Open thread to discuss psychiatry, psychology, Thomas Szasz's ideas, "mental illness", etc. (Szasz book links.)
Open thread to discuss psychiatry, psychology, Thomas Szasz's ideas, "mental illness", etc. (Szasz book links.)
People commonly use words without knowing their meanings. Instead of learning what a word means, people observe others and learn what situations the other people use that word in. People commonly use words by social copying instead of by understanding their meaning.
This is a very bad method. It's one of the reasons people write incoherent stuff so often.
They do the same thing with quotation marks. They don't know what quotation marks mean, and they copy other people misusing them.
I've observed frequent misuse of quotation marks, by many people, in a variety of contexts. I've been trying to figure out what's going on. Sometimes the quotation marks seem to be italics, and other times they seem to mean "add the text 'so called' before this word or phrase". They're used in many other incorrect ways, too.
I've tried asking people about their grammar usage, but they're unable to give coherent answers.
Buy my notes on Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course.
Buy my notes on Peikoff's Principles of Grammar course.
Learn about the education or grammar, and about note taking. And the notes will be a huge help if you're listening to Peikoff's lectures yourself.
Pricing is $1+. That means you decide how much to pay. There's a one dollar minimum (you do have to pay).
Want more content? There are lots of great posts to read at the discussion group. I write lots of them. It's like reading blog posts, but there's more!
Rewriting Rand is a long article about how Mayhew and others have made changes to the Rand archive material which has been made public. Books like Ayn Rand Answers don't actually present Rand's original words.
Mayhew also left out a bunch of interesting material include this:
To a question about the ideas of maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, Rand replied, in part, “He seems to be for individual rights, but I cannot always follow his argument—I have questions, I have certain serious questions about some of his premises—therefore, I have not read enough to criticize him. All I can say is he’s promising” (Ford Hall Forum 1976, 40:55–41:32).
I like to find comments by my favorite philosophers about each other. They're interesting. I'm glad Rand recognized that Szasz was promising and was in favor of individual rights.
I wonder why Rand didn't write Szasz a letter and ask her questions. I'm confident he would have answered.
Discuss anything in the comments below.
The four best books are The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity by David Detusch (DD), and Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (AR).
Update: See my unendorsement of the Deutsch books.
Everyone should learn this stuff, but currently only a handful of people in the world know much about all four of these books. This material is life-changing because it deals with broad ideas which are important to most of life, and which challenge many things people currently think they know.
However: they’re way too deep and novel to read once and understand. The ideas are correct to a level of detailed precision that people don't even know is a possible thing to try for. The normal way people read books is inadequate to learn all the wonderful ideas in these books. To understand , there’s two options:
1) be an AR or DD yourself, be on their level or reasonably close, be the kind of person who could invent the ideas in the first place. then you could learn it alone (though it’d still involve many rereadings and piles of supplementary material, unless you were dramatically better than AR or DD.)
this is not intended as an option for people to choose, they're like one in a billion kind of people. and even if one could do it, it’s way harder than (2) so it'd be a dumb approach.
2) get help with error correction from other people who already understand the ideas. realistically, this requires a living tradition of people willing to help with individualized replies. it’s plenty hard enough to learn the ideas even with great resources like that. to last, it has to educate new people faster than existing people stop participating or die. (realistically, this method still involves supplementary material, rereadings, etc, in addition to discussion.)
What is the current situation regarding relevant living traditions?
for the DD stuff, there’s only one living tradition available: the Fallible Ideas community.
the most important parts of the DD material is based on Karl Popper's philosophy, Critical Rationalism (CR). there’s some CR-only stuff elsewhere, but the quality is inadequate.
besides reading the books, it's also important to understand how the DD and AR ideas fit together, and how to apply the cohesive whole to life.
there's lots of written material about this on my websites and in discussion archives. the only available living tradition for this is the Fallible Ideas community.
for the AR stuff, there are two living traditions available which i consider valuable. there are also others like Branden fans, Kelley fans, various unserious fan forums, etc, which i don’t think are much help.
the two valuable Rand living traditions disagree considerably on some topics, but they do also agree a ton on other topics.
they are the Fallible Ideas community and the Peikoff/Ayn Rand Institute/Binswanger community. The Peikoff version of Objectivism doesn’t understand CR; it’s inductivist. There are other significant flaws with it, but there’s also a lot of value there. It’s has really helpful elaborations of what Rand meant on many topics.