[0:00]
hi guys it's been a while there's a simple reason uh the two main things i do are writing and talking and i've been doing a lot of talking on youtube so that's why i haven't been podcasting much so my youtube channel is kerry42 you can find a lot of stuff there if you you can find a lot of stuff there if you want so i wanted to talk about rationalism first thing is what do i mean by rationalism because the word has more than one meaning the papyrian meaning is using reason to 
[0:31]
learn about the world and you know it's a good thing reason is good rationalism related to rationality it can mean something good however there's a different meaning of the word which is sort of like armchair philosophy not looking at reality just trying to use your brain separate from trying to use your brain separate from reality and it often is involved with people thinking they're really smart and clever and they have all these great ideas and they can do better than tradition better than society better than convention and they're actually foolish you know 
[1:03]
that's a common theme that's how objectivism uses the word so i want to talk about that type of rationalism the armchair philosopher stuff where people think they have these great ideas sometimes utopias ideas sometimes utopias and they're not very practical that kind of they're not very practical that kind of problem problem so i've been interested in a variety of unconventional ideas in a variety of unconventional ideas and some people got the wrong idea and i haven't been perfect either but 
[1:35]
sometimes people get the wrong idea more than my own misconceptions about how great an idea some fancy philosophy theory is and you really need to be careful with this stuff which i have been talking about for years but i think it could use more emphasis and more revising of some of the impressions people have gotten so let's go through a few different so let's go through a few different topics first one is therapy so i think psychiatry is really [ __ ] 
[2:08]
up and dangerous up and dangerous but therapy is pretty different it varies therapists vary and styles of therapy vary some therapists are more on the doctor and the psychiatry and the medical end or the um like pseudoscience end where they're trying to say that they've read all these studies about how psychology works these studies about how psychology works and blah blah blah and that stuff i think is generally pretty bad and the other end of therapy is more 
[2:39]
like a life coach who's giving you advice and he knows some common sense and he knows some common problems people and he knows some common problems people have and he knows how to act like a reasonable person and you can talk to him and you can get advice and you can you can say negative things about your social group and he's not going to go gossip about it like there are advantages to having paid external help from people if you're talking your friends all the if you're talking your friends all the time for some people you have too many problems you're going to be a burden to your friends if you're always asking them for advice and help and whatever 
[3:09]
or it's it's hard to tell them or it's it's hard to tell them everything because they'll go tell other people like if you have problems with your wife you might not want to tell your friends so talking to a therapist can be good so there are some good things about therapy it's not all good it's not all good um so there's a few things to keep in mind a few things to keep in mind first is would you pay for it yourself with your own money if the answer to that is your own money if the answer to that is no it's probably a bad idea even if you're getting it for free i mean if the answer 
[3:40]
is i would pay for it if i had money but i'm completely broke it's okay but like you know assuming you had money if you wouldn't pay for it yourself it's probably bad regardless of how you're getting it um but if you would pay for it if you're actually if you actually care enough that it's something you would value and pay for then that is a good sign um you also want to look into different types of therapy and find someone that works for you and if it's not working don't say therapy sucks don't say this therapist sucks don't don't blame 
[4:11]
therapist sucks don't don't blame yourself just say you know they're i'm incompatible with this guy it might be one of the other things and if you really care you can investigate but just move on and try a different therapist if it's not working you can try different ones until you find one that works ones until you find one that works better don't just stick with one and say oh therapy is important therapy is important and i must be doing something wrong and i have to try harder if it's not working you can try other therapists until you find one who makes it easier for you that is part of their job is to figure out something that works for you if 
[4:42]
they're not doing that very well it doesn't mean they're a bad therapist but it's not everyone's a good match um most therapists don't know how to help everyone they know some things that help a lot of people a lot of people and you might not be in the group of people they know how to help they're not perfect they don't know everything um but a lot of them have some decent ideas so i'm not super anti-therapy i think so there's some other things about it like self-help books have a lot of the same knowledge you can get from 
