trans woman, conlanging enthusiast; ADHD, depression; polyamorous, childfree. It’s pronounced “cat err een yo”, not “cater in Joe”! Other names: Catherine, Katnjo, Kanjo, Paradigm. Feel free to message me!
katerinjo
Karma: 26
Oh, interesting. To want to leave alone people who aren’t willing to make the right kinds of sacrifices makes a lot of sense to me. I can come up with objections off the top of my head, and objections to those and so on, so I haven’t thought about it enough to agree or disagree with the idea. The reason I was aiming for agreeableness is that the phrase is intended for answering questions like, “What are your hobbies?” or “What is your friend so-and-so like?” in a short way that communicates the basic idea and keeps the conversation pleasant. I honestly hadn’t considered protecting people from rationality. But now that it’s on my radar, I still am thinking that the vast majority of people who will hear this phrase from me will think “That’s nice,” and move on without ever considering learning more. I also think that for the people who are interested in learning more, I can filter them for devotedness immediately after they express interest.
Now that I think about it, filtering for devotedness is actually pretty tricky, because to admit that you’d rather live in a comfortable lie than with an unpleasant truth is embarrassing. People will be put under pressure to agree to take the red pill even if they really would rather not. I’m not sure what to do about this.
Sacrifice is definitely an important part of the process, yes. But I think waxing poetic about how miserable it is to be rational to an average person will make them think we are very weird and likely not correct, while my phrase is really difficult to disagree with and so is less likely to invite criticism. Both my phrase and talking about sacrifice are honest, but the former has a better effect on my status. I think it is a better PR move, basically, to have an agreeable elevator pitch.
Both “believing true things and making good choices” and “believing false things and making bad choices” constrain anticipation. For example, someone doing the former more often is more likely to do well on a math test than someone doing the latter more often. They are both meaningful. The thing that they aren’t is controversial. One feels like an obviously good idea and the other feels like an obviously bad idea. (note: I said “feels like an obviously good idea” instead of “obviously is a good idea” because of the whole sacrifice element Qiaochu_Yuan brought up.)