The Best Joe Rogan Talk of All Time

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SkyCore wrote:

It is not that an objective reality doesnt exist, it is our own limitations in understanding that lends to an infinite number of interpretations.

I disagree with the part after "that." Instead, I would say our limitations prevent us from knowing the whole. Even with impressive data compression and decompression techniques, the attempt to store all knowledge on our limited memory (to include external storage like text and images) is ridiculous, even when considering the task from a species rather than an individual perspective. Thus, while I deny that there are multiple valid interpretations of the same fraction of the whole Truth, it should be understood that we are not all talking about the same fraction of the whole Truth unless we are in communication with someone with shared experience; this is the basis for independently repeatable experimentation in scientific literature.

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SkyCore wrote:

But simultaneously our language is so flawed that erroneous leaps in logic and downright falsehood are permissible... And compounded by the problematic fact that much of the information contained within a word is assumed, and even worse, is also unknown. Without explicit enumeration of all the properties and functions, we are left with a very 'hazy' bedrock of language. Of course with such a flimsy foundation, we will have problems building precision constructs on top.

You are strawmanning language.

The first and most important function of language is not communication between people, but communication within a single person, between their memory and their consciousness. I was talking about powerful (de)compression in storage earlier; words are how your brain does it. You remember concepts rather than sensation because you simply can't store it all raw and unprocessed. As far as this intrapersonal use goes, language is malleable, it is customizable, it is subject to invention and innovation.

Nothing about a strictly personal definition of a word is assumed, unknown, or involuntary; such things only apply to interpersonal word use. To believe these things apply to one's internal language reveals a failure to accept personal responsibility for one's own language-crafting (and thus the accuracy of one's own memory), seeking instead to achieve results purely by copying the effort of others.

If you are not satisfied with the quality of the work of others, do it yourself. Wield self-made terminology and memetics in the public sphere and reshape the collective language.

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SkyCore wrote:

I think the erroneous assumption is in that a person ONLY maximizes a single variable. I really hate the term 'balance' as it is often used in the context where multivariable optimizations (weighted or unweighted) would be the more correct term.

I think any group of variables must, as a practical necessity, be redefined as components of a new single variable representing a weighed combination of the group to achieve real-world results. This is because we seek to choose the optimal choice, and determining the optimal in the context of actual choice will always eschew purely academic discussion of optimization in terms of a variety of separate contexts. Still, the formulation of a necessary single variable representing the group does not necessitate self-confidence in how that variable was formulated, often with self-awareness that such is a work in progress or perhaps was even misguided.

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鬼殺し wrote:

whatever else Peterson has to say, he's standing on a lot of very wet sand in one significant way: his obsession with post-modernism is antiquated.

This guy is sort of living in the past academically. Postmodernism as he describes it, that ridiculous stance that truth is elusive and interpretation is everything, hasn't really been *believed* in literary academia for years now. It's interesting, and there's a lot to be learned from it, but as educated as Peterson is, he's an outsider in this regard. The picture he paints is a typical one, positioning literary academics as airy-fairy, whatever-man, there is no wrong way to interpret texts meanderer -- unless they employ that stance to impose that on others. In my not inconsiderable experience, that shit simply didn't stick. Post-modernism is most definitely considered a historical movement now, although people are struggling to come up with a term for where things are, given how stupidly terminal 'post-modernism' is as a term. Still, we managed to create a term for a war even worse than The War To End All Wars, so I'm confident it'll happen.

I wandered into this post knowing most of what I know about postmodernism from JBP himself, so I did a couple hours research. It seems you're correct that Peterson is misusing the term and that postmodernism is — well, I would argue not completely dead, but, like evangelical conservatism, a dying ideology held almost exclusively by increasingly irrelevant old people.

Particularly conclusive here is arch-postmodernist Lyotard's rejection of what he called Grand Narratives. Many of us skeptics who feel ideologically close to Peterson are highly critical of how mainstream media attempts to concoct a Grand Narrative, but Lyotard would say those capitalized words with the same vocal sneer as Stefan Molyneux or Mark Dice. If postmodernism is the rejection of single easy narratives, regardless of whether the motive is seeking an alternative Grand Narrative or the refusal to commit to any Grand Narrative whatsoever, it doesn't matter; the modern Left we're complaining about are clearly not postmodernists, or at least not the Lyotard variety.

Regarding a term for what replaced postmodernism, I found an article suggesting pseudomodernism as the new idiocy. Written in 2006 and focusing on the differences between passive observation of previous media and the interactivity of new media, it seems almost prophetic now:

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This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.

That's crazy close to predicting both safe spaces and weaponized autism in a single paragraph. And when the world is taken away and only the online persona remains, I don't think the rise of identity politics, on both right and left, is any coincidence.

I do find it very interesting how the center-right "skeptic community," for lack of a better term, dominates on video streaming services like YouTube rather than text-based services like Facebook and Twitter. I feel like a defining aspect of the audience for such videos is, yes, they can comment, but they are still mostly observing content rather than continually creating it, listening more than speaking. Maybe a small barrier to publish is better than no barrier at all when it comes to the democratization of media.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Hmm...something familiar about that link...

(definitely last post here. Already answered bars in pm and decided anyone else isn't making enough effort.)

Harsh, man. Sorry for doing my own search before checking your links.

my sides have currently left the planet

GG, caveman (allegorical)