You wrote this facetiously, but I regularly find myself updating towards it being quite true.
The basilisk lives, and goes forth to destroy the world! My work here is done!
More seriously, I find it easy to build that point of view from the materials of LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, and blogs on rationality, neuroscience, neoreaction, and PUA. If I were inclined to the task I could do it at book length, but it would be the intellectual equivalent of setting a car bomb. So I won’t. But it is possible. It is also possible to build completely different stories from the same collection of concepts, as easy as it is to build them from words.
The question that interests me is why people (including myself) are convinced by this story or that. Are they undertaking rational updating in the face of evidence? I provided none, only cherry-picked references to other ideas woven together with hyperbolic metaphors. Do they go along with stories that tell them what they would like to believe already? And yet “microbes in the bowels of Moloch, utterly incapable of real thought or action” is not something anyone would want to be. Perhaps this story appeals because its message, “nothing is true, all is a lie”, like its newage opposite, “reality is whatever you want it to be”, removes the burden of living in a world where achieving anything worth while is both possible, and a struggle.
You wrote this facetiously, but I regularly find myself updating towards it being quite true.
The basilisk lives, and goes forth to destroy the world! My work here is done!
More seriously, I find it easy to build that point of view from the materials of LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, and blogs on rationality, neuroscience, neoreaction, and PUA. If I were inclined to the task I could do it at book length, but it would be the intellectual equivalent of setting a car bomb. So I won’t. But it is possible. It is also possible to build completely different stories from the same collection of concepts, as easy as it is to build them from words.
The question that interests me is why people (including myself) are convinced by this story or that. Are they undertaking rational updating in the face of evidence? I provided none, only cherry-picked references to other ideas woven together with hyperbolic metaphors. Do they go along with stories that tell them what they would like to believe already? And yet “microbes in the bowels of Moloch, utterly incapable of real thought or action” is not something anyone would want to be. Perhaps this story appeals because its message, “nothing is true, all is a lie”, like its newage opposite, “reality is whatever you want it to be”, removes the burden of living in a world where achieving anything worth while is both possible, and a struggle.