Extremely glad to see your measured response to this article. Seeing the tacit approval of synthetic fertilizers in the article made me reel. It's a shame that farming methods like permaculture aren't a part of this conversation by default. For the reason they're not often discussed, I defer to your conclusion about needing to adopt a new perceptual framework and value system to effect certain kinds of change.
It's been several years since we last spoke Hosh, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with your comment here. Hope you and your family are well!
Have you actually done any permaculture, and/or run the numbers on what it would take to move away from synthetic fertilizers? The reason permaculture isn't part of the default is because it's a pipe dream. A hobby for those interested in it, but not a real, scalable alternative for what we have now.
If we are trying to scale up permaculture practices to the kind of mega-farms we are talking about, I don't think that is practical either.
If we are talking about many smaller sites more evenly distributed to where people are living (and likely, not people not aggregating into large metropolitan areas), I think it can work.
A lot of stuff would have to change. Permaculture isn't just about farming. Other things like human waste would have to be made as part of the nutrient-cycle. We have a lot of compostable food wastes going into landfills generating methane. We have landscaping practices that eat up water, or get rid of what could be fed back into the ground. We have a ton of food that never makes it to the supermarket because they are not in standard sizes fit for the retail market. You have planting practices that makes it easier for machines to harvest, or to grow to standard types, but it generates a much greater need for synthetic fertalizers.
You can't just run the numbers the nitrogen input of the farms. You also have to look at where all that stuff is going, and a lot of where it is going never makes it back as input.
I just asked for some pro-permaculture sources in this comment [1], and would appreciate it if you could also point me in the direction of some further reading on the claim that permaculture is a pipe dream.
Organic agriculture has much lower yields than conventional agriculture for most crops [1]. I believe permaculture is more restrictive than US-Organic. It would take some big changes in our diet to absorb such a loss in productivity.
There's also the little pickle that manure from an industrial feedlot is considered an organic fertilizer.
(I'm not suggesting it's directly a problem, the issue is that it's real hard to figure out the nitrogen budget society ends up with if all synthetic fertilizers go away)
During the economic sanctions, Cuba was forced to stop using synethetic fertilizers, pesticides, and even tractors. They could not import enough to be able use those at scale. The people there had to adapt and work out how to live.
So I typed a 10-paragraph post here arguing my case but ended up deciding there was too much identifying and non-public information in it for me to be comfortable posting it here. If you post an email address or add one to your profile, I can send it to you privately.
If you're interested in Plato and Platonic thought, I highly recommend looking into the work of Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society. Pierre has done dozens of lectures on Plato, see this channel[0].
How precisely do you define "nerd-like" personalities and what is it about them that is susceptible to having a "gaming disorder"?
I feel like there's not much that would separate a gaming disorder from addictive behavior in general. So much so, actually, that to grant a special term for a video game related illness comes off as a little ridiculous.
The essence of nerdiness is the elevation of the abstract at the expense of what's real, including the elevation of accomplishment in abstract domains (eg. video games) at the expense of developing social skills and progressing towards real life milestones, and the misunderstanding of social relations and social status owing to incorrect, reality-starved mental models. Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome pedantry.
As another poster (always_good) observes, there is a huge observable difference between video game addicts and substance abusers. I would not expect nerds to be substance abusers, and I would not expect substance abusers to be video game addicts, but everything about video games, in their construction of alternative realities and virtual goals and online communities, is like a glove tailored to the hand of nerd-dom.
> Often manifests itself in things like unwelcome pedantry.
You callin me a nerd, Tycho?
So, broadly, I can agree that a tendency towards escapism is what would make someone develop a "gaming disorder". And perhaps video games are the pinnacle of what our culture can offer as the richest form of escapism.
But I still don't think that's enough to draw a categorical line between the vices through which escapist tendencies become pathologized. It seems to me the solution to the mentation of escapism is to reinforce what you appeal to as "anti-nerdiness": pursuing meaning in a world you can (and do) fully occupy with the senses. And I agree there too.
Noting the bit at the end of the article about how terribly few people manifest a "gaming disorder" is what I'm not pleased to hear. Calling it a "gaming" disorder makes it seem like if you get rid of games, you've solved the problem. But obviously that's not necessarily the case, and so I think it's a useless distinction which potentially obscures the real issue.
If the WHO is making an indictment against the entertainment industry to formally warn against the ethical risks of making games which exploit escapist tendencies, that's fine. But I don't think there's actually much of a problem here that couldn't already be meaningfully identified as an addictive tendency.
While not all addiction is due to escapism, it cannot be escaped (no pun intended) that it can be a catalyst. What we as a society need to stop doing (same re opiod addiction for example) is stop labeling and treating symptoms instead of addressing the root causes.
Agreed. It's too arbitrary. The pattern of addiction is the same. The method of delivery doesn't matter.
In terms of marketing and supporting affected gamers, sure. But from a medical perspective, it's as arbitrary as classifying behaviors on Monday as somehow being qualitatively different from behaviors on Tuesday.
I'm not sure. When I look at video game addicts including myself in my late teens, I see someone who is addicted to credentializing in a virtual world. Maybe because everything is measurable unlike real life.
Doesn't seem like "addiction" alone communicates what's happening there.
