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April 26, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:40
HOW TO THINK! (The LGM Hypothesis)
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Hey there, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
Hope you're doing well. So, I wanted to give you the acid test of whether or not you can think for yourself.
That's really the purpose of what it is that I'm doing here, is trying to spark the fires of thought across the planet.
So here's your fundamental test about whether you can think for yourself, and I'm going to use, as an example, an article.
By Zoe Carpenter.
It's called Misinformation is Destroying Our Country.
Can anything reign it in?
Right? So yeah, misinformation is bad.
Misinformation is sophistry.
Misinformation is when you are lied to for the sake of a usually political goal or effect.
Right? So that is misinformation.
Like they say... Oh, America is ripe with gun violence, thus they want to overturn the Second Amendment, and they say, America's so violent, there's so many shootings, there's something peculiarly violent about America.
It's not true, of course.
It's completely false. If you take out just a couple of Democrat-run cities, America's way down in terms of violence.
It's more demographics and politics than it is anything to do with anything essential to America, but of course...
That's misinformation, right?
It's a form of information terrorism in that it is manipulation leading to coercion, usually, like taking away violence, taking away guns and so on.
And it's really brutal.
So, misinformation is destroying a country.
Can anything rein it in? Okay, that's an interesting title.
And then, of course...
Once they hook you with the misinformation is bad, they then immediately, she immediately zooms in on Trump is gone, but the right-wing media is alive and well and will further undermine our democracy if we let it.
Right, so this is, and this is not about this woman, she's just a normal NPC, but we want to talk about whether you can, I'm going to give you a tip and a tool for thinking for yourself and knowing whether the people around you can think for themselves, it's going to be amazing, I promise you.
So she writes, what have we got here?
Oh yeah, so there's like a video of Trump yelling and then there's Fox News and Newsmax and rigged.
On the night after the November 3rd election, hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump filled the parking lot at an election center in Arizona's Maricopa County, where officials were still counting ballots.
Although most networks had yet to call the state for Joe Biden, Fox News had declared him the projected winner shortly before midnight.
On election night, the Trump voters in Phoenix were furious.
Count the votes they chanted, Fox News sucks.
So, at the Mara Copa County rally, some protesters carried long guns, others waved Sharpie pens.
So this is the Sharpie thing, you know, that they said people were told to fill out their ballots with Sharpies, but they couldn't be read and all that kind of stuff.
And, whew, It's, uh, she tries to debunk the choppy thing.
I don't know whether it's true or not.
It doesn't really matter. So this person, oh, a woman, Natalie Fieras Bach says she could feel this mass delusion calcifying in the wake of the election in Pinal County, a rural area between Phoenix and Tucson, where she served as co-executive director of the group Rural Arizona Engagement.
It feels like an existential crisis!
Bach adds, this is the Sharpigate stuff.
And then, of course, you've got to do the Capitol insurrection.
The Capitol insurrection. So all the riots, Black Lives Matter riots, and all the Antifa riots, and taking over cities and killing people and so on, setting fire to businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
It's just a protest, but the Capitol, where apparently the police let some people in, they wandered around, they didn't take any lies, right?
And the lie that this officer...
Was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher, which is a total lie.
He just died of a stroke later.
So you got it. The capital insurrection threw into relief the real-world consequences of America's increasingly siloed media ecosystem, which is characterized on the right by an expanding web of outlets and platforms willing to entertain an alternative version of reality.
Social media companies confronted with their role in spreading misinformation scrambled to implement reforms.
But right-wing misinformation is not just a technological problem and it is far from being fixed.
Weaponized misinformation, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, I mean, it's really boring stuff, of course, and very basic.
And, of course, it's partisan in the extreme, which is, in fact, misinformation.
And, you know, she doesn't talk about the...
I mean, it's really... It's easy and, again, kind of boring, so I don't really do politics anymore.
This is about philosophy and epistemology, not politics.
But... When you say, oh, the right wing did not accept the outcome of the 2020 election, I mean, of course, most of them did.
And it would have been nice if the courts had heard a couple of cases, but they didn't for various reasons.
Maybe book advances.
But anyway... It's sort of easy and boring to point out that the left certainly did not accept the 2016 election and continued to try and undermine it with endless impeachment hearings, the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and some of it just went on and on.
So, I mean, that's kind of boring, right?
And knowing that it's partisan and it's one-sided, right?
I mean, why even get out of bed if it's just to repeat the same old stuff over and over again?
But what's really interesting here...
