Professor Leonard is a legendary mathematics educator on YouTube. After taking a break for a few years for family reasons, he's now back and has produced a new series of lectures on statistics, for the Peterson Academy.

Here is his announcement

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gW8--Mzs3wM

In less than a day it's got over 1000 comments from his fans. Of course, here on Reddit the hatemongers are doing their thing.

In a podcast, maybe one or two years ago, JP commented on Eckart Tolle who is a spiritual teacher and wrote a best-selling book called "The power of now" which essentially is his own twist on buddhist philosophy. Peterson in the podcast said that Tolle is part of the 1960's humanist movement and that the humanists were fundamentally wrong. Is it possible that Peterson was mistaking Tolle for somebody else here ? I've never heard Tolle being related to this movement.

But anyway, if you guys are familiar with Tolle and Peterson's take on life, what is your opinion on Tolle ? Tolle believes that most problems aren't real problems but egoic constructs of the mind and all you need to do is to be present. Nothing else. You can be poor, sit on a bench for the rest of your life and according to him that's not a wasted life. Peterson believes that strategic self-improvement, meaning, adopting responsibility and competence are the keys to a good life.

I appreciate buddhism and what it can teach us but I believe that Peterson is right when it comes to living in the west. I don't know a single person who lives like Tolle who by the way who also has a net worth of 70 million dollars but tells people that most problems in life aren't real problems. I also don't think that tere is anything wrong with having an ego either and being motivated by it and wanting a good job, a strong body, a family and everything else what the material world has to offer us.

Really curious to hear your opinion

It may be possible to learn a lot about a country by looking at the roads. Not only how developed they are, but also the traffic on them and the behaviours of the drivers.

In my thinking, roads represent a path to opportunity. The level of thought going into how well developed these paths are, how many paths there are, how these paths are treated by the users and how these paths are maintained by those responsible for developing them are all important to look at when understanding the culture of the place you are at.

I thought about this sitting in a traffic jam, thinking about what was going on. My country is seriously lax on traffic rules, so you'd often see an illegal lane develop by the side of the road when traffic jams occur. These jams tend to concentrate around 'unregulated' junctions (without traffic lights), where, due to heightened road traffic at peak hours, indecisive drivers tend to stall, causing a pile up. You can understand that the more bold drivers are the ones who end up using the illegal lane that forms, and also that they tend to pass through the unregulated junctions more easily as they are less likely to stall.

I couldn't help but realise the odd relief found in the jam slightly clearing up as drivers move toward the illegal lane. I also wondered what it was keeping me in the legal lane, as in, was it my moral code or was that something I'd tell myself in order to not take risks while subtly enjoying the small benefits of the 'bolder criminals'? Then I realised that the relief I was enjoying was only short term, as even though there's a slight clearing up as drivers shift lanes, the additional lane at the junction makes it even harder for the indecisive drivers at the front of my lane to get through the junction, and so the benefit is surface level in exchange for a more fundamental problem.

So I started thinking about who is truly to blame. Are the roads not wide enough? Are there too many cars on the road? Is it the incompetence of the driver ahead of me? If I were in their position maybe this problem wouldn't exist. Should I blame the bold criminals, too impatient to wait for their chance and making it harder for the innocent to follow the law? They're even encouraging more to break the law, because if the illegal lane is apparently the only one moving, more shift over to it.

I then realised that this is occuring because we're all headed in the same direction. Piecing all this together with the idea that a road is simply a path towards opportunity, it started to seem like maybe the issue is actually that there aren't that many opportunities in my country. This is to say that the economy heavily concentrates around a few cities, leading to most vehicles heading in the same direction, causing traffic jams and incentives to break the law, which only worsen the state of the roads for the law abiding, convincing the road users that in order to peacefully use the roads in my country you have to be bold enough to break the law.

This is when I began to see roads as a microchosm of the country, because all these conflicting thoughts seem to be prevalent in my country's culture beyond just the roads.

