gjm: This is not a rationalist origin story, because it is not the story of how you became a rationalist. (It seems fairly clear that in fact you are not a rationalist. This is a description, not a criticism; most people are not rationalists, and manage just fine without being rationalists.) ama: Big thanx for all your thoughts.
Hmmm Am I not also rational and also a rationalist by agreeing with you, who are a rationalist, that I am not a rationalist? smile
And aren’t you, to some degree, also not a rationalist by agreeing with me, who you say is not a rationalist, that I am not a rationalist? smile
I consider myself to be both rational and irrational, especially since rationalists believe in irrational numbers.smile
gjm: It is also not about “how we can overcome bias”, but about how we can (allegedly) overcome one particular failing which is not a bias in the sense that OB is meant to be about. ama: I wd appreciate you or anyone explaining in what sense that OB is meant here. Also explaining what is that one particular failing. Thanx in advance.
gjm: As an account of how one can go about eliminating (perhaps unconscious) hatred for oneself and others, and replacing it with love, it has a severe deficiency: it doesn’t actually explain comprehensibly how one can. ama: That was just a teaser. The comprehensive bit was going to be my next post as per Blume!smile
gjm: (Your central idea seems to be that you should love yourself “as” everything, including things you aren’t. ama: I am and you are everything already because all words and their opposites are stored in us as as, and those words are everything in the brain and represent everything outside of the brain, ‘everything’ also being a word. There are even more words than things since we have a word for no thing. smile
So I love myself as gjm so that I auto love and respect gjm as myself. I love myself as known and as unknown too, so that I don’t have to know you to love you but love you to know you and so am loving you before I know you or get to know you. This way, no bad knowledge I happen to know about you after I get to know you, will affect nor be able to affect my Love and Respect for you since my L&R was not and is not based on who you are, good or bad, but on Love of itself: the Love and R being unconditional, having no conditions nor limitations. Neat, eh?smile It is why kids say ‘It takes one to know one’ just based on learning the alphabet, and without any adult teaching them to say so, which teachers in fact discourage them from saying so.
gjm: That seems pretty incoherent to me. ama: I understand why you feel that way: it will tend to discombobulate you initially.
I love myself as coherent and incoherent and so I take your opinion of me with Love and Respect, and thank you for your honesty. However, there is coherence in incoherence, and vice versa.
kjm: You might try to do it by, e.g., imagining yourself in the shoes of everyone you interact with, and that might be an effective way of having a more positive attitude towards them; is that the sort of thing you mean? ama: Sort of, but all inclusive: it covers all words and their opposites and so includes all those who I have NOT interacted with nor yet imagined.
kjm: And you say that by not loving yourself “as” an X, where X is something you aren’t, you’re thereby hating others. I think that’s obviously false.) ama: But I am x, since x is one of the letters stored in me as me. Example: If I hate or love myself as kjm or as any word that describes you, then I auto hate or love you as myself. It’s automatic. The brain works by words, words work by their opposites, and all words and their opposites work most well by the word Love, and don’t work at all well with the word Hate.
kjm: I think your interpolations into the words of William James and Bertrand Russell change their meanings (James’s more than Russell’s). ama: Sorry, my bad. I was trying to be helpful. But what prejudices do you think WJ was referring to?
kjm: Since you appear to be quoting them as authorities, it doesn’t seem to me a good sign that you have to change what they’re saying to do so. ama: Good point: In Love and Respect of myself as right and wrong, as correct and incorrect, as correcting and as corrected, I take this correction from you as correct and as corrector, and so it will make me even more correct.smile
kjm: In general, attempts at proselytism are not likely to find an enthusiastic reception here. Hmmmm This has no proselytistic angle to it al all, even though I see how it might seem so.
Actually, I am also both theist and atheist since I love myself as both, and so love and respect all atheists & all theists as they are. There is actually no reason to not be an atheist, and there are many atheists who are better theists as atheists than theists are at being theists. smile
The only purpose is to share on overcoming bias as in “Self-Haters Donate More” and “Haters Cheat Less.”
Hey all,
Just joined.
Got here via Naked Capitalism and Yves Smith when she linked this article: “Self-Haters Donate More,” which then linked “Haters Cheat Less.”
Then the name of the site “Overcoming Bias” definitely got my attention!
My Rationalist Origin Story: ROS:
I had been digging in the Bible’s backyard—it’s really the front yard, smile—as a 37 year-old, and found over and over again where it was written that Moses only did as he was told when he had been told what to do and how to. It’s in later chapters of Exodus. So Moses could not do as he had been told until he had been told how to do it.
Hmmmmm It got me thinking: What did that remind me of?
3 days later it hit me like Eureka:
Love your neighbor as myself,
as per Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Matthew and Mark and Luke!
Hmmm,
since no one had ever sat me down and taught me to love myself, why did I think, why had I assumed that I knew how to love myself?
Hmmmm
Then Aha:
If I didn’t know how to love myself,
that explained
why I did not love my neighbors and/or found it so hard to do,
and why I found it so hard to love my neighbors as much as I loved myself, or THOUGHT I loved myself,
and why I found it so easy to hate my neighbors!
Hmmmmm
But,---I DID love myself: I loved myself as man and as right and as wise and good and friend and family and as etc!
But hey,--I also DID NOT love myself as woman and as wrong and as fool and as bad and as enemy as stranger and as non-etc!
So?
I was both loving myself and hating myself at the same time!
So I was also loving the neighbor I hated, and hating the neighbor I loved!
So it was only an illusion that I ONLY loved me and ONLY hated my neighbors: I was doing both all the time!
So by hating myself, I had been also teaching others how to hate ME all along!
Which meant that they had to be hating themselves too,
and which then compounded my Hate for myself,
and re-justified me to hate myself and so to hate them as myself since we justify hating others by hating ourselves,
and I was hating myself a lot more than I was or had been loving myself, which explained perfectly why I had been and was hating my neighbors a lot more than loving them, in fact to the same degree and extent that I was hating myself and loving myself!
Oooops!
I went to my wife:
If you promise me one thing,I’ll take you out to dinner every week! What do you want? Nothing! Just promise me that you will love yourself and concentrate of loving YOU! She laughed: I already do! Fine!
And the rest is history:
I eliminated my Bias of Hate for myself as any words over a period of the next year by inserting the Bias of Love for myself as all words!
And how I did that and what it means for all others is what I would love to share with this forum, so that each of you can do it for yourselves, and spread the word of how we can overcome bias.
It is very easy, but that very easiness makes it the hardest thing you would have ever tried to do!
“A great many people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” William James
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” Hermann Hesse
“The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which the wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean – please forgive me for mentioning it – is Love, the Love or compassion of Christ.
If you have and so feel this Love, you have the motive for existence, the guide for action, the reason for courage, and the imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.” The Impact of Science on Society, Lord Bertrand A. Russell.