The Ray Peat Of Physics Or Economics

[naugyanks]

Hey everyone,
Merry 2016. So it took me years of reading (and largely believing) dog ***t nutrition articles before finding the brilliance of Ray Peat and others like Roddy and Kim who have a concept of nutrition/medicine/health that actually makes sense. I've recently developed an interest in physics and economics and I was wondering if anyone here with similar interests has found any writers they like for either of these fields. I suspect it might take me years of reading to find very quality people in these fields like it took to find Peat and so I'm trying to save myself some time, if I can, by asking the smart folks here. I know Ray will occasionally write/speak about physics and economics so links to that stuff would also be cool. Thanks.

 

[jaguar43]

post 118699 Hey everyone,
Merry 2016. So it took me years of reading (and largely believing) dog s*** nutrition articles before finding the brilliance of Ray Peat and others like Roddy and Kim who have a concept of nutrition/medicine/health that actually makes sense. I've recently developed an interest in physics and economics and I was wondering if anyone here with similar interests has found any writers they like for either of these fields. I suspect it might take me years of reading to find very quality people in these fields like it took to find Peat and so I'm trying to save myself some time, if I can, by asking the smart folks here. I know Ray will occasionally write/speak about physics and economics so links to that stuff would also be cool. Thanks.

In generative energy Ray Peat cited economist john kenneth galbraith and Stanislav Strumilin. In mind and tissue, he refers to Marxism throughout the book. He doesn't really go into the economics of marxism, though it's clear that he doesn't stray away from it's fundamentals.

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0001/0 ... 7399eo.pdf

As for physics, have you read Pathological Science & General Electric:Threatening the paradigm. He goes into much detail about the different people he thinks that are tied together with his train of thought.

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/pa ... tric.shtml

 

[naugyanks]

Awesome. No I haven't checked that one out yet, thanks Jag!

 

[StrongMom]

post 118699 Hey everyone,
Merry 2016. So it took me years of reading (and largely believing) dog s*** nutrition articles before finding the brilliance of Ray Peat and others like Roddy and Kim who have a concept of nutrition/medicine/health that actually makes sense. I've recently developed an interest in physics and economics and I was wondering if anyone here with similar interests has found any writers they like for either of these fields. I suspect it might take me years of reading to find very quality people in these fields like it took to find Peat and so I'm trying to save myself some time, if I can, by asking the smart folks here. I know Ray will occasionally write/speak about physics and economics so links to that stuff would also be cool. Thanks.

What area of economics are you interested in? If you are looking for something against the dogma, questioning the mainstream thinking, looking at causality rather than correlation, I suggest you Gary Becker. He is brilliant I think.

Let me know if you have any particular subject in mind.

 

[bobbybobbob]

Modern economics is mostly a priesthood of applied statisticians with a track record of ridiculous failure. The idea of the economist as a social philosopher seems to have died out a half century ago. The "Ray Peat" of economics would be deeply iconoclastic. That's what I guess you're looking for, rather than the Paul Krugman de jour, with fancy mathematical descriptions of macroeconomic theories.

I would suggest Alain de Benoist as such a thinker.

Also, David Graber wrote a very nice and accessible book a few years ago called "Debt" on monetary policy (it essentially cribbed off better thinkers).

Ludwig Von Mises was a great economist. You have to understand his position as an apologist for the Hapsburg Empire. But once you grasp his biases he has deeply important things to say. Namely, that empirical driven approaches to economic policy are doomed to failure. He very accurately described how socialist and communist policies are doomed to failure, and predicted the inevitable path to failure of the Soviet Union.

To the extent Ray has discussed economic ideas he's apparently an old school European communist. He clearly had Soviet sympathies back in the day. Old school communist and socialist ideas are basically the dominant paradigm now, underlying most of the major western and asian economic policies and thinking. My guess is he would not like Mises or Alain de Benoist much.

 

[peterh]

Given the silly arguments about debt and deficits that dominate today's political scene, you should strongly consider looking into Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Check out www.moslereconomics.com and head over to the resources section and begin reading (in particular you should begin with 'The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy' and 'Soft Currency Economics' by Warren Mosler which are the equivalent of Pollack's books in that they gently guide the reader out of the 'cave of shadows'). As far as I know, the economist James Galbraith (son of aforementioned renowned economist John K Galbraith) is a strong supporter of MMT.

