>Milk isn't THAT bad and it's so popular I think I'd leave it alone and focus on other improvements. Sometimes you just have to judge the popularity of something and find an alternative approach.

Milk only looks terrible because it's compared to beverages with little nutritional value. I don't think it's intentional. People just compare "milk" with "milk" and many people are trained to think "calories=bad" so if they do glance at the nutrition profile it's easy to think "ah—milk=less healthy!"

Of course animal milk takes more energy to produce. There's more energy in it!

When you actually want the nutrition milk offers instead of hydration, it suddenly becomes a whole lot greener. We didn't start drinking milk to mellow out our coffee or quench our thirst, we started drinking it because it's nutritious food.

(Let us also not forget that milk is a local product and transportation of heavy things like unitised liquids over long distances have huge carbon costs.)

>But now I am curious, do you think the individuals inside Nazi Germany are "selfless" then?

Fascism is an ideology that does not respect the individual self in favour of the group. It's brutally selfish towards outsiders, and brutally selfless within.

A biologist will say a cell has a goal—but they don't mean it in the same way that a person has a goal nor do they mean it in the way an organization has a goal.

If this is applicable, translating concepts from one culture to another is incredibly difficult because so much of the context is lost. if you're putting an argument forwards, it's valuable to try and define every important term you use. Doubly so if you're translating ideas across cultures. The more central a concept is to your essay, the more of the essay I'd spend defining exactly what you're talking about.

>"They each strike me as a collectives of units each behaving selflessly"They don't behave "selflessly", selfless means "concerned more with the needs and wishes of others". If they are selfless they would not go on to hurt and engulf others, I think you want to say "mindlessly" and may have been muddled because this discussion is being dragged into a strawman of "whether self exists" and "whether everyone is a Hitler just by recognizing the self", when all this article suggest is there is no need to glorify and give importance to it.

I think we might be divided by a common vocabulary. I didn't mean mindlessly, I meant selflessly. I could have said mindlessly but I wanted to drive in the point that all things that are mindless are selfless.

"Concerned more with the needs and wishes of others" is a definition that can only only apply to things that are capable of being concerned. A cancer cell acts selflessly because it is incapable of reflecting upon its actions. It cannot be concerned with its own needs because it's incapable of forming that concern. A tidal wave is selfless—it has no sense of self.

The root definition of selflessly is "without regard to self" and that does not require a conscious choice. In the absence of a conscious mind, there is only selflessness. There is selfishness in a conscious mind—even one that exists in a pantheistic universe because there are selfish needs and selfish qualities to the conscious experience.

We can recontextualize those needs by looking at ourselves solely through the context we are part of a greater whole—but it seems intuitively harmful to deny one aspect of nature in favour of another when we can reconcile them. Why seek domination when harmony is possible?

>"Self" is broadly a coherent unit of things that have a common thought and goal. e.g., how your immune system recognizes self and non-self is by the different goals of pathogens and your body cells. That's why the 20-years-ago you seem like a stranger - because you have different thoughts and goals.

Self generally refers to the concept of self awareness. The self mediation of a thinking being that seems to exists in an external world but can only perceive that external world through an internal representation. Your immune system has no sense of self. It has no concept of concern-it only has triggers. It has no concept of goals-it has actions and limits. You might have the wrong word for what you're trying to get across.

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>I think you have also confused the image of self (that is now owning your goals/thoughts/monologue) as your consciousness and that's why you think intelligence or responsible behavior must be born from that certain idea of self (e.g., believing that I am a moral person), when you can go the pragmatic way and be conscious with the consequence of your actions directly. That you are conscious about actions is more powerful than you are conscious about a certain idea of who you are.

I haven't, I just see them as inseparable due to the nature of how we physically work. I don't even believe we're individual beings. I'm a traditionally pantheistic Stoic and I see us as manifestations of a single universal being. My morality attempts a cosmic perspective. But we also manifest as individuals—and while I believe our actions should be guided towards selflessness—we experience a sense of self. If the universe has created individual awarenesses, each with a sense of self, it's natural and right to revel in our sense of self just as it's natural and right to revel in the reality that we are made for cooperation. Both are natural miracles.

To act correctly we must accept all that is true, and that includes our current nature. I cannot pick up a glass without knowing my body. I cannot guide my future self to act effectively without knowing my current self.

Again, I suspect we might be divided by a common vocabulary. I sort of pick up what you're saying and I don't think it's too different from what I believe-you just get there through a different context. Cheers!

>cancer cells, invasive plants, and deadly plagues are exactly about a unitary "self" expanding and is behaving as if it is the most important thing

I'm not sure how you classify those as "unitary selves".

They each strike me as a collectives of units each behaving selflessly entirely according to their nature. A cancer cell does not decide to divide. It's just random damage. A seed does not decide to land in virgin soil or in it's home environment. A plague might not even be alive—viruses aren't even living things, let alone self indulgent. That's why they're so effective.

It makes sense to me we'd each see the metaphor completely differently, coming from two fundamentally different worldviews.

You may see their collective behaviour as analogous to the actions of an individual—but I say they are better representations of a culture that does not value individuality or allow freedom of choice. Each example mindlessly consumes without conscious self interest. That's not a model of individuality, it's a model of conformity.

