I got to the end and realized I'd been reading Robert Sapolsky. His "Biology of Human Behavior" Stanford lecture course in about 25 parts is on youtube. It's absolutely amazing; he's a great lecturer, articulate, funny, fascinating, a great storyteller about remarkable experiments and legendary scientists. It starts with evolutionary biology/sociobiology and goes down via a dozen levels of explanation ('buckets' he c…
Nautilus has great articles I wish there was a way to make a compilation of the best ones then binge read
Overcoming Us vs. Them
241–249 of 249 posts
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the religion. The modern Catholic Church now accepts that evolution through natural selection occurs, and they no longer claim that the Earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
Is that an official position? I knew they were more accepting of it in general.
Yes, it is official position, confirmed in a few documents by Pope John Paul II (google "Fides et ratio"). But of course you can still many priests arguing against that :)
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an account before this one that was shadowbanned one day with no notification at all. I hadn't broken any stated rules. I had posted some points about IQ, which would be considered offensive or "harmful" from the leftist viewpoints that dominate the San Francisco tech overculture. Probably this rule was the excuse: "We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless o…
When people post comments like this they never supply links. Usually this is because what actually happened doesn't fit their narrative. What actually happened is almost always that they violated the site guidelines in a way that is plain to the majority of the audience here.
Here's your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Snargorf
Certainly I made points that are culture war relevant a few times, but I think that account is clearly still within the rules. Certainly no rules were blatantly broken. I am human, but I've always engaged in good faith.
A warning, at least, would've been appropriate. But, it just got flat silent shadowbanned after a decent history of participation. I'd still love to know why.
Side note: "the majority of the audience agrees it's rule-breaking" should not be the standard you apply to determine what's rule-breaking. That's just a recipe for ideological uniformity; an obvious slippery slope into the space being being under the exclusive power of one tribe or another. A healthy discussion space needs moderators who will take unpopular positions and stick to the rules as written, in an even-handed way.
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nautilus has great articles I wish there was a way to make a compilation of the best ones then binge read
I've enjoyed quite a lot of articles on Nautilus, but it's a shame the the people who write them aren't getting paid. http://nautil.us/blog/a-letter-from-the-publisher-of-nautilu...
tl;dr: their grant money dried up, and they've been limping along trying to find support.
If you like them, it looks like they sell subscriptions here: http://shop.nautil.us/
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adults have trouble with all this stuff because mostly they don't learn it at all, even with a liberal arts education or any of the other things you mention. The entire rationalism movement is essentially founded based on the fact that ostensibly educated people don't realize how badly their brains work by default. The greatest superpower we have as humans is that we have the ability to introspect, and second guess o…
Judging from the people I know who identify themselves with the “rationalism movement”, occasionally reading topical blog posts doesn’t inherently teach introspection (or even reasoning) any better than high school, though its adherents are pretty good at rattling off lists of logical fallacies and getting distracted by meta-arguments about which particular one applies in a given situation. [Or by “rationalism moveme…
You're right, reading occasional blog posts doesn't do anything for anyone, on pretty much any topic. I'd argue that anyone professing to be a rationalist on those grounds is lying to themselves.
Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defense against value invasion doesn't require offense against other values, does it?
Well, it depends on the content of those values. I'm opposed to eliminationist ideologies for example.
What is an eliminationist ideology, and does it require an offensive to avoid it influencing your cultural values?
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
komali2's point is that the phrase is self-referential: someone saying "only a sith deals in absolutes" implies that they're also a sith, even though presumably being a sith is a bad thing here.
It isn't self referential though. Lets diagram a little, as only a surface level of contemplation could arrive at that viewpoint. Possible sets of people: - sith - non sith Known attributes sith have: - deals in absolutes Presumption of the phrase being used is that the phrase itself is an absolute, thus meaning the person speaking has to be a sith even if they claim not to be a sith. But that is flawed, as there are…
>There are non sith that also deal in absolutes
That can't be true if "ONLY a sith deals in absolutes" is true.
I think there are only two possible outcomes
1. Obi is wrong - not only Sith deal in absolutes. From a story perspective, this demonstrates the Arrogance of the Jedi.
2. Obi is a Sith.
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can overcome them without removing them, by extending "us" widely enough. This is how a number of religions handled it, leading to their expansion over large swaths of diverse nations. Seeing most everyone on Earth as ingroup improves collaboration and thus propels culture / prosperity.
But what if there is a group whose strategy is to take advantage of the trusting nature of everyone else for its own gains? In that case it would be advantageous to unite against them. Universal cooperation and trust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against attacks somehow. Also, does universal collaboration necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of peop…
>Ingroup favoritism raises a key question—at our core, do we want Us to do “well” by maximizing absolute levels of well being, or merely “better than,” by maximizing the gap between Us and Them?
Universal individualism and distrust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against cooperative attacks somehow.
Also, does universal individualism necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of people over which universal individualism becomes infeasible.
Re: Overcoming Us vs. Them
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get to the years and years of focused work? Vocabularies are the building blocks and mapping points of our knowledge stores. I think the suggestion is that emphasis on awareness and, at least some symbolic reverence to the concepts in grade school may offer a better path that what is traditional now. Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derai…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s > Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path. “Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers,…
I think your point is good, and I would restate my assertion. As trivia without context, it’s useless, I agree.
Knowing what a capital is and how to find the name when needed is important. But, history is much more important.
I never memorized state capitals as an assignment in school, but I do know most of them from my interest in the nation’s history and geography. I correlate these things but not in the rigorous trivial way I think my earlier comment suggested. Your input brings clarity to that.