Not only, of course, that somebody who claims to be fighting misinformation is in fact spreading misinformation by saying it only occurs on the right, which is mad.
But I want to introduce you something called the Little Green Man Hypothesis.
The LGM Hypothesis.
Now that's an acronym I can truly get behind.
The LGM Hypothesis.
Let's talk about that. Really important.
The LGM hypothesis, the Little Green Man hypothesis, so Little Green Man was kind of a sardonic term for space aliens when I was a kid, like the UFO craze of the 70s, 80s, 90s, noughties, and so on, right?
So Little Green Man hypothesis is something that I have been doing since the beginning of my career.
I've touched on it here and there, but I want to concentrate and give you this incredible tool for figuring out whether you can think for yourself and figuring out whether people around you can think for themselves.
Really, really important. So...
In the 18th century, 17th century, a little bit, 18th century in particular, the Europeans of course went to what they called the New World, which was full of an indigenous population of what were called Indians back then, Incas and Aztecs and Mayans and so on.
And They would sometimes bring these natives, which they are called savages, back to Versailles, to London, to the Houses of Parliament, to Rome.
They would bring these, and then they would try to...
They would know some of the language, and they would ask the indigenous population of the Americas what they thought of European civilization.
And it was an outside...
Voltaire used this, a bunch of other writers used this, too.
Examine and undermine some of the objectively ridiculous aspects of Western civilization.
So they would say, here's the palace of Versailles.
And then they would say, wow, the natives would say, wow, that's incredible.
And then they would say, oh, and here's a man living under a bridge over the River Seine.
And they would say, well, that's terrible.
In our tribe, we don't have people in giant palaces and people living under bridges.
Nobody... We starves while other people are full.
We share. So it was a way of looking at, you know, what do you think of this man in this strange costume and a funny wig who gets to judge everyone else?
It's like, well, when we judge, we sit around and we smoke a peace pipe.
It was a way of looking at your own culture, your own society from the outside.
And it's a great way to pry yourself out of the train tracks of prior experience.
And that would just normalize because you grew up with it.
I mean, if you grew up with one language, you look out the window and say, oh, that's a tree.
And you think that somehow the word tree is plugged into the giant woody plant.
Of course it's not. It's just a convention.
So it's a way of just stepping outside your convention and looking at your society through the eyes of an outside.
And that's really foundational to Can You Think?
Can you think? Or are you just manipulating people with partisan, you know, oh, I'm so much against misinformation, I'm going to spread misinformation, as this woman seems to, in my opinion, is doing.
So, I want to talk about the little green man hypothesis, which is kind of the way that I work.
So, what I work, the way that I work, and it's a great way to work, I'm telling you, this is objectively fantastic, and you'll understand why in a minute or two.
So, I think of the little green man hypothesis.
So, if somebody says to me, Misinformation is very bad.
It's a misinformation, things which people believe that do not accord to the facts.
And that's really a failure in training people in epistemology, how to reason in accordance with evidence to figure out what is true and what is false.
I will accept that misinformation is a massive problem.
I mean, that's kind of why I've been doing the show for so long.
Misinformation is a huge problem, and boy, oh boy, should we ever do something about it.
So then, what you have to do is, instead of thinking of the insurrection on January the 6th, and Trump told people to drink bleach and all these things, which...
Not really true, but people believe.
So, instead of thinking of all of that, you've got to zoom out.
Like, you've got to think like, you're a space alien.
You're just taking off your helmet, sniffing the deep earth air, and you're trying to figure out, wow, these people really seem to be fussed by misinformation.
They really seem to think that misinformation is a bad thing.
Okay. I take them at their word, says the little green man, the space alien, and he says, so, misinformation is a failure.
To accurately identify truth and falsehood.
It's an epistemological failure.
Epistemology is a study of knowledge, how we come to know things that are true.
So, okay, so then what I would do, and you've got to think about this, like you're the space alien, right?
What you would do is you'd say, okay, so we have a failure fundamentally of education.
Misinformation. People are susceptible to misinformation because they cannot...
Distinguished truth from falsehood.
And we can go with everything this woman says as being perfectly true.
There was this massive insurrection, and the election was the fairest election in all of history, blah, blah, blah.
All of this is true, and we say, she thinks that there's a massive problem with misinformation.
Misinformation is a problem of education.
Little man, LGM hypothesis.
You've got to burn this in your brain.
LGM hypothesis. So then what you do is you zoom out of the minutia and the details, and was it insurrection, and what did Trump actually say, and fine people, you zoom out of all of that stuff.
