If I had no heroes and no villains in my wild and reckless youth, I would not be able to have pre-cognitions which stopped me from ever reading the bible, the Quran, Freud, and Skinner.
Nowadays, after reading the sequences, after grasping bayes, After having sharper ideas about how we cluster objects into categories in our minds, I consider myself somewhat vaccinated.
Now, as a grown man, I am able to stop having villains and heroes. But when I was younger and had chosen my three heros (Dennett, Russell, and Bostrom) and my few dozen villains, this had extremely valuable consequences.
Is it painful for me to admit that Russell didn’t have a great theory of the Mind? you wouldn’t believe how much.
But I am happy to suffer this mild pain now rather than having had to go through the impossible process of telling the wheat from the chaff when I was 16 bit by bit.
But I am happy to suffer this mild pain now rather than having had to go through the impossible process of telling the wheat from the chaff when I was 16 bit by bit.
But you were required to tell the wheat from the chaff when you were 16: you had to determine who was a hero and who was a villain.
Yes, but not bit by bit. I knew Dennett’s view on evolution was genious, so I thought the bits of his writing about the mind were worth reading.
I attributed value to the arguments based on other bits, I didn’t fight every bit of information, I just took a cluster, called it Hero, and suffered the (good) consequences.
In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a “villain” idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.
To use Professor Quirrel’s words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.
The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you’d suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you’ll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you’d not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.
Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it’s avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that’s a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can’t imagine why we’d prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you’d think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.
How about no villains after a certain age?
If I had no heroes and no villains in my wild and reckless youth, I would not be able to have pre-cognitions which stopped me from ever reading the bible, the Quran, Freud, and Skinner.
Nowadays, after reading the sequences, after grasping bayes, After having sharper ideas about how we cluster objects into categories in our minds, I consider myself somewhat vaccinated.
Now, as a grown man, I am able to stop having villains and heroes. But when I was younger and had chosen my three heros (Dennett, Russell, and Bostrom) and my few dozen villains, this had extremely valuable consequences.
Is it painful for me to admit that Russell didn’t have a great theory of the Mind? you wouldn’t believe how much.
But I am happy to suffer this mild pain now rather than having had to go through the impossible process of telling the wheat from the chaff when I was 16 bit by bit.
But you were required to tell the wheat from the chaff when you were 16: you had to determine who was a hero and who was a villain.
Yes, but not bit by bit. I knew Dennett’s view on evolution was genious, so I thought the bits of his writing about the mind were worth reading.
I attributed value to the arguments based on other bits, I didn’t fight every bit of information, I just took a cluster, called it Hero, and suffered the (good) consequences.
¨bit by bit¨ above, Enphasis added.
I don’t know. Since when is bias good?
In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a “villain” idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.
To use Professor Quirrel’s words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.
The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you’d suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you’ll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you’d not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.
Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it’s avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that’s a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can’t imagine why we’d prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you’d think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.