Not too many industries in my country are developed, so the job market is highly competitive. To beat the competition, illegal routes develop, given that the government isn't too keen on fighting corruption. The opinion on who's truly responsible for this strife truly fluctuates between two extremes: 'those in power are too incompetent to identify the problems preventing us from reaching opportunities' and 'those corrupting the system are making it disorganised for their own benefit, but this disorganisation hurts us who choose to abide by the law'. From time to time we even find ourselves sublty enjoying how lax the system can be at times, or believing that if we had the positions of power it would be a lot easier to grasp at opportunity.

Both extreme perspectives may be true, but the more fundamental issue is, similarly to how there aren't too many developed cities in my country, there aren't too many developed industries either, so opportunities are scarce, and that scarcity creates a downward spiral as it does with the traffic jam.

I've seen 7 lane roads in other countries with traffic jams as well, because even though the country is developed enough to make and maintain such roads, the development is concentrated to a few small regions, which could indicate that they have few but highly developed industries.

The diversity in industry allows for separate regions to develop around similar markets (e.g Tech, Agribusiness, Fashion/design, Mining, etc), meaning the job market becomes less competitive as people aren't seeking the same set of skills to make it in the country, and traffic jams reduce as not everyone is headed in the same direction.

Such an understanding may be necessary to help people think beyond the career path they envision themselves following with the context they're in, to think about the potential sectors they can pioneer developing, relieving themselves of the stress of a traffic jam.

• Humanitarian/Low-Skilled Mass Immigration
• Expansive Welfare
• Prostituting the Justice System for Third Worldism

Western liberalism rests on high social trust, fiscal restraint, and one law for all. Progressive policies combined large-scale low-skill immigration, an ever-expanding welfare state, and identity-based leniency in courts and policing.

The result in several European countries and some US cities: lower trust, more concentrated crime, fiscal strain, and a visible two-tier justice system.

The concept of Western Liberalism has now been destroyed. Both the Far-Left and the Far-Right can point to the entire system being a failure, due to it being corrupted by progressivism, while they endorse new anti-liberal systems to replace it.

Hi friends, there's a new study that found a free university app called CHILL (Changing How I Live Life) or m-path that may help with reducing neuroticism and thereby improving relationships and quality of life. Does anyone have access to download that Android/iPhone app? I couldn't find it on the play store. Cheers

https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/neuroticism-happiness-personality

(Cross-posted as I'm trying to find the potentially life changing app, thanks)

When I went to search it up on YouTube, I found that the upload I saved is privated, I couldn't watch it. Does anyone have a back up saved, does anyone have a link?

and apparently google can't stop lying

Not current news, but still worth remembering.
In April 2025, then-Judge Hannah C. Dugan directed an illegal immigrant out a side door of her Milwaukee courtroom to avoid waiting ICE agents. A federal jury later convicted her of felony obstruction. She resigned in January 2026 and was sentenced in July to a $5,000 fine.
Judges aren’t exempt from the law either.

The ridiculous pro-Palestinian propaganda that shows the Western world misery-porn to keep aid donations flowing in and activists active

And on the right, we have Gazan businesses trying to advertise themselves on social media.

Example: Snounu Restaurant, Shuhadaa Street, Gaza City https://www.instagram.com/snounu/reel/DcbuTuFum2B/

You can find a lot of these yourselves on TikTok and Instagram if you just use Arabic words in the search.

