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The Righteousness Fix

orionmagazine.org

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Re: The Righteousness Fix

#131

Post by jimbokun »

riskable wrote: post #91
jiggyjace wrote: post #63

I wonder what the author's thoughts are on "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. It mentions many clear refutes backed up by history to the idea of how bad it is for humans to be "addicted to righteousness". For example, individuals have not and do not live by themselves in a vacuum as only selfish. We are also very group-ish, and it is the righteousness or norm…

The big assumption here is that increasing birthrates (above replacement level) is somehow the ideal outcome of a society. What if the ideal outcome is that humans populations shrink to 1/100th their current size and most "work" gets done by machines? Wouldn't that be vastly more efficient?

Efficient at accomplishing which goals?

Why stop at 1/100th? How about eliminating all of humanity? Why would the universe be worse off with no humans in it?

Why not eliminating all life on Earth? What makes life inherently more valuable than a sterile rock floating through space?

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#132

Post by calebm »

There's an interesting bible verse that I've never heard quoted in churches: "BE NOT OVERLY RIGHTEOUS, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them." (Ecclesiastes 7:16-18).

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#133

Post by jimbokun »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #89
jiggyjace wrote: post #63

I wonder what the author's thoughts are on "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. It mentions many clear refutes backed up by history to the idea of how bad it is for humans to be "addicted to righteousness". For example, individuals have not and do not live by themselves in a vacuum as only selfish. We are also very group-ish, and it is the righteousness or norm…

Why is "efficient" defined as consuming natural resources to produce children? Why is that a measure of societal success? Who gets to determine that this is a rubric that should even be considered? Seems simplistic in the extreme. I think enlightenment thinking and the concurrent non-successionist/non-miraculous/cessationist protestant reformation that drove the new world clearly overlap heavily in the venn diagram o…

> Why is that a measure of societal success?

Any judgement about ultimate value is just as arbitrary. It's one of the most basic and most intractable problems in philosophy.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#134

Post by prionassembly »

calebm wrote: post #132

There's an interesting bible verse that I've never heard quoted in churches: "BE NOT OVERLY RIGHTEOUS, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them." (Ecclesiastes 7:16-18).

Kipling has this

    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies
    Or being hated, don't give way to hating
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#135

Post by jimbokun »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #20

So many people are receiving this article very positively but am I the only one here who’s struggling to understand it? Why do the comments here make it seem as if it is impossible to be right but come off as merely being “self-righteous” because one is being engaged by someone else who is wrong and proud? Where do we draw the definition of when someone is being self-righteous? Is it possible to be self-righteous whe…

Humans have a strong bias for doubling down on our current beliefs and rejecting conflicting evidence.

It is crucial that we are just as harsh judging our current beliefs and subjecting them to scrutiny, as we are judging and scrutinizing beliefs with which we disagree.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#136

Post by leetcrew »

photochemsyn wrote: post #88
leetcrew wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. "addiction"…

Opiate addiction results in a higher concentration of opiate receptors on many cell surfaces. Possible down-regulation of endogenous endorphin production may also occur, as I recall. The result of removing the exogenous opiates is thus a very painful experience as the endorphin/receptor ratio is destabilized. This also seems to play a role in alcohol addiction as alcohol use has opiate-like co-effects[1] [1] https://…

it's not semantics. there's a useful distinction between addiction and dependence. dependence is the tolerance/withdrawal cycle. it doesn't necessarily coincide with the cravings that are characteristic of addiction. someone on pain meds for a broken leg may never think of them again once the treatment ends. it doesn't make sense to consider/treat them as an addict. conversely, a gambling addict is more similar to a heroin addict than a typical PM patient.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#137

Post by TimTheTinker »

Just a small nitpick, but it's important to my theological ears: TA conflates "righteousness" and "self-righteousness", which are two different things.

Not that anyone is righteous on their own -- no one is. But that doesn't mean righteousness isn't a real concept that can be understood apart from self-righteousness.

In fact, Martin Luther's discovery that no one is righteous on their own, and the notion of an alien or imputed righteousness granted by God to those who repent and trust in Jesus (as St Paul explains it in the book of Romans) was a key moment in the lead-up to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#138

Post by jimbokun »

tanseydavid wrote: post #125
dragonwriter wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant. But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism. So, you need to be more specific about “people”: one downside is that the intended audience sometimes doesn't understand what you mean (another is that the audience you are trying to bypass sometimes does.) PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-…

>> PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here. Serious question: what exactly do you mean by "political dog-whistle"? No similar term is contained in the Paul Graham piece that was linked and I am genuinely curious what it is you are implying by this. I have heard this term "political dog-whistle" thrown around over the past few years and for me it has somewhat poor metaphorical qu…

It is the idea that certain beliefs are outside the Overton Window [1] of acceptable political discourse, but you want to signal your endorsement of that belief to your supporters without saying it outright, to preserve plausible deniability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#139

Post by kirse »

welshwelsh wrote: post #119
cwoolfe wrote: post #115

This is the natural consequence of killing God, as Nietzsche observed. Without an objective basis, there's no objective truth about what's valuable, right, or good. But we desperately want to be right, so we ignore what God says is right and invent our own version. "For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." - The apostle Paul's le…

But was there ever an objective basis? No two believers could ever agree on what God wants, even back when Jesus was alive. Because God is nothing but an invention of man, what God thinks is merely a reflection of what each individual person thinks. Even if you go off a text like the Bible, there is no objective interpretation of what it means. >has zero pride, was so humble Jesus literally claimed to be the son of G…

But was there ever an objective basis?

People certainly behave in ways that reflects there is an objective basis to be reached - they argue about correctness of perspectives, attempt to reduce complex formulas to the simple, have entire reasoning + discovery systems (science) designed to reach the truth, etc.

I have yet to meet someone who truly dogfoods their own supposed beliefs on a "relative morality". You'll often find those people claiming all truth is relative, but are equally willing to argue ad-infinitum on whether they think you're right or wrong on a certain topic.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#140

Post by jonnycomputer »

photochemsyn wrote: post #50

The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. What the autho…

Nitpick. Dopamine doesn't signal a reward, and it isn't a reward in itself. In this context, the important function of dopamine is that it signals a reward prediction error.
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