 

[tobieagle]

As for physics, you can look into David Bohm who formulated an alternative approach to quantum mechanics but has been mostly ignored.
He has a very holistic attitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-jI0zzYgIE


As for economics, it probably wouldn't hurt to read some classics like Karl Marx "Capital".
But beware if you live in the US, decades of anticommunist propaganda have left its marks.

 

[Ideonaut]

post 118703 Ray Peat cited economist john kenneth galbraith

I recommend JK Galbraith's son, James Galbraith, and his books The Predator State and The End of Normal, as well as Michael Hudson's The Bubble and Beyond, which has excellent economic history. They're both statist/socialist in outlook. Ellen Brown's Web of Debt is a real eye-opener and her The Public Bank Solution is highly educational in terms of understanding economic history and the potential of sovereign national economies to accelerate economic growth and well-being. I researched and edited that book. The MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) people, like Warren Mosler, are fun to read and offer, like Peat, a new paradigm that rings true: money is just credit, rightfully a creation of the people thru their governments and there is no reason for a scarcity of it. Our system of money being created by private banks and society being run for the sake of the private parasitic predatory elements is much like the PUFA-pushing conventional nutrition and medical system.

 

[Such_Saturation]

The point of Ray Peat is that he is about all that and economics and physics... he wouldn't be talking about health in that manner if he wasn't talking about everything else as well...

 

[jaguar43]

post 118764

post 118703 Ray Peat cited economist john kenneth galbraith

I recommend JK Galbraith's son, James Galbraith, and his books The Predator State and The End of Normal, as well as Michael Hudson's The Bubble and Beyond, which has excellent economic history. They're both statist/socialist in outlook. Ellen Brown's Web of Debt is a real eye-opener and her The Public Bank Solution is highly educational in terms of understanding economic history and the potential of sovereign national economies to accelerate economic growth and well-being. I researched and edited that book. The MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) people, like Warren Mosler, are fun to read and offer, like Peat, a new paradigm that rings true: money is just credit, rightfully a creation of the people thru their governments and there is no reason for a scarcity of it. Our system of money being created by private banks and society being run for the sake of the private parasitic predatory elements is much like the PUFA-pushing conventional nutrition and medical system.

Saw a few interviews with Michael Hudson. He is pretty good in my opinion.

 

[kiran]

Its not about years of reading. You may not believe the truth even if you do stumble upon it. Its about testing theories against reality to satisfy yourself. In this field of nutrition, "incurable" ailments give people a strong motivation to find the truth, and we have a readily available laboratory (your body) for experiments. Most of us have neither a country nor particle collider to play with.

 

[burtlancast]

In my opinion, the best book for understanding the monetary system in Edward Griffin's book, The creature from Jekyll Island.

It is in direct contradiction with Bill Still's "The Money Masters" doc and book.

 

[Hugh Johnson]

I've seen few mentions about economics from him. In this interview there is a link to NIcole Foss, a big name in the collapse community. Her work closely agrees with Gail Tverberg, a genius IMO, and Steve Keen, MMT economist.

http://raypeatinsight.com/2013/06/06/ra ... revisited/

7. What impact would you like to see your research make on society? Reaching the largest amount of people? or a certain type of person? Or are you completely detached from the outcome?

I’d like to see it lead to the disestablishment of medicine. The same general outcomes Ivan Illich worked for. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDr71LHO0Jo)

Peat has also mentioned Michael Polanyi, who considered himself Keynesian. Peat has talked of his concept of emergent order, although in the context of physiology.

I always got the idea that Peat supports some sort of democratic, pro-market socialism. He criticises capitalism and authoritarianism so it would make sense for him to oppose authoritarian structures running the economy or our lives.

Part of this post may be projection, so take it with a grain of salt. Only thing I'm sure of is that he opposes authoritarianism.

 

[aguilaroja]

...Ray will occasionally write/speak about physics and economics so links to that stuff would also be cool....

