A List Of My Rules For Life (5-8-23)

https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147702

* We’re all locked in an iron cage together and nobody is coming to save us. To survive, you want to become as strong and connected as possible.
* Different people have different gifts.
* Nobody cares about out-groups.
* The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups.
* Ties bind and blind. (Jonathan Haidt)
* Everybody has a hero system. Most people get it from their community. (Ernest Becker)
* Marginalized movements attract marginalized people.
* What will determine the success of an administration? Events, my dear boy, events.
* Every living thing strives to create the optimal environment for its thriving and will react viciously to anything that endangers it.
* If you want to preserve native life, you have to restrict invasive species.
* The most important task for a nation-state is to survive.
* You never know what someone else will do.
* The common denominator in all punditry is self-assertion aka I see things you don’t see and therefore you need to listen to me.
* Crime waxes or wanes depending upon our willingness to punish criminals.
* Every functioning democracy contains considerable elements of dictatorship, socialism, capitalism, and oligopoly.
* The president of the United States has the same foreign policy powers as King George III.
* There’s no magic key to unlocking how the world works. The closest thing we have to a magic key to reality is the predictive power of IQ for large groups. Goodness, for example, requires empathy, which is a form of abstract thought, and the capacity for abstract thought is measured by IQ. If a thousand 80 IQ people spill a drink on the floor of a public gathering, a thousand 100 IQ people spill the same amount of liquid, and a thousand 120 IQ people spill the same amount, the higher IQ groups will be more diligent about cleaning up the spill.
* Left and Right politics are evolutionary adaptations that have enabled our ancestors to pass on their genes. In some circumstances, a Left-wing approach to reality will be more adaptive. In other circumstances, a right-wing approach will be more adaptive. Book: “[T]he political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order.”
* Our political, cultural, and personal tendencies are strongly influenced by our genes.
* Religion, from a secular perspective, is a subset of culture, which comes from genes and environment. African Christianity, for example, is very different from Scandinavian Christianity.
* As long as tens of millions of people such as the Japanese are more decent than the most committed nations of monotheists, I’m not sure how one can argue that God is necessary for ethics (something I’ve believed almost all of my life). Our behavior is shaped by who we love more than by our beliefs, texts, and practices.
* Most people don’t get their meaning in life from politics. Most people get their meaning from family. If they have room in their life after family, they get their meaning from their work, friends, and interests.