That's completely irrelevant distraction.
That's all just political terrorism.
And it comes from both sides, of course, right?
So, what you do is you say, misinformation arises from a lack of education.
Because if you're educated properly, Then you're good, not perfect, but good at differentiating truth from falsehood.
If somebody makes a claim, you will look at the source materials, you will look at the consistency of the information, you will examine motives of the person who is making the claim.
Are they on the left? And are they making claims that only misinformation occurs on the right, as this woman seems to be doing?
You will try to tease and suss out, so to speak.
What is true from what is false.
That's how to be educated.
The fundamental basis of education is knowing what is true and what is false.
Certainly the fundamental purpose...
Well, it's a necessary but not sufficient purpose for philosophy.
The whole point of philosophy is morality.
What is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.
But you can't know what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil, if you don't know what is true and what is false.
Morality has to have something to do with truth and universality, and evil has to do with manipulation and sophistry.
So... Given, as a little green man, a space alien just coming out of the spaceship, looking, oh my gosh, everybody's panicked about misinformation.
Misinformation is a problem of education.
So, boom!
Who's in trouble? Who's in charge of education?
That's all you need to do. Who's in charge of education?
Misinformation is a failure to identify truth from falsehood, which is an educational issue.
Who is in charge of education?
If misinformation is a huge problem, the cause of that problem is the educational system.
So you'd say, okay, who's in charge of education?
You'd say, ah, well, the government is in charge of education.
The government runs the curricula, the government forces people to pay for children to be educated, the government runs the schools, the government is in charge of education.
So you'd say, okay, well then misinformation, or people's susceptibility to misinformation, goes back to them being poorly educated in government schools, right?
So the problem is not...
The right or the left, or of course the left really runs the educational system at the moment, but you would look and say, the problem is with the educational system.
So then you would say, okay, well let's look at the educational materials and try and figure out what's going wrong, why people aren't taught about how to differentiate truth and falsehood, right?
Correct from incorrect.
Accurate from false.
And then you would look at the educational curriculum.
You would look at the motives. Does the government want a critical, skeptical, educated population that can resist sophistry and promises of free stuff because nothing is free?
Are they able to accurately identify and call into account false statements made by politicians, by the media, by Hollywood, by artists of various stripes and hues?
Does the government want a smart, educated, skeptical population for which it's very easy for them to differentiate truth and falsehood?
Well, of course they don't. I mean, of course they don't.
Does the media, like, does this woman want a really skeptical population that can evaluate her claims with...
No, she doesn't.
She wants people who are like, oh yeah, those right-wingers, they're all spreading misinformation and it results in death and I hate those guys.
That's what she wants. She wants a mob, right?
So yes, she doesn't want critical information, which is why she's completely overstepping the basic little green man hypothesis.
Misinformation is bad. Misinformation, susceptibility to misinformation, is an educational problem, is an educational failure.
Who runs the educational system?
That's the cause of the problem.
So she's not going to sit there and say, well, kids obviously aren't trained to figure out truth from falsehood, and that's entirely in the hands of the government.
Because the government runs the educational system.
So we have to go and look at the educational curriculum, figure out why critical thinking isn't being taught, how we can introduce critical thinking, blah, blah.
Like, she's not doing any of that.
So she doesn't care about misinformation, doesn't care.
And again, I'm not trying to pick on her.
She's just a person, but it's a good jumping place off for this.
Little Green Man hypothesis.
Somebody says, this is bad.
So then you've got to take off your space helmet as if you've just arrived from Betelgeuse or Alpha Centauri or Optimus Prime.
Oh wait, I think that's a transformer.
But anyway, if you just step off the spaceship and look and say, wow, they're really fussed about whatever it is, right?
So if people are, oh my gosh, I'm really, really mad.
About income inequality, that there's a growing gap between those who own the means of production and those who work.
We say, okay, well, so entrepreneurs tend to do quite well over time, so we would say, okay, well, if there are a lot of people who are workers, and there are relatively few people who are entrepreneurs, That's an educational issue right back again.
So you'd say, okay, well, does the government teach people about business, economics, marketing, sales, taxes, how to be an entrepreneur, how to incorporate?
Does the government teach people how to be entrepreneurs?
No, of course not.
It's too busy teaching them to, I don't know, hate white people or something, right?
So does the government teach people how to be entrepreneurs?
Okay, so again, when you see the growing disparity between wealth and And poverty, we would say, okay, part of that is an educational issue.
