181–190 of 201 posts
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Please tell me where there was snark or dismissal of religion? Talk about missing the point.
Do you believe “invisible man in the sky” is an accurate representation of of the beliefs of billions of people? I read that as snarky. Maybe I am too cynical.
Certainly does correlate with a disdain of religion in my experience.
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I think it has to be a change to the culture. Many of us have been shocked at the sudden rejection of Classical Liberalism. Preference for free exchange of ideas, objectivity, debate, judging arguments without regard to who is making the argument. I think those of us who were engaged in that intellectual world, never realized that most people are not invested in these values. So now that everyone has the capability t…
I agree. Kids are growing up with this stuff. I can only hope that helps them build mental defenses; but I don't expect it to happen automatically. I think it will take a lot of effort from a lot of people.
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Please don't take HN threads into generic religious arguments. They lead to religious flamewars, which are particularly bad threads for HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't take HN threads into generic religious arguments. They lead to religious flamewars Or they don't, as demonstrated by the results of this thread. Further, where was your commentary on this large thread then? Is there some sort of distinction between "spiritual" and "religious" that HN commenters are not aware of? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29700445 Your selective enforcement of a non-existent ru…
In the general case, they certainly do, and we have to moderate for the general case.
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I think that this is fundamentally untrue. Middle between truth and lie is a lie. When you are trying to find truth purely by searching middle of what people say, you are enabling bad actors and punishing honest people.
> Middle between truth and lie is a lie. It sounds like you're perhaps assuming the "middle" is a point in rational space. But maybe "middle" is best conceived as a point in possibility space -- it's the position over which someone must travel to ever get beside you in the future. So allowing the middle to exist as valid (even if it isn't "truth") is perhaps important if the goal is for two groups to align more. Deny…
This is literally about two people arguing. It is actually very possible that one of them is right and other is wrong. Arguments are not just about abstract things.
> Denying the middle position as "non-truth" is only helpful if one's goals have less to do with depolarization.
Sure. Because "depolarization" while ignoring where it ends can end up in even worst place.
Plus, the "truth is in the middle" thing motivates actors on all sides to make up extreme lies. I don't mean just not caring about facts, but intentionally making them wrong. Because the more extremely I push, the more likely you will end up tilted toward my position.
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What's the science behind claiming that conservatives prefer authority over fairness or caring for others? Sounds like unscientific terms used to demonize an large group by choosing favorable characteristics for one group and unfavorable characteristics for another. Conservatives do it also by characterizing liberals as emotional and irrational and bleeding heart and impractical and incompetent furry avocado toast ea…
> What's the science behind claiming that conservatives prefer authority over fairness or caring for others? https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-... That's just a quick sample. I could spam this discussion with links until the cows come home, but I won't. It's pretty well-known stuff really, and it shouldn't even be surprising. Wo…
> Two hundred and twenty-five NYU students participated in a mass-testing session for course credit
>Two hundred and seventy-two participants filled out our survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Here's the study for the scientific American article that you claim makes this 'well established' science:
>Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner
You're clearly being manipulated by the media and don't even have the will power to look at the citations in the pop science article to see if the article is valid?
A liberal supreme Court Justice just said that there's 100,000 children in hospitals from Covid.
This cavalier arrogant ignorance towards science that has taken root in the Democratic party, who are highly susceptible to CNN and Media influence, is scary.
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fairness and caring for others have zero negative connotations. those are universally respected and well received attributes across time, culture, and space. purity and authority have many negative connotations. I don't even need to say them. I feel like it's disingenuous of you to claim otherwise.
> fairness and caring for others have zero negative connotations Nobody has ever accused another of letting sentimentality or "heartstring stuff" interfere with long-term/greater good? A whole lot of "law and order" or "pure reason" types from time immemorial stand as counterexamples. > purity and authority have many negative connotations Also many positive ones. You think evangelicals don't prize purity above some o…
if you use a different adjective to describe an adjective, maybe the first adjective is the correct one.
The pop science study that these labels are from is pseudoscientific anyway so this conversation is pointless.
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Please tell me where there was snark or dismissal of religion? Talk about missing the point.
Do you believe “invisible man in the sky” is an accurate representation of of the beliefs of billions of people? I read that as snarky. Maybe I am too cynical.
It's useful because it's an abstract term that can apply to the majority of religions.
No need to label God or Allah or Shiva or Jehova or Zeus or whatever.
Saying 'higher power' or 'cosmic force' is not descriptive as there's also include things people don't worship like astronomy.
Almost all monotheistic organized religions have worshipped an invisible man in the sky and most poly theistic as well.
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Yes, your comment is exactly part of the problem I am talking about. You write long sentences and use sophisticated vocabulary, but what you are saying is that the truth or value of a belief or an idea depends on the person speaking or writing it. Not on the quality of the belief or idea itself. This is sophisticated tribalism. "I don't really want to debate any of these specifically so won't engage further on them."…
You said you were shocked by people rejecting classical liberalism. I offered some of the reasons I've rejected classical liberalism. I don't think it's possible to evaluate an idea purely on its own merits, without considering the people forming, executing, and effected by it. I don't think it would be meaningful if you could. That may be irreconcilable with your worldview! That doesn't give you a view into my mind…
In the US, among both working class Republicans and working class black communities, many people decided not to get a Covid vaccine because they do not trust the group of people telling them to get it.
The identity of the people telling them to get the vaccine is completely irrelevant. The reason to get the vaccine is the results of the clinical trials demonstrating that it was safe and effective.
Do those groups have good reason to not trust the kinds of people representing "science"? I am sure they do.
But they do not have to trust those people as individuals. They just need to trust the outcomes of the trials.
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> When the federal government begins to force values upon the country en masse problems begin. What is your opinion about the US Civil War? I'm curious about this because it is in part an abrogation of states' rights over a question of utmost moral importance. Are there some values that are so valuable that we should make them universal by any means necessary, including a war?
Slavery is one of those things that violates the fundamental principles of the declaration of Independence: all men are created equal, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So of course it should have been abolished and shame on the states that fought a war to preserve it. Even in the most limited federal government has fundamental requirements.
I guess my question is more related to how you can tell the difference between a "valuable value" like "slavery is bad" and a less-valuable value, like "going to church is a public good and should be compulsory."[0] While one can use the Declaration as a discriminator, that it's starting a civil war of its own might give us pause (and it has some problematic language of its own[1]).
[0] See, e.g., the constitution of the state of Massachusetts: https://archive.org/details/addressofconvent00unse/page/n19/...
It contains this clause which permits the people to actually force church attendance! (Earlier it specifies Protestant ministry rather than Catholic.)
"the people of this Commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subjects an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend."
[1] For example, "[King George] [...] has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
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 .
I struggled with ADHD-like symptoms profoundly during the eras of my life when my beliefs didn't match the trajectory the world was on, mainly during the early 2000s and late 2010s. My beliefs have since changed, now that I'm able to set boundaries and not let the outside world influence my inner peace as much as it once did.
But I really think there is something to the connection between negative feedback loops and ADHD/CPTSD/OCD etc. Which suggests to me that our obsession with medication is only looking at half the issue. Why are so many (generally clever, effective) people so consistently feeling like their intentions don't match outcomes? If it's not them, then what's wrong with the world or our role in it? Could we change reality instead of ourselves? Is there a difference? These are the questions I wrestle with now.