Discussion Structure

I thought a lot about the structure of discussions. Read it to learn about a big idea: the structure of conversations is a bigger contributor to the outcome than the content quality is.

Chatroom

Join the Fallible Ideas Chatroom on Discord if you’d like to chat.

Curiosity Posts

Explaining Liberalism. I explain the big ideas of (classical) liberalism. Highly recommended!

Discussion About Liberalism, Rand, Selfishness, Altruism, Psychology, Behavioral Economics and Science. See a productive discussion. Learn about the topic and about how to discuss. Bonus: there’s discussion about free will afterwards.

Liberalism and Charity. Did you know charity is overrated?

Objectivism and Empathy Discussion. The excerpt in the blog post has one of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes.

Media Matters Memo: Their Plans To Control All Political Speech. The left’s battle plan was leaked. Let’s look at how they intend to destroy the first amendment.

Curiosity Discussion

Got questions about parenting or school? Got any opinions to share? Post here: Open Discussion: Parenting, Babies, Education. In the first comment, I asked a question you can respond to: What's the worst thing you see parents or teachers do (when dealing with kids) which most people don't see anything wrong with? And what's wrong with it? There’s other discussion, too.

Interested in economics? Check out Open Discussion: Economics. I started it off with 6 comments on Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

Learn about Problems with Using the Normal Distribution.

The recent comments page now lists the ten most recently active discussion topics. This may be a better way to find active discussions than the list of individual comments (which is still available below). E.g. you can see that Sam Harris vs. Capitalism got discussed.

Links

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian by George Reisman. A new thing you may learn from this article is about the effects of price controls and their relationship with both socialism and with totalitarian measures like secret police.

This article, Cowardice At Brown University, is a double feature. On the one hand, it’s about how some people rapidly become gender dysphoric (transgender) as part of fitting in with a social, peer group where many people are doing it – even though it wasn’t part of their life before. And on the other hand, the article is about how academia is cowardly and suppresses research with conclusions that offend SJWs.

Article: America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings. Much-publicized “research” about mass shootings was never backed up with numbers by country or year, or lists of the shootings it counted. It turned out be wrong and to massively undercount foreign shootings.

Viral Tweet

I wrote my most popular tweet, which got 171 retweets and 208 likes:

It gained attention after David Horowitz responded saying:

Thanks for the support Elliott. Everyone has to realized there's a multimillion dollar Soros-David-Brock campaign to silence conservatives. The Silicon Valley problem is really a by-product of this since Sen Warner has threatened the Techs if they don't censor conservatives

The Breitbart article on the topic, David Horowitz: Visa, Mastercard Cut Off Payments to My Think Tank Based on SPLC ‘Hate Group’ Label, used my image (their screenshot says “Dear Elliot”).

The vocal, censoring, Soros-funded, first-amendment-hating faction of the political left backed off (despite the broad failure of the rest of the left to disavow them) and the Freedom Center can receive donations again. But the problems are ongoing. For example, one of the Freedom Center’s writers is still being blocked from multiple funding platforms and has started an Indiegogo campaign to sue the SPLC over it (the link explains the situation).

Additional articles: David Horowitz Freedom Center Declares Victory Over Censorship Attempt and Confronting The Left's Agenda To Silence Conservative Voices. Quote from the second article:

Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself. Once again, the numbers were remarkable. Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate.

By Elliot Temple. I write philosophical essays and a blog.