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/ti ... ogen.shtml
"In astronomy, Halton Arp's discovery of "anomalous" galactic red-shifts is practically unknown, because the journal editors say the observations are 'just anomalies,' or that the theories which could explain them are unconventional; but the actual problem is that they are strong evidence against The Big Bang, Hubble's Law, and the Expanding Universe."

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/wi ... lake.shtml
"Since the difference between a Rationalistic view of the world and a creative view is largely a question of the reality of time, it’s worth mentioning the work of an astronomer whose cosmological view was based on the reality of time:“Possibility of experimental study of properties of time,” N. A. Kozyrev, Russian, September 1967, USIA document in English, 49 pages, 1971. J. Narlikar more recently did similar work, including his collaboration with H. Arp, described in Arp’s Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science, Apeiron, Montreal, 1998."

 

[allblues]

post 118717 Ludwig Von Mises was a great economist.

Also interesting is von Mises main pupil Murray Rothbard, a huge influence on the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist crowd.

The Rothbardian take on economics has some Peaty qualities, i think. It draws a sharp line between forced / voluntary interaction,
it is based on reasoning and deduction rather than statistics/mathematical models, and sees coercion as always working as a inhibitiory force on human potential. The role of violence in society should in this view be limited to defense of person and property.

How this would work in the real world with all its complexities and contingencies i'm not sure. But some of their stuff i think is
correct, their outlining of the emergence of money as a natural market process rather than by governmental decree, for example.

A few quotes;

“To be moral, an act must be free.”
“Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”
“For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.”
"Money … is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society."

There's a sort of divide between anarcho-capitalists and the "socialist" individual anarchists, which i'm not that well versed on.
Kropotkin which i've seen Ray mention here and his brand of anarchism i'm not familiar with.
If there's any of the socialist anarchist bunch out there, give us a holler :)

 

[Ideonaut]

post 118828 “Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”

One would have to ask, but I suspect Ray would consider "“Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State" pure poppycock. Ray's work is shot through with contempt for "the free market." I rather think he would concur with James Galbraith that left to itself (without "coercion"--laws that protect social interests) "the market" is criminogenic.

 

[ejalrp]

post 118731 Given the silly arguments about debt and deficits that dominate today's political scene, you should strongly consider looking into Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Check out http://www.moslereconomics.com and head over to the resources section and begin reading (in particular you should begin with 'The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy' and 'Soft Currency Economics' by Warren Mosler which are the equivalent of Pollack's books in that they gently guide the reader out of the 'cave of shadows'). As far as I know, the economist James Galbraith (son of aforementioned renowned economist John K Galbraith) is a strong supporter of MMT.

Mosler and Hyman Minsky

 

[Hugh Johnson]

post 118828

post 118717 Ludwig Von Mises was a great economist.

Also interesting is von Mises main pupil Murray Rothbard, a huge influence on the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist crowd.

The Rothbardian take on economics has some Peaty qualities, i think. It draws a sharp line between forced / voluntary interaction,
it is based on reasoning and deduction rather than statistics/mathematical models, and sees coercion as always working as a inhibitiory force on human potential. The role of violence in society should in this view be limited to defense of person and property.

How this would work in the real world with all its complexities and contingencies i'm not sure. But some of their stuff i think is
correct, their outlining of the emergence of money as a natural market process rather than by governmental decree, for example.

A few quotes;

“To be moral, an act must be free.”
“Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”
“For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.”
"Money … is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society."

There's a sort of divide between anarcho-capitalists and the "socialist" individual anarchists, which i'm not that well versed on.
Kropotkin which i've seen Ray mention here and his brand of anarchism i'm not familiar with.
If there's any of the socialist anarchist bunch out there, give us a holler :)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/ ... -bias.html

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/ ... ments.html

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/ ... ision.html

ANDREW: Will security GLOs be different from governments because they will be small family firms?

CNC: No. One reason that insurance companies will be well-suited for the role of security GLOs is that they are “big” and in command of the resources… necessary to accomplish the task of dealing with the dangers… of the real world. Indeed, insurers operate on a national or even international scale, and they own substantial property holdings dispersed over wide territories… [281]

ANDREW: Will security GLOs be different from governments because they don’t use physical force against criminals?

