Wright’s pre-conversion writing gave me the impression of someone who really wants to base their life on unyielding and absolute moral axioms, so he’s not working that well for me as an ”it could happen to anyone” case. More as an example that the sort of people who like engineering and for some reason become dogmatic hardcore libertarians, communists or religious literalists can dramatically change allegiance after suitable neurological insult.
Mm, I’m not sure that group doesn’t embrace LWers as well. We may claim to be open-minded and uncertain, but are we? We have plenty of libertarians here, after all.
(I think that would be testable, though; IIRC, there are a number of psychological questionnaires measuring dogmatism or need for certainty/closure (from the old research into authoritarianism). Administer along with some sort of religious questionnaire before psychedelic use, see whether the high scorers on one become higher on religion afterwards as compared to the low scorers, and especially the high scorers who report a specifically religious psychedelic experience. Too bad the drugs are so controlled and there will probably never be any real studies on this...)
I’ve been wondering whether an unusual number of smart people these days are ones that were libertarians in their early twenties and have become less so later on. Possibly similarly as in an earlier generation an unusual number of smart people were communists in their early twenties and became less so later on.
There’s definitely a lot of background assumptions sympathetic to libertarianism on LW, but I haven’t seen much of the sort of absolutist first-principles stances I associate with the group of people I’m thinking of in grandparent comment. It’s the difference between thinking that free markets are a good starting metaphor for thinking about arranging human affairs and insisting that a strict adherence to a few easily listed axioms like absolute property rights can be pretty much the only thing you need to successfully run a human civilization.
Wright’s pre-conversion writing gave me the impression of someone who really wants to base their life on unyielding and absolute moral axioms, so he’s not working that well for me as an ”it could happen to anyone” case. More as an example that the sort of people who like engineering and for some reason become dogmatic hardcore libertarians, communists or religious literalists can dramatically change allegiance after suitable neurological insult.
Mm, I’m not sure that group doesn’t embrace LWers as well. We may claim to be open-minded and uncertain, but are we? We have plenty of libertarians here, after all.
(I think that would be testable, though; IIRC, there are a number of psychological questionnaires measuring dogmatism or need for certainty/closure (from the old research into authoritarianism). Administer along with some sort of religious questionnaire before psychedelic use, see whether the high scorers on one become higher on religion afterwards as compared to the low scorers, and especially the high scorers who report a specifically religious psychedelic experience. Too bad the drugs are so controlled and there will probably never be any real studies on this...)
I’ve been wondering whether an unusual number of smart people these days are ones that were libertarians in their early twenties and have become less so later on. Possibly similarly as in an earlier generation an unusual number of smart people were communists in their early twenties and became less so later on.
There’s definitely a lot of background assumptions sympathetic to libertarianism on LW, but I haven’t seen much of the sort of absolutist first-principles stances I associate with the group of people I’m thinking of in grandparent comment. It’s the difference between thinking that free markets are a good starting metaphor for thinking about arranging human affairs and insisting that a strict adherence to a few easily listed axioms like absolute property rights can be pretty much the only thing you need to successfully run a human civilization.