PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

<p>The field of Pop psychology is absolutely chock full of pseudoscience, mostly to prop up or justify the researcher’s personal deficiencies. It’s almost always a matter of applying disparaging labels; name-calling hiding behind post graduate degrees. There's no better example than when they throw around the concept of a dark triad. The Dark Triad is said to be composed of narcissism, Machi...

<p>Pop psychology personality tests have an almost addictive allure; you strongly suspect they're little more than horoscopes, but you tend to believe them anyway. Is there anyone on the Internet that hasn't taken one online that purports to tell you what kind of person you are? The two most well-known personality tests are Jung Type and Big Five, both of which are supposedly based on real s...

<p>Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was the most insightful man in history, but he's been maligned for being too disturbing to read, and his Ubermensche concept was regrettably adopted by the Nazis. Ubermensche, which is German for “overman,” was the idea that humanity will eventually achieve full self-awareness. It comes down from the world's first philosopher, Zarathustra, founder of the wo...

<p>In the Male Dominance Hierarchy, the coin of the realm is respect; the more you have, the more control you have over your own life. And like coins, respect can be both given and received, but it must be earned, people aren’t owed respect. The most important kind of respect is self-respect because <strong>if you don’t respect yourself, you will not be respected by others either. Cour...

<p>There's a lot of words out there that originate in Metaphysics, the opposite of physics, which means they can mostly be ignored; one, however, "mindfulness," comes up repeatedly. The definition is a little hazy; it's either an entreaty to focus on what you're doing now and ignore the complexity of life around you so as not to be overwhelmed, or it means to prevent thoughts of th...

<p>One of the things that separates human beings from animals is extensive memories. Animals have memory, sometimes long ones, but not at the same level as humans; a lot of our intellect is remembering things. Humans want to remember, they desire to remember, they get positive reinforcement by remembering because memory cells are literally bathed in dopamine, the mind's feel good drug. Every...

<p>Virtue is one of those words that requires people who share the same values to discuss because it uses morality in its definition. Similarly, its opposite, vice, has no universal meaning; what may be a vice to some is virtuous to others. Like all the foundational human motives, virtue is a result of chemical interactions in your brain; it triggers a dopamine release. When you are indoctri...

<p>There is nothing more subjective than happiness, which is probably why it has the most amount of trite cliches to describe it: contentment, pleasure, satisfaction, cheerfulness, gaiety, joy, joviality, glee, blitheness, carefreeness, gladness, delight, good spirits, light-heartedness, good cheer, well-being, enjoyment, felicity, exuberance, exhilaration, elation, ecstasy, delirium, jubila...

<p>It may be disappointing to know that we act only as a result of chemistries in our brain but the human body isn’t magical, there must be something that controls the inner-workings of our complicated lives. Rather than dwell on the mechanics, it's more productive to identify the positive emotions built on that reality: there's our optimism, hopefulness and confidence about the future, and...

<p>We are biological robots; everything we do is motivated by a neurotransmitter stimulating some part of our brain. David Hume, one of the Scottish philosophers so important to The Enlightenment, postulated on this in the mid-1700s; he thought that passion rather than reason governed human behavior; that we were only a bundle of causally-connected perceptions. Because the incentive mechanis...

<p>Society is too important to leave unsubsidized; let's review:</p> <ol> <li> <p>By many definitions, we're already in a depression.</p> </li> <li> <p>The attraction for Universal Basic Income is too powerful to overcome.</p> </li> <li> <p>Most people don't understand why work is so important to a functional society.&lt...

<p>Altruism is genetic, and it's the source of people's profound desire to help other people and other creatures when they see them in need because altruists get personal satisfaction from their charitable actions. Some people even feel altruistic towards things, and become their protectors & custodians, hence the allure of the environmental movement. This is a fundamental human emotion,...

<p>Mention “schools,” and everyone always thinks teachers, classrooms & buses. Those things are very expensive, partially, if not completely, because they are government-run, which means political. Everywhere there’s lots of money combined with sanctimony, especially with no one keeping tabs, exploitation runs rampant: public schools, and their tremendously powerfully teachers unions and...

<p>It's in society's interest to ensure citizens are educated, at least so that they can interact with others and with business; to be able to take care of themselves with the least amount of government intervention. What form that education takes is immaterial; there's no reason students should be forced to a particular timetable, location, grouped by age, or forced to engage in propaganda...

<p>Children are incredibly resilient, obviously an evolutionary trait. Children live in an imaginary world because the real world hasn't sunk in yet. Every kid is happy by default; the naivete of childhood is a protective cloak that insulates them from the outside world; except in extreme cases, they doesn't know if they're poor or that their family life is chaos. The traditional family, one...

<p>It's not enough to subsidize employees; to keep as many people working as possible, government needs to subsidize jobs too, much like it did during the Great Depression. Programs were created by Executive Order by President Roosevelt in 1933 in times very similar to these: Emergency Conservation Work, Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, National Youth Administratio...

<p>A society isn't things, and most of the things in society are optional; people need way less than they consume, and the things they consume are ephemeral too. The reason consumerism is encouraged is that modern society has enough productivity to satisfy the basic needs of every person in it, with a lot of productivity left over. If people didn't consume the non-essential things that other...

<p>The word “Boomer” has become an icon for a time in history when life seemed, in retrospect, to be idyllic. Boomers are mocked for their optimism, enthusiasm & positive, go-getter attitudes, but that's more out of envy than belief. No other generation can do better than Boomers as a whole; those times are past. Boomer is obviously more a concept than it is an actual time period during...

<p>Sanctimony can justify anything, and make the sanctimoaner feel good at the same time. The sanctimonious holy grail is “saving lives.” There's no defense to that claim because it isn't logical; if it was then simple comparisons would be persuasive; for example, what about outlawing bathtubs because they're among the Top 10 causes of injuries & death? Choking is another big hazard, so...

<p>It's odd that we, as a society, will let people sleep in tents under bridges, or sleep in church parking lots, but let regulations and building codes keep them out of empty buildings? It’s actually a problem of being over-civilized. Here's what would be required to use vacant commercial space for temporary housing:</p> <p>1) No liability. The owners of the building have to be...

<p>In the days when people worked to survive, they consumed barely less than they produced. That ratio has progressively moved up so that in modern times, the productivity of 1 person supports 5 people. The question isn't how high can that ratio go, which seems limitless with robots and new technology on the horizon; what's important is why should people work at all? The vast majority of peo...

<p>Universal Basic Income, or UBI, as odious as it may be, is an idea whose time as come,<span lang="en-US"> and it will only gain ground as there are fewer & fewer jobs untrained people can do. In fact, it's gained academic credibility, and even some presidential candidates have begun basing their campaigns on it; who doesn't want free money? Plus, payments during the vi...

<p>Since money is imaginary and can be produced as needed, poor financial metrics are not the best definition of a “depression.” It’s also difficult to get out of the mindset that a depression should have soup lines, but those have been replaced by Welfare checks. Another traditional indicator of a depression is how many people aren't working, now 37%, over a third of the population; approxi...

<p>Not enough emphasis is placed on properly debating online so let's review:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Debating is not for the feint of heart nor those with fragile egos.</p> </li> <li> <p>There's a few tips every debater should know or you'll be the newbie.</p> </li> <li> <p>You only need warned once about the pitfalls of debat...

<p>Online debate forums are obscure, and Twitter limits length, so most “debate,” if it can be called that, occurs on Facebook. Debating on Facebook is a chore because memes make up the bulk of the posts, name-calling is ubiquitous, and people you would ignore in real-life often take over a thread from sheer stupidity. However, if you should want to use Facebook for debating, first get enoug...