CNC: You gotta be kidding, right? … in cooperation with one another, insurers [will] want to expel known criminals not just from their immediate neighborhoods, but from civilization altogether, into the wilderness or open frontier of the Amazon jungle, the Sahara, or the polar regions. [262]

There is a reason Peat does not like capitalism.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/ ... ategy.html

ANDREW: Did you say earlier that trying to convince the public would be difficult?

CNC: With the secession strategy, you don’t need a majority. That’s good, because [t]he mass of people … always and everywhere consists of “brutes,” “dullards,” and “fools,” easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission [92]. Still, there can be no revolution without some form of mass participation. … the elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in communicating its ideas to the public, openly if possible and secretly if necessary… [93].

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/ ... ation.html

ANDREW: What do you mean by “left-libertarians”?

CNC: Murray Rothbard likes to call them “modal-libertarians” (MLs). As Rothbard says, “the ML is an adolescent rebel against everyone around him,” who only hates government because it is something else to disrespect. MLs think that profanity, drug use… homosexuality… pedophilia… or any other conceivable perversity or abnormality… are perfectly normal and legitimate activities and lifestyles [206]. What these countercultural libertarians fail to realize… is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic rise in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the… life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. [208]

Left-libertarians and multi- or countercultural lifestyle experimentalists, even if they were not engaged in any crime, would once again have to pay a price for their behavior. If they continued with their behavior or lifestyle [in public], they would be barred from civilized society and live physically separate from it, in ghettos or on the fringes of society, and many positions or professions would be unattainable to them. [212]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/ ... ities.html

ANDREW: Is it that you want everyone to be able to express their views about politics, or is it particularly important for some people to do so?

CNC: The latter, of course. magine that… the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds. [The resulting government’s] policies would most definitely reflect the “legitimate concerns” of children to have “adequate” and “equal” access to “free” french fries, lemonade, and videos. [95] Similarly, if we had democratic decision-making on a global scale, the government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth… With these “thought experiments” in mind, there can be no doubt about [95] the negative consequences of “one-person, one-vote.”

 

[Nick]

post 118828
There's a sort of divide between anarcho-capitalists and the "socialist" individual anarchists, which i'm not that well versed on.
Kropotkin which i've seen Ray mention here and his brand of anarchism i'm not familiar with.
If there's any of the socialist anarchist bunch out there, give us a holler :)

Usually anyone coming from the socialist anarchist "libertarian socialist" tradition would distance themselves from "anarcho-capitalist" ideas as being completely unrelated to anarchism, which rejects the ownership of productive property as being propped up by coercion and violence.
In all his writing, Peat's attitude seems very much in line with socialist-anarchist thinking and he mentions in an interview that Kropotkin's book "Mutual Aid" was one of the first he read because his parents had it lying around since they were familiar with Kropotkin's anarchist political ideas. Within anarchist thought, Peat's ideas definitely highlight the need for personal autonomy and freedom to explore unconventional ideas to be protected and not allowed to be subjugated in the name of collectivism.

For an example of libertarian socialist-anarchist economics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Also, the David Graeber book "Debt: The Fist 5000 Years" mentioned in one of the above posts is very good.

 

[jaguar43]

post 118764 I recommend JK Galbraith's son, James Galbraith, and his books The Predator State and The End of Normal, as well as Michael Hudson's The Bubble and Beyond, which has excellent economic history. They're both statist/socialist in outlook. Ellen Brown's Web of Debt is a real eye-opener and her The Public Bank Solution is highly educational in terms of understanding economic history and the potential of sovereign national economies to accelerate economic growth and well-being. I researched and edited that book. The MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) people, like Warren Mosler, are fun to read and offer, like Peat, a new paradigm that rings true: money is just credit, rightfully a creation of the people thru their governments and there is no reason for a scarcity of it. Our system of money being created by private banks and society being run for the sake of the private parasitic predatory elements is much like the PUFA-pushing conventional nutrition and medical system.

You edited The Public Bank Solution. Thats impressive. I have been reading into MMT theory. There is a video with Warren Mosler versus ROBERT MURPHY and with every argument, he states that Mosler is technically right. As if their is any other way to be right. Anyway I will post the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTLCDBONok