michaelkeenan comments on Some rationalistic aphorisms

[michaelkeenan]

If you like rationalist aphorisms, you might like Aaron Haspel’s Twitter feed. Examples:

Once you start to view human interaction as a contest to signal mating fitness, it becomes hard to view it as anything else.

Nothing is art, but anything can be treated as art.

Even the most disinterested truth-seeker is angling for a world of greater rewards for disinterested truth-seekers.

Polytheism is pre-scientific: monotheism is anti-scientific.

Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.

Whatever you do for someone’s own good is probably mischief.

Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.

Tact consists mostly in disguising the fact that some people are better than others.

Adaptive is not optimal.

You are what you fear to appear to be.

The chief problems in moral philosophy are akrasia and imperfect information. It has mostly pretended that they do not exist.

Whatever you have done, you are the sort of person who would do that.

Misspellers learn from speech, mispronouncers from books.

We all have the strength to refuse what we are not offered.

The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.

The incorruptible politician merely prefers power to money.

Katja Grace pointed out something interesting about aphorisms:

Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together?

A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.