Then we'd say, okay, well, the government is in charge of redistributing income.
So if the government takes from the rich and gives to the poor, that should close the gap between rich and poor.
Now, if the gap between rich and poor is instead spreading rather than closing, again, that's a government issue, because the government has put itself in charge of closing the gap.
That was the whole point of public education, was to close the gap.
People who want to break into other occupations and they find that a third of Americans need to have a license simply to make a buck.
You say, okay, well, who's in charge of the licensing?
Because that's a huge barrier to entry to going and competing with people who have the licenses already.
So, okay, well, that's a government issue because the government's putting up these barriers, which keeps people poor and blah, blah, blah.
So, you understand all of this.
Again, if you're just space alien stuff, right?
And this is what's so freaky to people about what I do, is I'm constantly taking off The space alien suit.
I'm constantly using the little green man hypothesis.
Little green man hypothesis.
Now, if you do this, it's incredible.
It's powerful. It's fascinating.
And it blows people's minds.
Because I agree with this woman, Zoe, I think her name was.
I agree with her. Misinformation is a huge issue.
It's a huge issue. So we need to teach people how to think critically, right?
We need to get them to ask those Socratic questions, look for contradictions, look for universals, ask those who claim to be wise for the very definitions of statements they claim are wise, check them for consistency, check them for universality, check them against the evidence, all of this sort of stuff, right?
Wonderful. Now, she's not...
Can you imagine? She writes this article and then says, oh, but there's this guy on the internet who really teaches critical thinking.
He's got a whole book of Art of the Argument.
He's got a 17-part introduction to philosophy that teaches you how to think critically.
Boy, if you want to fight misinformation, man, you go to a philosopher and he'll teach you if he's good.
How to avoid misinformation and not be taken in by sophists and all that, right?
Of course, she's never going to do that in a million years, right?
She doesn't want critical thinking.
She wants to rouse the mob by claiming to be against misinformation and for critical thinking.
So, the little green man hypothesis is really powerful.
I'll give you sort of one other example.
Where I don't use it against the left or the government, but this is where I use it against, not against, but with regards to libertarianism, right?
So libertarianism is very much founded on the non-aggression principle.
You should not initiate the use of force against others.
And for that, they say, oh, taxation is theft, and central banking is theft, and inflation is theft, and government control is theft, and bullying, and, you know, it's hard to argue when you accept the non-aggression principle, but...
You can't really do much about those things, right?
And, you know, one of the things that sophists do is they will say to you, this is a giant moral issue, and you should focus on it even though you have little to no control over it, right?
That's how they castrate morality, is they say, this moral issue is pressing and pressing.
You have to try and will it in a sphere you can't possibly or can barely even influence.
You get these moral hysterias, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, income inequality and racism and big giant issues, which as an individual you can't really do much about, and they get you to burn out your motor of morality by getting incredibly frustrated and trying to will Control over things that you can barely, if at all, control. So, you see this all the time.
And this is one of the reasons why more than half of women on the left have a mental illness.
And probably pretty serious mental illnesses.
Partly that's because...
People with mental illnesses are, I think, drawn towards impossible tasks, but also because having an impossible task that you must achieve, right?
It's an impossibility, right?
An impossible task that you must achieve.
I mean, if you said that the world is hideously unjust and will forever remain so until everyone's the same height, I mean, you would go slowly insane trying to solve that because you can't really control that.
It's the same thing, but like you and intelligence and all of that.
So if you were to say, well, you can't rest easy, you can't relax, you can't think that your country is a good country, the world is a good place until everyone's exactly the same height, males, females, children, adults, doesn't matter.
Everyone's exactly the same height, and until that is achieved, you cannot rest!
Your moral crusade is 150% you're going to burn out your motor.
You're going to burn out your motor.
If your personal trainer wants to injure you rather than have you become healthy, then your personal trainer will drop weights onto you that you can't possibly lift or hold onto and then you'll try and struggle and hurt yourself and you'll tear cartilage and you'll pull muscles and you'll get injured, right? Because you're being given a weight that you can't possibly manage.
It's the same thing with giving people these massive, impossible moral tasks, rather than what can you do in your own life?
And like global warming, whatever it comes up, whatever they come up with.
When I was a kid, it was endless environmental catastrophes and nuclear war, the Cold War, and so on, right?
And particularly women.
Women really care about morals in many ways and can be a wonderfully positive moral effect in society.
So what you want to do is, in particular, you want to program women and say, all inequality means that there's terrible, horrible injustices in the world.
