excellent BBC documentary.

Good advice, on a similar note I can recommend this book to help understand what's going on there at the core level and how to train yourself away from that type of thinking:

Rewire Your Anxious Brain

Daniel Kahneman writes about this in his famous Thinking, Fast and Slow. Optimists generally do better in life, are more popular, lead longer lives, etc. If you could give your child one trait, he says, you should seriously consider it being optimism.

In other words, if his information is correct positive people almost certainly do have better lives. It seems intuitively reasonable, too. It's not a catch-all, and counterexamples of course exist, but scientifically optimism is a very desirable trait.

It's worth noting that it's not all rosy. Optimists are generally also more prone to irrational risk taking and other biases. Still, overall it's supposedly a big benefit.

For what it is worth I read two books that basically solidified by view of reality and meaning and it is not too distant from your own. The first was Waking Up by Sam Harris and the second was The Big Picture by Sean Carroll. Reading them back to back was a near life changing experience for me, and they deal very closely with the intersection of science and spirituality.

I could accept that as far as it goes, but things go awry when we actually try to use these ideas to help people. For instance, Vilayanur Ramachandran gave an interesting TED Talk where he mentions (starting about 2:50 in) a form of brain damage where people think thier mother is an imposter. The Freudian explanation for all this involves (what else?) oedipal ideas about breaking the usual inhibitions about getting aroused around mom.

Modern neuroscience says it's all nonsense. They can show that specific connections between visual processing and emotional parts of the brain have been cut. Which is great, because we can use that knowledge to actually help people, instead of charging them $75/hour for two sessions a week for a year and come out none the better.

On topic here, I've added this little part on The 2030 prediction on the decline of humanity, just to bolster your argument.

You do have a point though

Seems like a good general approach but there's some recent research that suggests limits on it. Link to abstract:

>People's recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in people's perceptions of events. The authors review the results of several studies and present several new comparative analyses of these studies, all of which indicate that people perceive events in their lives to more often be pleasant than unpleasant. A 2nd cause is the fading affect bias: The affect associated with unpleasant events fades faster than the affect associated with pleasant events. The authors review the results of several studies documenting this bias and present evidence indicating that dysphoria (mild depression) disrupts such bias. Taken together, this evidence suggests that autobiographical memory represents an important exception to the theoretical claim that bad is stronger than good.

There's also a TED talk by Philip Zimbardo where he talks about how your habits of relating to the past and future affect your happiness.

Interesting point for discussion, for sure.

The question is, just because everyone calls a particular way of functioning reality, does that mean it's your reality?

I found this book to really help with my soul searching when trying to grasp dealing with such concepts: The Science of Self Realization

Another user recommended you check out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'll second that recommendation for a different reason. Pirsig has some interesting things to say about Aristotelian influence on the western way of thinking about things, and specifically talks about how analyzing, categorizing, and reducing can be used as a weapon (he called it a knife) to direct people's attention to what the knife wielder wants people to see and blind them to other possibilities.

A good example from modern society would be prisoners. We categorize prisoners as criminals, we categorize criminals as bad people, and certainly no one wants to be around bad people, so ex-cons have one holy hell of a time getting a decent job when they get released, all because of how we think about the category we've put them in, which is based on another assigned category, which is based on yet another assigned category, and not at all based on the individual in question.

Are you a pragmatist or a moralist? It depends on the context and who you are. Psychopaths don't care about doing the right thing (amorality); lazy slobs don't care about doing things right (slovenliness). Most people are somewhere in between, while some people don't give a damn about either.

Actually it's a bit of a false distinction because you can't do the right thing without doing it well. Aristotle's idea of virtue, eudaimonia, is sometimes translated as "happiness", but is better expressed as “well-being” or “excellence of performing the proper function.” Both Plato and Aristotle recognize a conceptual connection between ergon, function, and arete, virtue (R 353 b–c; NE 2.6 1106a14ff; NE 6.2 1139a18). A virtue is not merely an admirable or socially useful quality: it is quite specifically a quality that makes you good at performing your function. An important part of Aristotle’s task in the Nicomachean Ethics is therefore to show that the characteristics that we commonly think of as the moral virtues really are virtues in this technical sense—qualities that make us good at rational activity.