That may be your experience but that isn't what others experience. It also doesn't match the ICD's definition either.
Credentials in most systems are useless outside of those systems (and even within them in certain cases). Some can be used to gain employment or other things but even those can be abstract and "virtual" in a sense.
If you look at the Wikipedia entries for ESP, telepathy, etc, the field is called out harshly for being "pseudo-science", because of bad methodology. Surely methodology would have been better if "money" had shown an interest. I need good methodology and that surely has costs.
I listened to a podcast from Kristen Truempy with Jeffrey (103). He reaches similar conclusions, notably the benefit for society and the blind eye of big-S-science.
He gets emotional when dealing with blatant denial of "150 years of documented empirical evidence" (as he should). He mentions that polls suggest 2/3rd of the population recognizes the existence of some form of ESP.
Jeffrey also mentioned (but not recommend) the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Indeed its setup resembles a freak show, not science.
I didn't know of any of the competitions in TV-shows, nor of the $100.000 reward by the Australian Skeptics (seemingly discontinued), which "is open to any contender who can state exactly what their paranormal claim is, and the claim can give a definite yes or no result".
In my view, in psychology, a definite yes or no result, doesn't exist, and no one should be asked to provide one. Not even climate scientists can convince 100% of the population of climate change despite overwhelming evidence. Nor can an advertiser force all clients to buy the intended products. Yet advertising definitely works.
Note that, as should be obvious, I have no prior at all in parapsychology. Even when I was writing down my original post, I felt the need for a reality check (and repeated the experiment).
Peterson's arguments against Nihilism are substantive and deeply involved with his thesis about individual responsibility. Your description of him is merely hand-waving, uncharitable, and reactionary.
Peterson is a con artist who appeals to desperate and impressionable men that can’t be bothered to read the Nietzsche and Jung that he only skims for sound bites.
That you feel he is a con artist does nothing but indicate to me that all you know of Peterson is from headlines and hit pieces.
On the contrary, he is probably responsible for droves of new readers of Nietzsche, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Piaget, William James and other important thinkers, which is certainly not a bad thing. Whether you find yourself at odds with what you think his audience is makes no difference to the strength of his arguments.
If you were honestly concerned with challenging Peterson's ideas and fans, you could squarely engage his work critically. Others have productively challenged his ideas and, as a result, have added to the progress of the discussion surrounding them. Before you do that, you're just adding to the noise which confuses and obscures issues of actual importance.
Ah the old "Peterson is a con artist/fraud", aka "I automatically disagree with what he says because he's not a left-wing atheist" or some slight variation of that.
The more people are told to stay away from his work for such intellectually lazy reasons (such that he's inflammatory, offensive, etc, primarily pushed by journalistic hit pieces), the greater the odds of the uninitiated taking a look at his work and finding some value in it. Ironically, the dynamic somewhat resembles your overly religious parents on that damn devil's music.
Note: "finding value in his ideas" does not correspond to agreeing with everything he says. There are many valid critiques of Peterson. It also does not mean that you discard everything he says because you disagree. These strike me as symptoms of lazy ideologically driven thinking, most often political, and particularly speaks volumes of the left vs right divide in America.
It's more telling that you've used your month-old account to drag his name through the mud just as opportunistically as those you accuse.
All you're doing is charging up the topic with more contention than you've found it with. The consequences of doing so are regressive for all related causes, especially your own.
If you find yourself elsewhere in life championing free thought and open discourse, remember this comment and know that you are a hypocrite and an enemy to your own virtues.
> What exactly about his argument that nihilism is "the easy way out" is problematic?
The fact that it is a polemical characterization and not any kind of argument at all would be the main problem I've seen in his attacks on what he calls “nihilism”.
Another problem is that he seems to use the term “nihilist” about as loosely as the average modern North American right-wing propagandist uses the term “Marxist”, so that it becomes very hard to be clear what he is arguing against specifically, which is a real problem because “nihilist” is already a heavily overloaded term that refers to a lot of different and often conflicting belief systems and affiliations.
Another problem is that to the extent that one can frame his stream of polemic as an argument at all, it's mostly one which implicitly relies on existential or moral nihilism (by presenting meaning or morality as something which is not intrinsic, but where is preferred morality is merely an idea that arose at a particular historical time and place that has certain utility to the holder to both hold and to have others around them hold) to argue against whatever it is that Peterson is calling “nihilism”. In this respect, it seems a poor, sloppy, and less honest echo of Nietzsche, who overtly embraced nihilism, but rejected passive nihilism for a more active and, in his view, productive for the individual form of nihilism.
Closest comparison I can draw is with urbit[0], mainly in regard to data ownership. Beyond that there's not much else that's similar between them. I'm disappointed by the lack of information on Solid.
Fwiw, Carol Dweck recently wrote about how the surge of interest in and promotion of a growth mindset approach to teaching and learning came with false positives [0]
I didn't read the article because it required a subscription for me, but I feel pretty confident that he already had a lot of the knowledge. Because the alternative is that he didn't have the knowledge, and actually learned 4 years of information in 2 weeks, which seems crazy even for people with the highest aptitudes.
It's been several years since we last spoke Hosh, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with your comment here. Hope you and your family are well!