And then the women will run around trying to make everything equal, which is impossible and counterproductive.
The only time we're ever equal is when we're food for worms.
And even then, the fat people feed the worms more.
And the women will simply burn out.
They will become incredibly frustrated.
They will become angry.
They will become bitter. And they will damn the world.
And of course, the reason you do this is you want the most caring and the most empathetic to have the fewest children because there's no personality aspect that is immune from genetics, right?
So if you want... Fewer empathetic and caring people in the world.
What you do is you train women to become progressively unappealing due to their increased levels of frustration and hostility and animosity and depression and anxiety because you give them an impossible moral task and that way you slowly and then rapidly begin to eliminate moral compassion from Why is society getting crueler?
In a lot of cases it has to do with this, right?
And you would also want to make sure that you give a lot of welfare to people who have a lot of kids because When you are taking welfare, like you're coercively taking resources from other people against their will, an empathetic person won't like that, but a selfish person will be fine with it,
and so you're breeding selfishness and you are destroying the reproductive capacities of people who have a moral sense and empathy, and it's a wonderful way to turn the world back in time and have all of the achievements of the past couple of hundred generations completely eliminated, but... So, I will tell you what happened with libertarianism.
So, I did the little green man hypothesis, the LGM hypothesis 101, right?
So, this is philosophy 101.
If I was a space alien, just disembarked, what would I see and how would I solve these problems?
So, I accepted and am fully behind non-aggression principle.
Do not initiate force against others, right?
Now, if I were an evil genius...
Then what I would do is I would say to all of the people who were really interested in the non-aggression principle that they really need to fix taxation, the Federal Reserve, foreign policy, and war, and national debts, and money printing, and inflation.
I would say to them, oh, you're really interested in the non-aggression principle, then what you really need to do is focus on these things you can't possibly control as an individual.
You can't, like, zero, effectively, oh,.00001%.
Okay, okay. Come on.
Come on. I mean, you people wouldn't even play Russian roulette, which is a one-in-six chance of living, right?
And so I would say to all the people who are interested in the non-aggression principle, you've got to focus on all these big, giant things you can't control.
And they'll love that, too, because they can't have any effect on it.
They're not really harming the interests of any evil people in particular, and therefore they get to feel that they're doing good by trying to jump and catch levers they can't possibly catch and even if they could catch them they couldn't possibly move them so I would castrate libertarians by having them focus on big giant socio-economic political and military industrial messes that they couldn't possibly change And that's a wonderful way to take people most interested in the non-aggression principle and completely neuter them and make them absolutely useless and have them spin their wheels,
burn themselves out, look foolish, look ridiculous, lower their chances of mating and then passing along the wisdom and genetics of an adherence of the non-aggression principles.
You're just winnowing them out of the gene pool.
You're winnowing them out of the population.
It's a beautiful strategy. Now, what I did when I was on the scene as a thinker I did the little green man hypothesis.
The little green man hypothesis, remember, is I accept that your issue is a huge issue.
Let's sort by two columns.
Prevalence, effect.
Prevalence and effect. How prevalent is the issue and what effect can you have on it?
So this woman, she can't change the educational system.
But what she can do is she can say, look, clearly the educational system is Churning out people incredibly susceptible to misinformation.
So the first thing that you want to do is pull your kids out of government schools and teach them yourselves with the wonderful resources available on the internet to promote critical thinking, right?
That's what you wouldn't want. She would say all of that, right?
Then at least she could convince people to get their kids out of the brain-wrecking treadmill of Pink Floyd.
Style, sausage-making, brain-ending government education.
But you're not doing any of that, right?
Just wants to generate hatred rather than solve problems, I would imagine.
So, you sort by the prevalence of the issue, and then you sort by The effect you can have.
And what you want is highest prevalence and most effect.
That's what you want. If you want to solve a problem, highest prevalence, most effect.
So if you are a researcher, you want to search for the most common disease that you can have the most effect on.
So, the most common disease that you can have the most effect on.
Now, of course, the severity of the disease matters as well, but with regards to the non-aggression principle, it's pretty simple.
What you do is you look at society, again, take the space helmet off, little green man hypothesis, you look at society, like you were never there before, like you know nothing about it, blank slate, tabula rasa, and you just think of, you know, you sort by, I used to do these all the times in databases, you can do it in spreadsheets and so on, you know, two columns, sort by, sort by, right?
So the non-aggression principle, violations of the non-aggression principle, right?
VNAP, violations of the non-aggression principle, the VNAPs.