Some books that are related to what you are talking about are:

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thinking, Fast and Slow by: Daniel Kahneman

I don't know if this is completely relevant, but I thought this was a wonderful TED video

Stephen Fry did a show about this.
Turns out humanity's greatest invention was the lighter, due to the fact that it made fire portable and instantaneous.
Article here

> Is there significance to the order of the alphabet

This is an intriguing but unanswerable question. Quick précis: historical reasons.

Unfortunately, "you don't understand" is unsatisfying but true. If I don't start at the nature of atomic and subatomic structures, you will never understand why "some background radiation" is significant. You will have to ultimately take all this on faith.

I think the part though, that should perk you up is that unlike spiritual enlightenment, this is easily gained by everyone who cares enough to find out.

Good luck on your journey, never take "because it is" as an answer.

You can start here

http://www.khanacademy.org/science/chemistry

It may not seem significant, but understanding each of those will help you in the future tell someone just like you "It's far to complex to explain in 800 words or less, but I can show you the way."

Unfortunately no I don't, it haven't yet put it on my list of things to save sources for. Wikipedia has a good article on the basics of a guaranteed minimum income. If you search reddit guaranteed income you'll also find several interesting threads on the topic. Also /r/basicincome.

From Wikipedia:

>In November 1995 The Wire published an article, "Advice to Clever Children". During the production of the interview a package of tapes with music from several artists (including Aphex Twin) was sent to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who said:

>>I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James (sic) carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth", which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.[21]

>James (an admirer of Stockhausen) replied, "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Digeridoo", then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".[21]

Further discussion on Metafilter here.

Regarding the other comment about availability of technology influencing popular music, isn't wasn't so much the personal computer that gave rise to popular electronic music initially as very basic computer chips used in synthesizers, etc.

Considering the early use of samplers, I think the first sampler that was widely available at all was the Fairlight. Although prohibitively expensive for most artists, it was used by The Beatles, Frank Zappa, etc. However some of the most creative uses can be found in the music of Kate Bush. I'd highly recommend it if you've never really listened to her work.

Also, when it comes to trailblazing styles of music like psychedelic rock, acid house, etc, I can think of one other form of technology than the actual musical instruments that was crucial to the development and popularity of those new styles...

Yes, that's the one. Looks like I was paraphrasing the secondary title. And miss spelling the author's name a bit.

Here's the Amazon link.

https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468

You may benefit a lot from learning about mindfulness. A lot of people dismiss it as simply "living in the moment," but it's more than that. The central idea is that by focusing on the present moment, you are able to identify, acknowledge and calmly accept whatever it is you are feeling. You are not trying to dismiss or suppress the emotions, you're simply observing them. The more you practice, the more skilled you become at recognizing the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause an emotional reaction so that you can actively intervene as it happens or before it happens. That way, you can choose to react differently, from a place of awareness and understanding rather than being consumed by emotion and having a meltdown.

Someone ITT recommended The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and that is probably an excellent resource for you. Ultimately, there is a lot more that plays into your emotions than just anger, sadness, shame, etc. Being able to identify exactly what you're feeling, what tends to cause the feeling, what tends to cause an overreaction, etc., is important because you can use that emotional knowledge and self-awareness to take more control of how you present yourself in the world. It will help you find a healthy balance between feeling and expressing.

I used to be in a rut, and I would constantly think about suicide.

Reading philosophy helped a lot at that time, I started with The Republic by Plato.

Now I like more existentialist stuff, like Nietzsche, suicide is a pretty popular topic for existentialists. It has no simple solution, but the basic gist is that you have to create your own meaning in life, and you can only do this by realizing that you have immense value as a human being.

Language changes. That's all. How can you qualify the development of language?

How is

> Næs hie ðære fylle gefean hæfdon, manfordædlan, þæt hie me þegon, symbel ymbsæton sægrunde neah; ac on mergenne mecum wunde be yðlafe uppe lægon, sweordum aswefede, þæt syðþan na ymb brontne ford brimliðende lade ne letton. Leoht eastan com, beorht beacen godes; Beowulf, lines 562-70a

Any better or worse than

> But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general terms, the practical question, where to place the limit—how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control— is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. JS Mill

or the way I'm writing now? If you're referring to our vocabulary and grammar, what are you using as your reference point? If it's 19th century writing, a lot of people would argue that language since then hasn't degraded but is being refined. Writing simply and clearly is the most effective way to communicate. That won't change with the advent of text messages. We will still know the meaning of the slangs and acronyms, but I doubt that they will ever penetrate academic writing. Paula LaRocque's The Book On Writing has really insightful perspectives on modern writing.

