The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surfaces. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentic air waves. These waves take the form of torrents of discourses about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.
--W. V. O. Quine
One thing I noticed when I was archive-binging his site was that there was a very distinct threshold (which I think occurred sometime in ’09, but don’t quote me on that), when the primary message Moldbug was trying to convey abruptly switched from “Silly progressives! Democracy doesn’t work like you think it works” to “Democracy is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of forever”. This transition was accompanied by a marked upswing in his general level of bitterness.
Oh, right, Senjōgahara. I’ve got a great story to tell you. It’s about that man who tried to rape you way back when. He was hit by a car and died in a place with no connection to you, in an event with no connection to you. Without any drama at all. [...] That’s the lesson for you here: You shouldn’t expect your life to be like the theater.
-- Kaiki Deishū, Episode 7 of Nisemonogatari.
So telling someone not to get offended is kind of like telling them to stop getting in the way of moving fists. Potentially a sign of moral myopia.
Yes, telling people not to get offended is like telling them to stop getting in the way of moving fists. And on a case by case basis, it generally is bad to blame people for what other people are doing to them. But on a long term basis, if you find yourself constantly on the recieving end of moving fists, you might want to seriously consider learning to dodge better. Similarly, if you find yourself constantly getting offended to the point that your epistemic rationality becomes impaired, you should seriously consider practicing ways to better manage your emotions.
Answer: Because the Greek gods are vindictive as fuck, and will fuck you over twice as hard when they find out that you wriggled out of it the first time.
But even as light is opposed by darkness, science and reason have their enemies. Superstition and belief in magic are as old as man himself; for the intransigence of facts and our limitations in controlling them can be powerfully hard to take. Add to this the reflection that we are in an age when it is popular to distrust whatever is seen as the established view or the Establishment, and it is no wonder that anti-rational attitudes and doctrines are mustering so much support. Still, we can understand what encourages the anti-rationalist turn without losing our zeal for opposing it. A current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description, under the heading “Philosophy”, that typifies the dark view at its darkest: “Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and more there has crept into current research and study the haunting suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge unfathomable by our cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which are deserving of our serious attention.” Now “knowledge unfathomable by our cognition” is simply incoherent, as attention to the words makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One wonders how many students enrolled.
-- W. V. O. Quine
Because Britain has a national custom saying that they do.
Paul Graham has written quite extensively of why some things are considered “threatening heresy”, and other things mere eccentricity. Ultimately, he concludes that in order for something to be tabooed, it must be threatening to some group that is powerful enough to enforce the taboo, but not powerful enough that the can safely ignore what their critics say about them. Democracy is currently so entrenched in western civilization that it doesn’t have to give a fuck if a few people here and there criticize it occasionally.
If, when you say “God”, you actually mean “universal ethical theorem for sentient life” or something other than “supernatural being that created/help create the world”, you’re probably best off coming up with a different word; the one you’re currently using has been hopelessly entangled in its present context, and continuing to use it for something other than that will only result in confusion.
Probably the only two examples that I can think of from my personal experience are:
1) A post that one of my old high school classmates made on face book saying (and I paraphrase): “[the existence of a personal god] is literally too good to be true, which is why we should believe it.”
2) Being forced to take a class in “critical thinking” which actually turned out to utilize pretty much every dark arts technique in the book to convert you of the professor’s political agenda.
There is in fact a very simple way to activate an absolute denial macro in someone with regard to any arbitrary statement. Once activated, the subject will be permanently rendered incapable of ever believing the factual contents of the statement. I have activated said macro with regard to all of these statements that I have just made.
As someone who makes weekly forays into San Francisco, I strongly suspect that many of Molbug’s more extreme beliefs regarding the current state of US politics are a result of him generalizing from living in SF. I also suspect I’d be far less sympathetic to Moldbug if I grew up in, say, rural Texas rather than the Bay Area.
But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations?
Rational expectations equalibria are a thing. To take a somewhat exagerated example, if everyone thinks that girls suck at math, so no one teaches girls to do math, then no one will ever find out whether or not girls actually suck at math.
The hidden thought embedded in most discussions of conspiracy theories is this: The world is being controlled by evil people; so, if we can get rid of them, the world can revert to control by good people, and things will be great again. This thought is false. The world is not controlled by any group of people – evil or good – and it will not be. The world is a large, chaotic mess. Those groups which do exert some control are merely larger pieces in the global mix.
-- Paul Rosenberg
If we see in each generation the conflict of the future against the past, the fight of what might be called progressive versus reactionary, we shall find ourselves organizing the historical story upon what is really an unfolding principle of progress, and our eyes will be fixed upon certain people who appear as the special agencies of that progress. [...] But if we see in each generation a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever willed, our minds become concentrated upon the process that produced such an unpredictable issue, and we are more open for an intensive study of the motions and interactions that underlie historical change. [...] The process of the historical transition will then be recognized to be unlike what the whig historian seems to assume – much less like the procedure of a logical argument and perhaps much more like the method by which a man can be imagined to work his way out of a “complex”. It is a process which moves by mediations and those mediations may be provided by anything in the world – by men’s sins or misapprehensions or by what we can only call fortunate conjunctures. Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.
-- Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History
This is kinda tangential, but this just now occured to me: I am male, and my too biggest hobbies are watching pro- sports and playing tabletop RPGs; while various folk ontymologies define these two activities as being on opposite ends of the jock-nerd spectrum, I have always maintained that they are actually quite similar (I am not the first person to comment on this similarity) Both fandoms have a reputation for being male dominated; my question is: is this a co-incidence, or is there something about emotionally investing in naratives that have been basically woven whole cloth from what is essentially a random number generator that is off-putting to girls?
(Possible confounding factor: I’m admittedly not your standard sports fan, though we’re apparently a sizable enough minority to get our own negative stereotypes and labels as sportsnerds/statheads.)
If he’s become actively hostile to libertarianism, then this is a reverse from his originial position put forth here:
That leaves libertarians. Now, I love libertarians to death. My CPU practically has a permanent open socket to the Mises Institute. In my opinion, anyone who has intentionally chosen to remain ignorant of libertarian (and, in particular, Misesian-Rothbardian) thought, in an era when a couple of mouse clicks will feed you enough high-test libertarianism to drown a moose, is not an intellectually serious person. Furthermore, I am a computer programmer who has read far too much science fiction—two major risk factors for libertarianism. So I could just say, “read Rothbard,” and call it a day.
On the other hand, it is hard to avoid noticing two basic facts about the universe. One is that libertarianism is an extremely obvious idea. The other is that it has never been successfully implemented.
This does not prove anything. But what it suggests is that libertarianism is, as its detractors are always quick to claim, an essentially impractical ideology. I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is: is there a path from here to there? And if we get there, will we stay there? If your answer to both questions is obviously “yes,” perhaps your definition of “obvious” is not the same as mine.
You were monstrously unfair to Dumbledore, said the voice Harry had been calling Slytherin, only now it also seemed to be the Voice of Economic Sensibility and maybe also Conscience.
This is awesome.
In other words, people will only convert for precisely the wrong reasons.