[5:12]
same knowledge you can get from therapists uh you can get some of it on youtube i think people who do youtube only without books are at a disadvantage like you should include books when you're trying to learn about things but anyways but some people have trouble learning from books and videos and stuff and they need like personal help and someone to to tell them how it applies to their life situation and if you're a really great thinker you should be able to like read a book and apply it yourself but you know for the vast majority of people 
[5:45]
uh you know that's kind of hard and maybe therapy would help by the way i can do things in the ballpark of therapy if anyone wants to hire me um i can give like personal private advice kind of in that style i don't think it's very like generic i don't have standard training uh you know but if if someone likes my way of looking at the world then that is a service i can do but i'd only be interested in doing that with people who 
[6:15]
like my world view and are interested in those type of ideas i'm not gonna just those type of ideas i'm not gonna just um try to try to meet people at whatever their ideas are because that's not my that would be going outside my specialty and my going outside my specialty and my interests interests anyways i think most therapy is not super great or clever or clever but most people aren't super great or clever and the therapist deals with a lot of problems and he's read books about it 
[6:45]
and so on so he often has the advantage and knows some stuff that his patient doesn't know i like the word patient by the way client client is the right word it's also important to know that your therapist is not your friend it's a different kind of relationship than a friendship it has some similarities to friendship but it's significantly friendship but it's significantly different okay different topic social status i have a lot of criticisms of the social status hierarchy there are a lot of problems with that it causes 
[7:17]
a lot of problems with that it causes trouble trouble however that doesn't mean you just like avoid it or something it's not that simple you have to say okay there's this thing it plays an important large role in life let's try to understand it better it seems to be causing some trouble what might we do about that it's a what might we do about that it's a process you study it and then you consider changes and then you analyze if we make this change what's going to happen what will the effects be how will it work you know you don't just 
[7:48]
rush off to be like oh well this is irrational i won't do it that's not going to work and there are various reasons that making changes in this area is difficult people are often dishonest or confused about what the status quo is what is the current system what are they currently current system what are they currently doing um so it's really hard to make changes before you actually understand what you're doing why you're doing it what the unwritten rules are once you understand those you still have to figure out okay well if i'm going to make a change how am i going to get anyone else to make a change or am i 
[8:19]
going to make changes which work going to make changes which work unilaterally if you can figure out a way to change that doesn't require anyone else to change you know that's a lot easier but those are harder to come by you have to think these things through at some so yeah view it as a process don't just be like oh i learned society's bad about this so now i'm going to do like way better because i'm smart it's not that simple it takes a lot of study and work if you actually want to understand it well enough to make significant changes so on a similar note there's the 
[8:49]
monogamy versus polygamy versus uh never marrying anyone just being alone kind of marrying anyone just being alone kind of issue when i say polygamy i don't just mean marrying multiple people it could be like dating multiple people just the whole genre of not doing exclusivity for your romantic sexual relationships and the the history here is there is the ar list autonomy respecting relationships started by sarah and david that was supposed to apply tcs ideas which is 
[9:20]
taking children seriously to relationships how do we take our non-coercive parenting and our platyrian non-coercive parenting and our platyrian rationality and apply them to relationships and one of the first things that ar said is there's a lot of things wrong with monogamy here are some criticisms of monogamy here are some criticisms of monogamy uh we got to do better because a lot of people are getting hurt and all these things are going wrong and a lot of that had good points a lot of that had good points however you know what to actually do instead is 
[9:52]
tricky to figure out and people did not go into enough enough depth on trying to figure that out and some of them were then going around having poly relationships and stuff and my view which took a few years to to figure out what i thought more clearly like at first i was just trying to learn at a nice like when i first got there i was like oh you can question monogamy i never thought of that but anyways after a few years what i sort of settled on is my general sort of settled on is my general perspective 
[10:22]