One of the books that has really made me think about this question was Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! It is a must-read, both because it's entertaining, but more importantly I think because it gives you a real perspective into the mental life of one of the most brilliant people of the 20th century. And despite being so smart and iconoclastic he was still sexist.

Feynman said that he was always worried about drinking alcohol or trying drugs because he didn't want them to cause permanent damage to his brain, because he just loved thinking so much. And so I started wondering, what the hell did HE think about as he went about his day?

He just did interesting things, like set up random experiments with getting ants to follow paths in his kitchen. That type of thing is sort of what I'm getting at. What kind of mental habits promote that sort of day-to-day creative thinking?

I read something like (and many other similarly mind-bending examples) in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. It's a very impressive book that repeatedly explains the flaws in our thinking that underpin many of the counter-intuitive thoughts described in this thread. Twenty-first century wisdom at its finest.

just gonna leave this here: Westermarck effect

and The emotional dog and its rational tail

Find a local psychoanalytic institute and undergo a course of psychoanalysis. It is the oldest, strongest, and most powerful therapy and a wonderful way to look inside your psyche and come to a better self-understanding.

Here are two quotes that I remember when college students talk about not having any meaning. They're from Small is Beautiful:

> When people ask for education...they are really looking for...ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.

Education is (or, I suppose, should be) about trying to find your place in the world. To feel like you don't have all the answers is the entire point of getting educated.

> The truly educated man...will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity

And this inner clarity is what you're trying to develop. Depending on your major, those answers may not come from what you're learning. Without going off on a tangent about the qualitative abyss of STEM degrees, I'll just say that knowing how to do something says nothing about what to do. So, your education may have to happen outside of what you're learning in university...or at least in parallel.

What if the military came back and worked on infrastructure projects for free? For example the military could make it a project to go to this town and use their labor and financial resources to install solar panels or some other suitable energy solution.

So many possibilities.

This book, The Science of Self Realization, really helped me. 10/10 would recommend.

Note, I'm currently an atheist. Which doesn't necessarily equate to not being "spiritual". I put the word in quotes simply because it means so many things to so many people.

You mention growing up restricted in your beliefs, as was I, and I think it is important to understand the nature of evidence, and how to keep oneself honest. After all, there’s a whole world out there of conflicting beliefs, and one should do their best to make sure during their search that they aren't fooling themselves.

To that end I recommend The DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD: SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK by Carl Sagan. In the book, Carl teaches how to evaluate evidence, and various types of ways we can keep ourselves honest, which is important because as humans, we have multiple ways of fooling ourselves.

Good luck on your journey.

You might find listening to prozac to be an interesting read. It asks the question: If someone is a completely different person on and off a drug, which is the real them? How can there be a soul if all the properties we associate with someone's essential being can be altered as a part of changing brain chemistry.

For my part, I'd love to believe that there's an afterlife but for these (and other) reasons, I don't.

https://smile.amazon.com/Permission-Feel-Unlocking-Emotions-Ourselves-ebook/dp/B07N69F1W7?pd_rd_w=IrGjJ&pf_rd_p=3fdb7f7b-31a2-4f37-b9bc-1469e3d4fb18&pf_rd_r=7TWJYMXC7N506ZNAGK51&pd_rd_r=c2d76246-e885-446d-978f-9e6cf24361e0&pd_rd_wg=GHDlT

I recommend The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog for your research, if you’re interested. It’s great research, but told through well-written case studies, so much more interesting.

I don’t think the author specifically brings up “cry it out” method- but physical touch in raising children and its connection to emotional attachment later in life is a big topic throughout the book.

> Sometimes I just feel stumped by the question of "what change" I'd like to make.

Maybe you don't need to make a change. Maybe you're already on the right path and you should carry on! Usually, there are indicators that change is needed--persistent depression, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, or as I describe it, the vague craving for some unknown thing.

If you don't exhibit the symptoms, I'd say you're a balanced and functional human being--meaning you don't need to worry too much about self-improvement, growth, and all that.

> I read a book called Triumphs of Experience that sorta influenced what I see as the Good Life

Looks like a very interesting read!

The fact that you have any notion at all of what "the Good Life" constitutes is, in my opinion, a very good sign. Few people bother to give this question much thought, let alone define it for themselves.