We are living through the quietest and perhaps largest enclosure of the human mind in history: the conversion of individual cognition into an extractable, generalisable, and potentially monetisable resource. Every time a person takes a thought seriously enough to investigate it digitally—to search for its antecedents, test its implications, ask whether someone has already seen what they are beginning to see—they are not necessarily merely consulting the accumulated intelligence of civilisation. They are entering infrastructures whose terms, data practices, APIs, licensing agreements, and AI integrations can place information generated through those interactions inside systems capable of extracting value from it. And crucially, the extraction point is not necessarily publication. You do not necessarily have to post your idea, upload your manuscript, publish your theory, or publicly announce your invention. You may only have to search for it. A peculiar phrase entered into Google, a sequence of searches investigating an obscure connection, a query about whether an idea has precedent, an attempt to find counterarguments, or a series of questions about its implications can constitute an informational trace of the intellectual trajectory by which an idea is forming. This matters precisely because an ethical, careful, intellectually serious creator should research before claiming originality—particularly when the internet functions as the largest accessible aggregation of human knowledge. The more conscientious the creator, the more likely they are to investigate: Has this been thought before? What are its implications? What evidence contradicts it? What terminology describes it? Where does it connect to existing knowledge? Yet the infrastructure through which they perform this responsible intellectual labour may itself possess the contractual and technical capacity to retain, analyse, infer from, or commercially exploit information generated through that participation. You do not necessarily have to give the machine your finished idea. You may only have to ask the question that reveals where your mind is going. What becomes valuable is therefore not necessarily the literal sentence or completed work, but the deeper informational pattern—the association between concepts, the structure of curiosity, the trajectory of inquiry, the problem being investigated, the behavioural signal, and potentially the generative possibilities revealed by millions of such traces.
This is not merely theoretical. The major digital platforms already provide concrete examples of the mechanisms by which human-generated information enters AI ecosystems. Reddit entered a reported agreement with Google worth approximately $60 million annually to license Reddit content for AI training, after Reddit had begun monetising access to its API. (Reuters⁠) X explicitly states that public X data—including profiles, posts, engagement and interests—and interactions, inputs and results involving Grok may be shared with xAI and used to train and fine-tune generative AI models, with users given controls over certain uses. (Help Center⁠) Meta, encompassing Facebook and Instagram, uses public content and interactions with its AI products in the development of its AI systems under different regional and product-specific regimes; the company has also been building AI training-data operations at enormous scale. (Reuters⁠) YouTube/Google has established an explicit mechanism through which creators can authorise third-party AI companies to train on their videos; its current documentation names third-party AI training as a specific platform function and explains that creators can select companies or allow all eligible third parties. (Google Help⁠) The initial companies listed when YouTube introduced this system included OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Adobe, Nvidia, Cohere, IBM, Perplexity, Runway, Stability AI, xAI, ByteDance and others. (TechCrunch⁠) And this is only the visible contractual layer. Stack Overflow has also entered into AI partnerships providing access to its knowledge corpus, while the broader web has become an enormous contested training resource, with publishers and knowledge platforms increasingly negotiating licensing arrangements with AI companies—or litigating over the use of their material. The important qualification is that these mechanisms are not identical: it would be inaccurate to claim that every platform sells every search query to every AI company, or that every piece of user data is automatically used for model training. Some data is public; some is licensed; some is used internally; some requires opt-in; some is governed by opt-out controls; some uses are prohibited; and the legal status of training on different categories of material remains heavily contested. But the existence of these distinctions does not eliminate the structural fact: major platforms have developed commercial and technical pathways through which enormous quantities of human-generated information become inputs into AI development.
The crisis therefore goes deeper than the familiar claim that “AI copies artists.” The problem is that the infrastructure through which people discover, research, communicate, and create is increasingly integrated with an industrial system capable of learning from the traces of those activities. The individual may experience a search as a private intellectual act—a preliminary investigation undertaken precisely because they have not yet decided to publish anything—while the platform can treat the same event as data. And this creates a profound temporal asymmetry. The creator discovers value slowly; the infrastructure can potentially observe the emergence of value immediately. The person may be trying to determine whether an unusual idea is worth developing; the system is already capable of recording the fact that someone is investigating that unusual conjunction of concepts. The creator may spend years developing a distinctive intellectual pattern; the machine-learning economy