It doesn’t, but I tend to go with the assumption that if one person voices an objection, there are 100 more with the same objection that don’t voice it I put this on my to do list, might take a few weeks to come back to it, but I will come back to it
Yep, I was going to write something similar to what Duncan did. Some topics seem so strongly connected with irrationality, that if you mention them, it will almost inevitably attract people already interested in that topic including the irrational parts, and those people will be coordinated about the irrational parts. While you will be pushing in the direction of rationality, they will be actively pushing in different directions, how sure you are to win all these battles? I assume that creating a community that is 50% rational and 50% mystical would not make you happy. Maybe not even 80% rational and 20% mystical.
One of my pet peeves about the current rationalist community is what seems to me as quite uncritical approval of Buddhism. Especially when contrasted to our utter dismissal of Christianity, which only makes a contrarian exception for Chesterton. (I imagine that Chesterton himself might ask us whether we are literally atheists, or merely anti-Christians.) I am not saying that people here are buying Buddhism hook, line, and sinker; but they are strongly privileging a lot of stuff that comes from it. Like, you can introduce a concept from Buddhism, and people will write articles about how that actually matches our latest congnitive science or some kind of therapy. Do the same with a concept from Christianity, and you will get some strongly worded reprimand about how dangerous it is to directly import concepts from a poisonous memeplex, unless you carefully rederive it from the first principles, in which case it is unlikely to be 100% the same, and it is better to use a different word to express it.
I will end my rant here, just saying that your plans sounds to me like the same thing might happen with Buddhism and Hinduism and New Age and whatever at the same time, so I would predict that you will lose some of the battles. And ironically, you may lose some potential rationalists, as they will observe you losing these battles (or at least not winning them conclusively) and decide that they would prefer some place with stronger norms against mysticism.
(Then again, things are never easy, there is also the opposite error of Hollywood rationality, etc.)
I mean, that’s unusually generous of you. I don’t think [my objection] obligates you to do [that much work]. But if you’re down, I’m down.
It doesn’t, but I tend to go with the assumption that if one person voices an objection, there are 100 more with the same objection that don’t voice it
I put this on my to do list, might take a few weeks to come back to it, but I will come back to it
Yep, I was going to write something similar to what Duncan did. Some topics seem so strongly connected with irrationality, that if you mention them, it will almost inevitably attract people already interested in that topic including the irrational parts, and those people will be coordinated about the irrational parts. While you will be pushing in the direction of rationality, they will be actively pushing in different directions, how sure you are to win all these battles? I assume that creating a community that is 50% rational and 50% mystical would not make you happy. Maybe not even 80% rational and 20% mystical.
One of my pet peeves about the current rationalist community is what seems to me as quite uncritical approval of Buddhism. Especially when contrasted to our utter dismissal of Christianity, which only makes a contrarian exception for Chesterton. (I imagine that Chesterton himself might ask us whether we are literally atheists, or merely anti-Christians.) I am not saying that people here are buying Buddhism hook, line, and sinker; but they are strongly privileging a lot of stuff that comes from it. Like, you can introduce a concept from Buddhism, and people will write articles about how that actually matches our latest congnitive science or some kind of therapy. Do the same with a concept from Christianity, and you will get some strongly worded reprimand about how dangerous it is to directly import concepts from a poisonous memeplex, unless you carefully rederive it from the first principles, in which case it is unlikely to be 100% the same, and it is better to use a different word to express it.
I will end my rant here, just saying that your plans sounds to me like the same thing might happen with Buddhism and Hinduism and New Age and whatever at the same time, so I would predict that you will lose some of the battles. And ironically, you may lose some potential rationalists, as they will observe you losing these battles (or at least not winning them conclusively) and decide that they would prefer some place with stronger norms against mysticism.
(Then again, things are never easy, there is also the opposite error of Hollywood rationality, etc.)