An individual has the capacity for destruction through self glorification, but a culture that does not value individuality cannot change. The world is change, and a unchanging culture inevitably glorifies itself in the same irrational destructive way.

In between we find a better balance. Stability and change—liberal and conservative—push and pull. The individual has a self—recognized or not. The individual is part of the collective—recognized or not.

A sense of self need not be fixed to be strong—a healthy sense of self includes the ability to recognize and guide change. It sure helps to know where you are if you want to get somewhere else.

Balance comes when we recognize and glorify both—the individual as a vital part of the collective and the collective as a group of diverse individuals with a shared purpose. The individualist and collectivist views aren't just compatible, they need to be integrated or each only half works.

There's a simple formula for that. All weird units but it works out.

C=(3E/L)^O/D

C=Number of bowls

E=Height of the Empire State Building in smoots.

L=Information content of the Library of Congress in HD floppy discs

O=Orbital radius of Luna in yards

D=Distance to cereal in attoparsecs

>When u have an " emperor" being one of the biggest examples,

The other biggest example? A slave.

I agree. Advice is often ill informed and can be harmful.

However, I'm not sure if he's saying that advice itself it immoral or that nonconsensual advice is immoral. News media is a pretty unreliable source for technical information.

The experience of others is valuable, and I do not see how consensual advice could be objectionable. All you have to do is ask.

I thought it was quite well written. The first half seemed annoyingly shallow—but once it got to the meat that was the point. Philosophy requires context.

No one's confusing anything—the author didn't give sufficient context for their particular language game.

>As I say in the article, Popper restricted the tolerance paradox to very authoritarian movements.

And? There's extremely authoritarian and pervasive elements of our culture—like conservative Christianity. The blog post even opens with a defence of a Christian who want to impose their religion on others.

My faith demands abortion when it is appropriate. How can defending against a substantive attack against the free practice of my faith be intolerance without first applying that measure to initial attack?

A person can express anything they want—it doesn't mean people are going to like them. Belonging to organizations is a privilege reserved for those who play well with others.

I'm not entirely sure of your question. Are you asking if science is capable of accurate divination or are you questioning my seeming certainty that psychology can provide accurate guidance on human behaviour?

If you're asking about predicting the future with accuracy—science is more into predicting the future with probabilities rather than with accuracy. It appears to work pretty well within specific domains that we seem to understand well and poorly for general domains that we don't.

If you're asking how I can justifiably say psychology will be able to provide accurate guidance of human behaviour, it already does to a limited extent. We're only now gaining the tools we need in order to see what the problems actually are and the field faces a lot of stigma from religions and from it's youth and immaturity (including not a small amount of sheer lunacy), but there is solid work being done. It's successfully challenged many preconceptions of what drives human behaviour in fields of addiction and crime and it's shown that authoritarive structures are healthier and more effective than authoritarian ones. It does face structural difficulties that make it extremely difficult to get good science done and extremely easy to just see cultural bias reflected back—but give it time.

You'll probably find it interesting that it seems to be confirming collectivist views more than individualist ones. I think it's far more likely that psychology will simply confirm which aspects of religions and philosophies line up with actual human behaviour rather than invent new ones. A lot of people have been thinking on these things for a lot of time and we've got lots of good answers—science can eventually tell which ones don't work in practice.

In a religious context, what is the difference between moral behaviour and healthy behaviour?

I'm pretty sure all behaviour can be viewed from a scientific context. Science can't tell you which behaviours are moral and which aren't—but it can tell us which are healthy and which aren't.

The Munchausen trilemma does neatly show the metaphysical impossibility of knowing anything for certain though it is somewhat self defeating. If all arguments and knowledge are based on unprovable assumptions—so is the Munchausen trilemma. The assumptions it makes are reasonable... but... that's its point. Reason depends on assumptions.

My question is—once you've reached the inevitable metaphysical conclusion that no truth is perfectly confirmable—where do you go from there? You must make assumptions to live. Presumably you assume you exist or that oxygen is necessary for life.

Does the uniform lack of absolute certainty affect the relative merits of arguments for truth? If not, can you say that having faith in something you directly experience and can confirm through repetition is the same as faith in something you've been told but cannot experience or test? You can't say either are True—but can you justifiably lean in a direction? Can you approach the truth? If you can approach the truth, are there methods that appear more likely to lead you in the correct direction?

IMHO—the idea that we cannot know anything for certain merely pushes me further towards worldviews that are inherently self questioning rather than ideological. Reason demands to be abandoned if it can be shown to be unsound.

Religions do tend to make strong claims about healthy human behaviour.

While psychology is a young science that is still working out fundamental principles—it's still a science and will be able to confirm which of those behaviours actually are healthy.

The principle difference is science is inherently self questioning and a fanatical application of it would be fanatically self questioning, not fanatically confident.

Science doesn't expect to provide the truth directly—it provides a mechanism to move closer to the truth by showing previous assumptions are not true. It's a process of elimination. I can't think of any other widespread worldview that operates on similar grounds.

This is a huge generalization, but overall religion and philosophy looks for truth and then tries to prove it with logical arguments—science looks for truth and then tried to disprove it with practical experiments.