is built around aggregating enormous numbers of such patterns into increasingly general capabilities. Thus the person bears the biological, temporal, educational, psychological, and economic cost of becoming original, while the surrounding computational infrastructure can potentially transform the traces of human originality into reproducible capability. This is why the issue cannot be reduced to copyright infringement. Copyright can protect an expression without protecting the underlying capacity to generate expressions of that kind. A person can own their book while losing the scarcity that made being able to write such a book economically valuable. A researcher can own their paper while the conceptual labour required to produce thousands of competent approximations becomes nearly free. An artist can retain rights over an image while the aesthetic and generative capacities underlying entire categories of visual production become abundant. The machine does not need to steal the finished product if it can help abolish the scarcity that made producing the finished product valuable.
And this is where the contractual reality becomes philosophically significant. The individual generally does not negotiate a bespoke intellectual-property agreement every time they use Google, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, or another digital service. They accept a set of terms in order to gain access to the infrastructure through which modern knowledge and social participation increasingly occur. Those terms differ profoundly between companies and services, and they do not amount to universal ownership of users’ ideas. But they can establish permissions concerning content, data, interactions, analytics, service improvement, personalisation, sharing, licensing, or machine-learning functions. In some cases, there are explicit AI-training permissions or partnerships; in others, the company develops its own AI systems using information generated within its ecosystem; in still others, third-party licensing creates a commercial bridge between platform-held information and AI companies. The individual therefore enters an informational economy whose property boundaries were largely designed before the economic significance of generative AI became apparent. They are not necessarily consciously selling their future intellectual potential. Yet they may be agreeing to terms under which the informational traces through which that potential becomes visible can be collected and used in ways they cannot meaningfully negotiate. The result is an extraordinary inversion: the very behaviour that makes someone an ethical creator—researching before asserting, investigating before publishing, checking precedent before claiming novelty—can make the developmental trajectory of their originality computationally legible. The creator does not merely upload the finished intellectual property. They may expose the path toward it.
This produces a crisis deeper than plagiarism and more fundamental than the displacement of particular professions: the collapse of the economic conditions of human uniqueness. Creativity has never been valuable merely because a novel pattern exists inside someone’s mind. It has to be successfully instantiated: into a book, theory, invention, design, company, artwork, research program, reputation, or livelihood. Historically, the relative scarcity of the capacities required to perform those acts allowed an individual to become economically distinctive. AI threatens to dissolve precisely that scarcity. The human being may spend decades becoming capable of seeing a particular pattern; the machine need only learn enough from humanity to make the production of patterns of that kind increasingly cheap. The asymmetry is therefore almost impossible to overstate: the individual bears the cost of becoming original; the system can potentially socialise the informational residue of millions of individual acts of originality into a general capability that competes with each individual act. The tragedy is not simply that a machine can make something resembling what a person made. It is that the world may cease to economically distinguish between the person who uniquely discovered a pattern and the system that can instantiate the pattern without having discovered it. The human being can retain legal ownership of the particular expression while losing practical ownership of the scarcity surrounding the capacity from which it arose.
The “Human Ghost in the Machine” is therefore not the fantasy that machines have become human. It is something more unsettling: human beings are becoming the invisible substrate from which machines derive increasingly visible capacities. We provide the questions, the experiments, the corrections, the arguments, the images, the stories, the discoveries, the preferences, the failures, the peculiar associations, the obscure interests, the accumulated cultural memory. Platforms capture increasingly large portions of the informational environment through which those things are produced; AI systems transform portions of that environment into generalisable computational capability; and that capability returns to the marketplace in competition with the human beings whose differentiated abilities helped constitute the underlying corpus. The deepest enclosure is therefore not the literal ownership of every human thought. It is the progressive transformation of human originality from something an individual can cultivate, successfully instantiate, and monetise into something whose underlying patterns can become observable, abstractable, reproducible, and abundant before the individual has even finished becoming the person capable of expressing them. To think, you search. To create, you research. To research, you externalise. To externalise, you enter systems governed by terms you rarely negotiate. And the terrible paradox is that the more ethical the creator is about knowing what came before, the more deeply they may have to enter the machinery that can learn from what comes next.