I, like many people, have a father. After a long time of not really caring about the whole thing he's expressed an interest in philosophy this Christmas season. Now, as we know a lot of philosophy is rather confused and I don't see any big reasons for him to start thinking truth is irrelevant or other silly things. I don't think the man is considering reading anything particularly long or in-depth.

So, I'm asking for book recommendations for short-ish introductions to philosophy that don't get it all wrong. Solid, fundamental knowledge about how we know what we know, why we can know it and so on. The whole less wrong thing really. I think i'll also send him a copy of epistomology 101 for beginners.

All ideas are welcome even if it's not 100% the right book.

The point is, I've been there and I want to help you make the right decision

As far as I see it, you basically were faced with a situation without having any tools to deal with it. That makes your situation quite different.

When sitting in front of the hospital bed of my father speaking confused stuff because of morphium, my instinctual response was to do a nonverbal trance induction to have him in a silent state in half a minute.

Not because I read some how-to guide of how to deal with the situation but because NLP tools like that are instinctual behavior for me.

I'm very far from normal and so a lot of lessons that might be drawn from your experience for people that might be similar as you are, aren't applicable to me.

There wasn't exactly a how-to guide I could read on the subject.

While reading a how-to guide doesn't give you any skills, there's is psychological literature on how to help people with most problems.

She said she'd try hard to change, I said I'd help her, I tried to help her and was extremely supportive for a long time.

Trying hard to change is not useful for changing. It keeps someone in place. Someone who has emotional issues because they obsess too much doesn't get a benefit from trying harder. Accepting such a frame is not the kind of mistake I would make.

That I lost 3 years of time I could have spent making progress in a state with no energy.

If a person breaks down crying I'm not disassociating and going into a low energy state. It rather draw me into a situation and makes me more present. But I'm not sure whether it brings me into a position where I consider the other person an agent rather than a rubics cube having to be solved.

I'm at the moment quite unsure how to handle a girl who seems to have bipolar depression and wants to have a relationship with me.

Four years ago I think she was in a quite stable mental state (I'm more percetive today than I was back then(. At the time she turned me down. I haven't seen her for a while and now she seems to be pretty broken as a result of mobbing in an enviroment that she now left.

One the one hand there the desire in me to try to fix her. Having a physical relationship with her also has it's appeal. On the other hand I can't see myself being open personally with her as long as she is in that messed up mental state.

On 6 of the past 7 days I've succeeded in doing 50 minutes of exercise and 2 hours of job searching a day. I'm now talking with 3 different recruitment agencies and it seems likely that I'll be having interviews shortly! I've been wanting to get into running for years so i'm spending half the exercise periods doing a couch to 5k program and the other half on bodyweight workouts. This may not seem like much but as a person who have been struggling to get anything done at all for the past 5 months it really is a big deal. Thanks to /u/peter_hurford for his guides on productivity which were brief enough that I couldn't procrastinate by reading them.

Thanks for the write up. I used these tips, and they've been effective for 5 days in a row so far which is great because I'm finally getting callbacks about job interviews now after putting off applying for so long and all my muscles hurt from working out. It was short enough that I couldn't do what I normally do and put off taking action till I'd finished reading the book/presentation/whatever. Ended up skipping step 2 due to having plenty of free time in the schedule, which probably doesn't apply to most employed people but hey, feedback.

I found it useful to set and write down a series of specific rules for myself to follow beforehand to prevent excessive weasling out of things. It seems that although I'm not above some motivated rules-lawyering I can stop myself from breaking the rules if I make them sufficiently bulletproof beforehand. For example, one rule was that if I was going to skip a time slot to do something else, I had to make time to get the work done before-hand in order to stop myself from infinitely putting it off and to prove that it was actually a thing important enough to me to re-schedule around and not just an attempt to get out of it.

All in all, very useful. I'll be reading your other posts on the subject.

I had the happiness of stupidity once. While younger I edged into the valley and recoiled. I believe I even made a conscious choice and enforced it through various means. It was a good time over about two years, and it was unsustainable. I made the mistake of continuing to gain knowledge about human nature, I kept my curiosity and my fascination with how things worked and thus was my ignorance doomed. I dipped deep into the valley and eventually found this place, where I (hopefully) hit critical mass of bootstrap.

If I had stayed in that bubble of wilful ignorance I would probably be happier, but long term I think my current path will overtake it. It's better this way, I couldn't have stayed in that state without maiming my own curiosity and growth.

I find it worrying that you can't find any examples of good things in larger government

Of course I can. Recall me talking about the multidimensionality of government power and how most people (including me) would prefer more in one dimension but less in another. On the whole I would prefer a weaker government, but not necessarily in every single aspect.

However I would stress once again the cost-benefit balance. More is only better is you're below the optimal point, go above it and more will be worse.

Consider it from the view of the average wellbeing of the entire populace.

Sure. A larger government takes more of their money, limits them in areas where they would prefer to be not limited, and has scarier and more probable failure modes.

a small one simply outsources its failure modes to companies and extremely rich individuals.

No, I don't think so, not the really scary failure modes. Things like Pol Pot's Kampuchea cannot be outsourced.

People are eternal and essentially unchanging, the average level of humanity rises but slowly.

The second half of that sentence contradicts the first half.

The structure of the system they flow through is too important to be left to market forces and random chance.

I don't know of anyone who proposes random chance as a guiding political principle. As to the market forces, well, they provide the best economy human societies have ever seen. A lot of people thought they could do better -- they all turned out to be wrong.

so long as on average the lot of humanity is improved.

You're still missing a minor part -- showing that a large government does indeed do that better compared to a smaller one. By the way, are you saying that the current government size and power (say, typical for EU countries) are optimal? too small?

Suicide bombers do not achieve their goals,

Really, last time I checked there is now a Caliphate in what is still nominal Iraq and Syria.