Please don’t take this post too literally. Of course a Yudkowsky styled creative devil would be… Worse. Much worse. I merely meant to highlight how things like faith on the surface really look designed to be maximally awful, though of course they arise from natural processes. It’s a thought experiment meant to make you consider things in a different light, and to make you gain sympathy for those who attribute these things to malicious forces.
Oh. Hehe … personally, judging by my emotional responses, I already instinctively attribute things like missing the bus and bumping into things to malicious forces, so I totally have sympathy for people who intellectually as well as instinctively anthropomorphize everything.
I saw an article once about how the tendency to anthropomorphize varies among individuals, and this is supposed to be correlated to other things. I’ll see if i can dig it up...
Funny how if I were a devil, and I tried to make the world miserable through faith, and I were getting concerned about those dangerous anti-faith ideas, I’d try to create a horrible political regime based on suppressing faith ;)
Personally I agree, but if I were a devil I’d just fall in love with the kind of double-think you’d need to . After all, I wouldn’t actually want to suppress faith, I’d just want to create in people’s minds associations between atheism and nice places like Stalinist Russia. Phrases like “scientific socialism” would just send nice little shivers of pleasure down any nice devil’s spine, wouldn’t they?
Please don’t take this post too literally. Of course a Yudkowsky styled creative devil would be… Worse. Much worse. I merely meant to highlight how things like faith on the surface really look designed to be maximally awful, though of course they arise from natural processes. It’s a thought experiment meant to make you consider things in a different light, and to make you gain sympathy for those who attribute these things to malicious forces.
Oh. Hehe … personally, judging by my emotional responses, I already instinctively attribute things like missing the bus and bumping into things to malicious forces, so I totally have sympathy for people who intellectually as well as instinctively anthropomorphize everything.
I saw an article once about how the tendency to anthropomorphize varies among individuals, and this is supposed to be correlated to other things. I’ll see if i can dig it up...
I would be interested in seeing this, if you find it.
Funny then how deliberate all-out attempts to suppress and eradicate faith are historically associated with places like Stalinist Russia.
Funny how if I were a devil, and I tried to make the world miserable through faith, and I were getting concerned about those dangerous anti-faith ideas, I’d try to create a horrible political regime based on suppressing faith ;)
Stalin’s soviet Russia suppressed religion, not faith. It wasn’t exactly a haven for critical thinking.
Personally I agree, but if I were a devil I’d just fall in love with the kind of double-think you’d need to . After all, I wouldn’t actually want to suppress faith, I’d just want to create in people’s minds associations between atheism and nice places like Stalinist Russia. Phrases like “scientific socialism” would just send nice little shivers of pleasure down any nice devil’s spine, wouldn’t they?