perspective is there's a lot of things wrong with monogamy and love and romance and all that stuff it's dangerous you have to be really careful of it and if you're going to look to do something different you should probably be looking in the direction of less of that stuff not more of it like what is the point of poly if all this stuff is dangerous why do you want extra so i i find the poly stuff very questionable i find the poly stuff very questionable like monogamy is bad because love is 
[10:52]
irrational so love multiple people or like you know sex is not educational why do people make such a big deal out of it therefore sex is not so important so like sexual exclusivity doesn't make sense therefore have sex with lots of people if you're gonna say sex is not important there's not a good reason to go around being super promiscuous that trends more in the direction of just don't have sex with very many just don't have sex with very many people so i think there was a perspective problem and there's a lot of 
[11:23]
um rationalization of people just being promiscuous or whatever i also think it makes a big difference sort of what stage of your life you're in because if you're like 50 and you're being poly that's like really unconventional you're supposed to be sort of settled down by supposed to be sort of settled down by then and have like a family and stuff and like a stable life situation and not many people are probably at that age and it's um you know it's weird and it's hard and you should probably think it through and most people who try to think it through 
[11:54]
don't don't think enough in order to do better than convention it's really hard to use your brain to figure out how many how am i going to do better than what almost everyone else is doing because you don't have to be a little bit smarter than them to do that you have to be a lot smarter than them you have to know way more than them because they have this huge advantage of doing the normal thing that so many other people have thought about and have ideas about and give advice about and understand and so on like the support of society for a lifestyle makes a huge 
[12:24]
society for a lifestyle makes a huge difference so let's make a change it's like a lot of work and then you better be getting a large benefit large benefit and if sex is not like super special important whatever which is like the main rational criticism of the standard view then it's not a super high priority then it's not a super high priority issue to put all this effort into that's what so but on the other hand if you're age 20 a lot of normal behavior 
[12:56]
a lot of normal behavior is like very short relationships serial monogamy or maybe just hookups and never actually formally dating people and you're dating like a lot of different people in a short time frame people in a short time frame and i i don't think that's great i think the way people look at sex and i think it's sort of overrated and people get hurt and blah blah blah but anyways if you're going to do that kind of stuff then being poly while you're being promiscuous is like not really that different than what you're 
[13:27]
going to do anyways it's not that much of a change so it's like a lot less of a change so it's like a lot less dangerous it's a lot less of a big deal and then as you get older it becomes further away from convention so it's a bigger deal all right moving on tcs parenting tcs is unconventional it says hey guys we should do parenting like a lot different than how people normally do different than how people normally do parenting so you gotta be careful with that stuff and i think tcs did not adequately emphasize that it talked about it there's info about it people have written about it i've written about it 
[13:57]
on the fallible idea stuff i had multiple essays about tradition for both tcs and ar tcs and ar but you know i think more emphasis is still you know i think more emphasis is still merited merited that you need to look at okay so we have some ideas about problems with conventional ideas about problems with conventional behavior that's just step one now you have to look at it more look at it more um you're not just ready to change things right away you have to understand what's going on what are the reasons for the 
[14:28]
conventional stuff what's good about it why has it lasted over time um you really need to understand it better before you try to change it and work through that and like write a bunch of things and have a bunch of discussions and so on don't just go read some old tcs essays and think ah now i know how to do this you don't they're not adequate as written like they're a starting point they have some good ideas some food for thought also some bad ideas mixed in but anyways there's you know there's 
[14:59]
there are useful ideas there you can take inspiration from it it's a starting point that you can start analyzing and thinking about what you want to do but it's not like here's the complete picture everything worked out it's nothing like that it's not just like ready to go if you want to use it you need to there's basically two ways to use that one you can be a fairly conventional parent and you can make some minor changes that you think are like fairly low risk or you think are like fairly low risk or whatever 
[15:29]
and you know you can get some ideas from it and that's that's fine that's not a big deal you know everyone takes some ideas and just changes things with their own personal spin that they think makes sense then you can do that and tcs can help you do that that's fine on the other hand if you actually want to do it in like a thorough way and like use philosophical principles and stuff principles and stuff then you can only do it if you're a top tier philosopher that's it you cannot 