So you'd say, okay, the most common VNAPs that you can have the most effect on.
Okay, taxation is very common, can't really have much effect on it.
Inflation, money printing, very common, can't really have much of an effect on it.
Spanking, boom, boom, massively common.
Massively common. In terms of the people who are actually violating the non-aggression principle.
So, there are very few central bankers and even they don't violently enforce their system themselves.
They rely on the police and so on, right?
There are very few people who collect taxes relative to those who pay it.
So, violations of the non-aggression principle, spanking is by far the most common.
It's by far the most common.
Depending on the race, it's 65% to 85% admit that they do it.
And from the research, it happens many times a week in many families, right?
So, spanking, violation of the non-aggression principle.
Is it the most widespread?
Yes. It is incredibly serious?
Yes, it is. And I did the whole Bomb in the Brain series on the effects of spanking, on the effects of child abuse.
It takes, on average, 20 years off your life to be abused as a child.
High rates of cancer, ischemic heart disease, addiction, promiscuity, various other diseases, and overeating.
And on average, it takes 20 years off your lifespan.
I think smoking only takes seven years, right?
So it's like three smokings to be abused as a child, as far as its effects on your health, which is why, like myself, if you were abused as a child, you've got to take particularly good care of your health.
And so...
With regards to libertarians, I did the dual sort.
I want to sort by the prevalence of the violations of the non-aggression principle.
Okay, spanking, clearly.
It's the most prevalent. And that which you can have the most effect on.
Well, yeah. Because you don't have to spank.
You have to pay your taxes. But nobody goes to jail for not spanking.
Nobody goes to jail for not spanking.
So that is the little green man hypothesis, the LGM hypothesis.
You look for the widest prevalence of the most serious stuff that you can have an effect on.
I guess you saw it by three things.
Widest prevalence, most serious, that you can have an effect on.
And if you started a movement to not pay your taxes, you would go to jail.
But if you start a movement to not spank, to not circumcise, to not brutalize children, you don't go to jail.
Perfectly legal for all of that stuff.
Safest, most prevalent, safest to oppose, most prevalent, most serious, that you can have the most effect on.
Of course it's spanking, which is why one of my very early shows and articles was, does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
And I was promoting peaceful parenting and voluntarism within relationships and focusing on...
And you know... That I actually had an effect because of the violence of the opposition that came to me.
Not just, I mean, to a small degree from libertarianism, although mostly just ignored me, but from the mainstream media and so on.
Because when you actually do harm the interests of evil people, they'll strike back at you, right?
Which is why libertarians are considered a joke and I'm considered one of the most evil men in the known universe because I'm actually harming the interests of evil people by promoting voluntarism and peace and the non-aggression principle in personal relationships, particularly parent to child.
So, the little green man hypothesis is really, really powerful.
We really urge you.
And look at it in yourself. Look at it in yourself.
Little green man hypothesis.
You accept the person's complaint, and then you strip yourself of all knowledge, blank slate, taken off the space helmet, viewing this place for an indigenous population person from North America at the Palace of Versailles in 1789.
Look at it with completely fresh eyes, new eyes, as if you know nothing.
Explain it to me like I'm five years old.
Non-aggression principle is really bad.
Yeah, it is. What's the most common violation of the non-aggression principle?
Spanking. Does it have serious effects?
Sure does. Can you oppose it?
Safely? Yep. Can you actually do something about it in your life, in your circumstances, in your environment, in your family?
Can you advocate for it?
Yep. Then that's what you should be focusing on.
I mean, clearly, unless you just want a virtue signal and talk about how you're against the non-aggression principle, but never actually interfere with the evil actions of evil people so that you don't get any blowback.
So you can just pretend to be good, pretend to be virtuous, pretend that you oppose violations of the non-aggression principle, but not really, not in any tangible, actual, practical sense.
Because otherwise you piss off evil people and they will come after you as they've come after me.
So, little green man hypothesis is really, really important.
Misinformation is bad! Oh, okay.
So, it's an educational issue.
Who teaches the children and what could you do to change that?
Well, the government teaches the children and you can homeschool most places.
Easy peasy, nice and easy, right?
And yet, when you see people bringing up all these issues, They're never looking at them with clear eyes.
They're never looking at them, or almost never looking at them, in a solid mechanism of critical thinking.
And the little green man hypothesis, that is critical thinking.
That is the very essence of critical thinking.
I know nothing. I wish to solve this problem.
According to universal principles, I'm going to sort by prevalence, severity, safety, and can I affect it?
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