> I saw once that Ben Franklin kept a list of discrete character traits and reflected daily on if he felt he met his mark

A worthy practice. The Stoic philosopher Seneca suggested a similar practice. He said we should take a moment every evening to reflect on our day and ascertain whether or not we lived up to our own standards and ideals.

> What books did you have in mind?

Too many to list here. I usually like to tailor my suggestions based on the person's particular background, interests, and disposition. That being said, I feel pretty confident recommending Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl; Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt; and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Lastly, my YouTube channel might be of interest. I delve into this kind of stuff on the daily. I've also shared quotes from all three of the aforementioned books there as well, along with commentary about what I think they mean, etc.

Cheers and don't hesitate to PM me if so desire :)

My Psychology classes at Uni recommended Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" as background/supporting reading especially for our judgement and decision making topics , and his ideas seem to largely fit with current best understanding of the Neuroscience-type side of things. Good book.

I gotcha. Thinking hard takes a lot of energy. If you don't have anyone to engage with on these thoughts, and you're not getting anything out of putting all this time and energy into whatever intellectual pursuit you may be engaged in, it gets tiring, seems pointless, and a feeling of 'why bother' often arises.

Check out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Frankly what you're dealing with is likely a lack of goal, direction, community, reward, or maybe your just over thinking things in general instead of just doing.

Hi Phil! It seems like you catch a lot of flack around here... sorry. You're clearly a good Stoic for coming back!

I read A Guide to the Good Life recently, and it caused me to doubt (for the first time) even the most enlightened hedonism/utilitarianism. You seem to incorporate all of the Stoic ideas but still call it hedonism! Anyways, that's just semantics, call it what you want.

I agree with just about everything you have here, although I struggle with the question of free will: I don't think it exists, but that drives me a little bonkers. I wonder what my life would be like if I carried around a little sign to remind me that we have no free will.

It's very good that you have a philosophy of life, and everybody should. I think the world would be a better place if people took some months out of their life to mentally zoom out, see how insignificant their human-made "obligations" are, and decide what is more important in life. See you around.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." - Adam Smith

Out of 'greed', a baker might invent a better oven design that allows him to produce more bread at lower cost so that he captures more of the market. Everyone wins - consumers get cheaper bread, the baker makes more profit.

Adam Smith gets bashed for promoting greedy capitalism, but his view was actually very nuanced. His book The Wealth of Nations describes capitalism, his prior book The Theory of Moral Sentiments shows that morality is not just selfish actions.

Tangentially, a recent econtalk podcast is titled The End of Socialism and has an in-depth and accessible discussion of socialism vs capitalism. I highly recommend that episode and the podcast in general.

Check out Chapter 7 of the Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading social psychologists today. He goes into great detail about it, and it's fascinating. Short answer is yes, adversity absolutely benefits development, but there are lots of variables that influence how much, and there is definitely such a thing as too much.

You should read this book, OP I think you'd like it.

The author talks about the flaws in both capitalism and communism in how it's been implemented, and then presents some pretty interesting thinking for how a better organizational system might work.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Desire-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372

One of the most insightful things I have learn from this book was a sidenote:

• people feel anxiety, nervousness, emotional discomfort
• they do something good to make it go away, like exercise, meditation, sex with partner: fine, OK
• people do something bad to make it go away, to feel comfort: drugs, drink, cheat, overeat etc.
• next day they feel SHAME over having done the bad thing and thus more nervousness, anxiety, emotional discomfort so in order to make it go away they do it AGAIN

Cycle of addiction.

Things that are bad and comforting get us addicted because being bad and we know that they cause later discomfort (shame, bad conscience) so we take them again to cure that.

Literally how it was in The Little Prince: the alcoholic drinks to forget his shame, and he feels ashamed because he drinks.

Just looked it up. Seems like an interesting website, I'll have to read through.

>Sharing was a psychological disturbance: they felt guilt for "ownership" and "surplus" and "sharing" was a method to counterbalance this feeling of "being wrong".

Yeah, you could make that argument. Another part of it I'm sure is that sharing increased the group fitness, and there probably wasn't much benefit to hoarding things in that sort of setting.

> Not all: only 90%. There is always empathy evolution in a minority. No, Lloyd deMAuse does not say it is "all bad". /Freudian/ Psychotherapy does not judge you for having inner /uncoscious/ drives. But as you will not look up my quoted source there is no hope of a dialogue here. It is you who claim "throughout the course of recorded history" there is a contrast to this altruistic ideal fantasy "sharing" of Stone Age aboriginals.