[16:00]
make huge changes to your life and make huge changes to your life and actually learn and understand that stuff well enough to do something really unusual unless you have quite a lot of philosophy skill you need to be able to do things like write articles if you don't have a blog with 100 posts on it you probably shouldn't try to do tcs in person with your own kids in like a thorough serious your own kids in like a thorough serious way you need to be able to discuss it debate you need to be able to discuss it debate it you need to read a lot of books on both 
[16:31]
sides like you need to read like philosophers that are related to tcs and try to understand them and study them and discuss them and so on and and take that quite far and you also need to read like conventional parenting books and compare and analyze and write criticisms and so on and if you're not going to do all of that if you're not going to do all of that then you shouldn't think that you know what you're doing enough to make major radical parenting changes like you can either follow the the like you can either follow the the default 
[17:02]
where society sort of guides you and you just do reasonably normal things or if you want to think for yourself you have to think like a lot you have to reinvent a bunch of stuff if you want to reinvent parenting in line with certain principles then you have to redo tons of ideas and that takes a ton of work and a ton of skill it's very easy to [ __ ] up and you need to be way way way ahead of other people in terms of intelligence and knowledge and so on or you're not going to come out ahead 
[17:38]
another topic is like jokes and memes and emojis and being friends with people and some people have this rationalist view that like i'm a robot which isn't true a robot which isn't true or that somehow it's bad to have friends and everything has to be super rational all the time and we should only eat plain white rice because flavor is irrational and unnecessary and luxury is irrational and unnecessary and there's a lot of things and there are problems with jokes and memes 
[18:09]
and stuff um they're bad for clarity a lot of friendship behaviors are not very good for clarity so avoid them in serious philosophy discussions like you can have some discussions where you cut out the jokes um so that you can speak in a more clear way but those things aren't like huge disasters either you can do them some of the time if you just cut them out while still liking them you're screwing up your life if you want to cut them out you need to first stop liking them stop seeing the appeal like you need to be more thorough about 
[18:40]
learning why do people do them what are the upsides if i get rid of them what do i need to replace them with like what am i going to lose out on them what do i need to replace at and if you don't understand that you're not ready to cut it out another another related one is it out another another related one is praise a lot of people don't praise my articles when they read them and like them and when they read them and like them and that's unconventional weird behavior if you read it and you like it and you think it's good you should just say oh i liked this this was great this one seemed really useful to me you know just say stuff like that that is completely normal if you stop doing it 
[19:11]
you're a rationalist unless you know what you're doing in that in an extensive way which most people don't um if you're going to stop doing praise you need to know what are the purposes of praise like what roles does it play in people's lives and then you know what alternative actions could i use to accomplish some similar things and which ones should and shouldn't be accomplished and what is actually wrong with praise and so on and like a bunch of detail if you don't know that just keep acting normal 
[19:42]
don't don't make significant changes if you have some concerns about praise you can raise them or start investigating rather than changing your behavior in a significant way some people try to copy me and you shouldn't do that like just because i'm not doing something doesn't mean you shouldn't do it i'm weird don't just be like well ellie it's weird so i'll be weird like that's cargo calzine you don't know all the things i know and you're just a different person than me like um so if you just like copy some of my 
[20:12]
superficial traits because you assume i must have thought it out and they're good it's like maybe they're good if you have my entire life and everything fits together but if you just take a few things out of my life and stick them in your life you know a lot of them aren't going to work very well so praise by the way it praise matters to the author the audience and yourself all three and if your assumption is praise makes no difference to me no difference to me um one i think you're not thinking about it 
[20:43]
correctly you don't know what i think so i would basically in short i would disagree with that but two even if praise made no difference to me it makes a difference to both the audience and to yourself when you praise audience and to yourself when you praise things that is part of your way of interacting with it if you praise a bunch of other stuff and then you come to fi and you're like oh fi is rational no praise allowed and then you don't pray stuff it skews your perspective it biases you because pray you praise things you like 
