I originally wanted to say that a “canon of scripture” is probably dogmatic and unnecessary, but that was mostly just anti-authoritarian attitudes speaking. After reconsidering, especially comparing to things such as the Western Canon (and the literary criticism, scholastic advancement, and cultural changes its contributed to), I would say, yes, a canon seems helpful. However, I will say that, especially with a community like LW and the rational community as a whole, there should be an important element of change to avoid dogma. No gurus, in other words.
The canon could be a set of books written outside of the community. For example “Thinking, Fast and Slow” would be one of the books in LW canon.
If we had enough books to cover most of the Sequences, we could tell people to read those books instead of reading the Sequences. It would be more pages, but on the other hand it would sound more acceptable to many people.
Maybe even better would be the set of books, plus a small “micro Sequence” explaining how that all fits together for us. To overcome compartmentalization and “guessing the teacher’s password”; to explain in near mode that we are supposed to use that stuff, not only debate it. Also a few topics that we didn’t find in any book, or for which reading the whole book would be an overkill.
Yes. I too think that the canon should contain at least one method to alter it in some ways. Scientific methods wise or something like a plausible idea at least.
I originally wanted to say that a “canon of scripture” is probably dogmatic and unnecessary, but that was mostly just anti-authoritarian attitudes speaking. After reconsidering, especially comparing to things such as the Western Canon (and the literary criticism, scholastic advancement, and cultural changes its contributed to), I would say, yes, a canon seems helpful. However, I will say that, especially with a community like LW and the rational community as a whole, there should be an important element of change to avoid dogma. No gurus, in other words.
The canon could be a set of books written outside of the community. For example “Thinking, Fast and Slow” would be one of the books in LW canon.
If we had enough books to cover most of the Sequences, we could tell people to read those books instead of reading the Sequences. It would be more pages, but on the other hand it would sound more acceptable to many people.
Maybe even better would be the set of books, plus a small “micro Sequence” explaining how that all fits together for us. To overcome compartmentalization and “guessing the teacher’s password”; to explain in near mode that we are supposed to use that stuff, not only debate it. Also a few topics that we didn’t find in any book, or for which reading the whole book would be an overkill.
Yes. I too think that the canon should contain at least one method to alter it in some ways. Scientific methods wise or something like a plausible idea at least.