> If you don't mind me asking, do you suffer from any of the things he discusses in the book?
Yes, the book was recommended by my therapist. There were interesting and helpful parts to the book, in my case specifically the idea that it's hard to be anxious in a relaxed body, the yoga part, and the chapter about psyche being composed of different parts that protect one another and you can ask them to "step aside" were the most influential.
So I took useful things out of it, but I cannot say it is well written. In particular a lot of "meta" conversation would have been better left out. Like coming back to the DSM classification and ranting how it doesn't include childhood traumas even thou the author feels he demonstrated they should be a separate entity. And on research - I don't know much, but I know something about epigenetics. There was a chapter that touched upon epigenetics (about how stressors change the expression of our genes), and the papers were cherry-picked to agree with what the author was saying. I didn't like that and this made me doubt some of the cited literature in other chapters that I cannot judge on my own.
But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.
I am not sure if there is a linear trajectory. With some hypes the "othering" starts early and itself acts as a booster for hype, by creating the "initiated" group that everyone wants to be a part of.
Also, unrelated, but for some reason, while reading, I kept thinking that COVID-19 vaccines fit all these levels quite well.
I second the Freedman, Pisani, Purves "statistics" recommendation.
This book explains the concepts without using mathematics, but even people with phDs in mathematics praise it as one of the best textbooks on statistics [1]
The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shift towards the "non material" interpretation for consciousness more and more.
It's not an explanation, I agree. But there is nothing to explain. Me claiming that consciousness might not arise from matter is not an attempt to explain it. I just see no way how it can be investigated in material terms. If you see a person on the street there is no way you can tell if he or she is conscious. And I don't see a possibility of there ever being a way.
Sadly, I don't know what started this doubt in me, so I cannot share it with you. You brought physicists for some reason, and I know a few, like Schrodinger, who thought about consciousness and came to the same conclusion. Here is his quote: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." I haven't read about Max Plank, but heard he had similar views.
If I had to guess my starting point was a book called "the problems of philosophy" by Bertnard Russell [1]. He tries to answer the question "are there any statements to which all reasonable men would agree". And one of the conclusions the book comes to is that you cannot claim anything as objective without assumptions, and that the most objective thing is your subjective experience.
For example if you saw a cat, turned your head, and then looked back at the cat - was the cat there when you were not looking or was it gone? In the book Russell convincingly demonstrates that if someone maintains the cat was gone when you were not looking - you cannot prove logically to that person that he is wrong. In other words - you would not be able to start with his worldview and lead him to contradictions. Hence his "theory" about cat disappearing cannot be disproven without assumptions about how material objects behave.
Not sure if this is helpful, but I wanted to reply.
Here is one more, search: Ten Elements of the False COVID Narrative
Google: nowhere
Brave: first result
And it's not like Google just didn't index the site, it works for topics that are "less controversial", search: Universal Clock implies Universal Clockwork
Google: first result
Brave: first result
Whatever the explanation - either Google censors some topics, or its search engine works differently - the result is the same, for this example Brave outperformed Google.
That's one of the issues - the "far-right", depending on who is using the term, can range from someone advocating for genocide of anyone without blue eyes and blond hair, all the way to someone who says that Donald Trump wasn't that bad as a president.
So this is a public bragging about illegally putting a gun in a foreign country and assassinating a person, all the while being comfortably sure that no national or international pushback will come.
Brave allows you to do whatever you want. You can see publisher ads without Brave ads. You can see Brave ads without publishers ads. You can see both. Or you can disable both.
Since individual users can achieve any configuration of ads they like, to me it seems that some people are only unhappy with this because they want to push their moral stances on everyone else. Like, for example, stating that the ability to block publisher ads while enabling Brave ads is immoral and shouldn't be allowed.
There are more lies in that article. This one for example is so often repeated but untrue:
> Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.
Brave doesn't replace ads with their own. Brave ads are displayed as desktop pop-ups. They can also be easily disabled (which, surprise, the author doesn't mention because of his bias). And the idea behind Brave ads is to give you tokens which are then distributed to the content creators you engaged with. This is the default setting. Their idea is not to shovel you with ads or offer you "get rich with crypto" schemes. Idea is to block ads but still provide revenue to the content, based on how many users engage with that content.
When I see people saying "Brave replaces ads with their own" I have to wonder if they have tried using Brave themselves before writing these critique articles.
Well, I find such selective highlighting reprehensible. If we seriously care about Nazi sympathies we can make a list and go from the top and get some perspective for tackling this issue. But to bring it up after a person dies is, at minimum, in poor taste.
With all these vaccines and companies competing with one another I often wonder what is real, what is unstated, and what is a PR stunt against the competition.
Most well known is probably narcolepsy induced by Pandermix flu vaccine. [1] But in my understanding any vaccine can have side effects. When my kids get vaccinated I always have to sign a paper stating that I understand the risks of possible seizures, blood cloths, sudden death, etc. Even thou I understand that risks are very small it's always hard to read and sign something like that.