I mean, it's almost not worth getting into a dialogue of your position is "90% of human behavior was schizoid cannabalism and murder". You'd get laughed out of any group of anthropologists with a such a silly claim. Read some actual books about the lives of tribal people.

The sharing I mention isn't some fantasy, it was the way resource distribution worked in tribal groups. There's a good book on that subject if your at all interested to read it: http://www.amazon.com/Limited-Wants-Unlimited-Means-Hunter-Gatherer/dp/155963555X, which sums up a lot of anthropological study and shines a light on the economics of these societies.

Or head over to /r/anthropology, or read one of the great books by anthropologists who have lived with tribal people for extended periods of time and studied their lifestyles. I can assure you, it's not all violence and suffering, that's a pretty childish viewpoint.

The entire purpose of a suburb was to provide residents with a manageable, stress-free way of living.

Read the book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. The premise of it is that humans tend to achieve the greatest things while their lives are in a state of disarray. For example, writers and musicians often create their best works while coping with depression, anxiety, etc...

I imagine that if we took the time to look at ourselves, we would see a similar trend.

In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam describes the downfall of active communities across America. With modern-day technology, people tend to spend more time on their own. Now, this manner of "alone" isn't necessarily to say "lonely."

It's creating a culture of contentment among suburbanites. Kyle Kinane brings to light this issue in his skit.

Thoughts?

The economist Gary Becker (Nobel Prize winner 1992) did a lot of research that reaffirms what you're saying. Basically, businesses that engaged in discrimination against minority customers would lose business and earn smaller profits. Meanwhile, businesses that discriminated against minorities by not hiring them, would end up paying a premium for white labor. In the long run, this placed them at a competitive disadvantage to non-discriminatory businesses that would step in and hire black workers at a lower wage.

One avenue to take when exploring what it is to become a separate being with its own rights is to look at the ethics around killing beings in general.

For a fantastic exploration of life and rights, check out The Ethics of Killing. This book begins by looking at what some people consider life, from the perspective of a soul, a biological being, and a mixed being. It highlights strengths and weaknesses of each of those accounts. It goes further, looking at the rights of babies, when they get rights, and compares them to animals of higher and lower intelligence -- always asking why is it ok to kill X and not kill Y.

.... and further -- looking at what whether a life that's full of pleasure is worth more than a life where a person is depressed ... and if a person with alzheimer's, who no longer has a trace of their identity left is still a person with rights, or if they have new rights.

Fantastic book. Completely accessible to anyone.

I was using Rotella's as my example in the math. There only factory is on 84th and Harrison Here in Omaha. But you can buy the bread fresh in LA. They produce good bread, their steakhouse loaf is amazing and $0.98 loaves that are... palatable.

For some economic situations it really is cheaper to make then ship. Look at T-Shirts. Cotton from Georgia(US) and Eqypt, spun in Taiwan, woven Shan hai, cut and assembled in Nairobi, printed in Mexico, licensed by stockholder back in Georgia, and sold with Coca Cola logos everywhere for $10 a piece. All told the net cost was $5 for the retailer $4 of which was shipping.

Global shipping is the way of the world. Is bread not a basic part of the world? I recommend you read The Box by Marc Levinson it shows how these price have happened.

Also, Even with trips averaging only 100 miles the logistics don't change much. The gas is negligible when compared to payroll of drivers who must be present for all loading and unloading, for auditors who prevented retailers from claiming "it fell off the back of the truck", stores who cancel orders en route, waste due to misproduction, and countless other inefficiencies. The system of making things is preposterously efficient when you compare it the process of shipping things and that was my whole point.

Can't say anything with 100% certaininty. Im pretty new to history. I just listen to Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcasts all the time, and repeat my favorite ones quite alot.

I think you would really appreciate show 48, murderous millenial preachers which is about one specific crazy, nutty, mindblowing instance of the Protestant Reformation called the Anabaptists and the Muenster Rebellion. It is perhaps the most enthralling story I've ever heard, and also it really hones in on some larger themes at the same time. It's just awesome. Give it a shot if you haven't heard it

Also you might be interested in the Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria specifically about liberty vs democracy in the modern age.. really hits your questions quite directly.