[21:14]
and then you don't praise it and then you like it less basically so stop suppressing your normal behavior so stop suppressing your normal behavior stop trying to change when you don't really know what you're doing especially when you do partial changes only when interacting with fi basically some people sort of make fi less friendly less the kind of place they like on purpose trying to copy me or something and then they complain or that fi isn't the kind of place they like or they don't complain they just like it less than participate less 
[21:46]
just participate your way um so related to this when you receive um so related to this when you receive criticism that is an attempt to help you it's not an attempt to make you change right now you are a complex system very similar to traditional conventional ways of living life and and like significant knowledge our society has um you're a complicated thing you're hard to change uh before trying to make significant changes to yourself you need to know what you're doing 
[22:16]
when in doubt just leave it alone to change yourself you know you take a bunch of criticism and then you look for which ones are high priority which ones are recurring patterns like chronic problems which ones are easy to change and you only change things if one they're easy or two they're high priority and the high priority ones you have to figure out what you're doing and put work into it and study it and think if i make this change what's going to happen 
[22:47]
why will it work what am i getting rid of and what were the benefits of the thing i'm getting rid of like you have to work through all that stuff and if you don't know how to work through all that stuff you have to like study philosophy and learn how to think and philosophy and learn how to think and stuff and like write a blog and like think through a bunch of issues as practice through a bunch of issues as practice and as far as the easy issues go there's some things that you can just quickly make a little change but most of the time people think something is easy to change they're just wrong they haven't noticed how hard it is how complicated it is 
[23:17]
complicated it is people frequently think something will be easy and then it's not so you have to be careful with that so the overall point is and this applies especially to the and this applies especially to the archives when you see criticisms of something when you see problems that doesn't mean you're ready to change things understanding flaws is step one step two is further investigation and study and trying to understand what's going on why 
[23:48]
are those flaws there why is it hard to change why has no one else changed this before most flaws are things that a lot of people have are things that a lot of people have noticed but there have been reasons people did not change it or only a few people changed and the change didn't catch on you know occasionally there's a flaw that like no one's noticed before but the vast majority of them of the flaws that you've you've noticed you've read about you've thought of you understand are things that other people have thought of too 
[24:18]
and they haven't managed to make changes that worked well enough to spread and catch on um there's reasons that society is the way it is and if you don't understand the upsides of the current conventional the upsides of the current conventional thing then you're not ready to change it then you're not ready to change it so um a bunch of like theoretical criticism um a bunch of like theoretical criticism and philosophy principles and so on it has value it gives you some ideas of places to look at things and you know it can be interesting and it can give you 
[24:49]
uh it can help you figure out because you should in your life try to study something and get good at it and make some sort of change where you're not just following along like you know you should take at least one thing seriously and try to do really well at it and you know knowing a bunch of flaws on society can give you options it gives you places you can look you can say maybe parenting will be my thing i'll look into that a bit and and see if that is the area of life i want to put a bunch of effort into 
[25:21]
um you know you can look into how bad is it and uh you know how big an opportunity is there to do things better and how resistant to change are people and do you just want to um learn a ton about parenting and then do good parenting yourself or do you want to learn a ton about parenting and convince other people to change their parenting and show them how and stuff those are pretty different projects and anyway you have options and so somewhere in your life you should put work into something and don't just follow convention but for most stuff you 
[25:53]
got to pick your battles and well a convention because you don't have the time and effort to study it the time and effort to study it extensively now you can try to become like a super philosopher is really really good at everything because you learn the most generic knowledge that helps you with all the different fields that is possible but it's quite hard and most people really aren't close to that most people really aren't close to that later