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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#361

Post by czbond »

ganbatekudasai wrote: post #277
czbond wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One will not know, but the downside risk is greater if you must at least believe.

You can make up arbitrary properties about the god you believe in all day. Some very mainstream beliefs include such ideas as "you have to spread your religion over others". You cannot chose which arbitrary properties you make your wager on.

>"you have to spread your religion over others". That just seems like growth hacking (to put it in startup parlance). I find it illogical that a creator would see someone with a good heart, pure intentions, and kick them off to their "hell" because they didn't "spread your religion over others".

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#362

Post by rjbwork »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #354
chii wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. how can there be capitalism when central planners tell the owners of the capital what to do with their capital? that sounds like authoritarianism to me (which is basically why all communist countries must be authoritarian, since without it, the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic).

> the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic "Commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonyms. The former has existed for ages. The latter is comparatively recent.

Which is almost entirely my point. There's at least three concepts that are quite distinct components of an economic system that people commingle when they talk about these broad categories like capitalism and socialism in popular discourse.

This naive conflation of commerce with capitalism is certainly one manifestation of this conceptual confusion.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#363

Post by tomcatfish »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #121
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #103

As an authorial technique starting off with a just so story about how marriage came to be that lasts several paragraphs and is obviously not at all how marriage came to be and doesn't even have the excuse of referencing some sort of supernatural source for being wrong might seem interesting but bored me too much to continue. I'm supposing the rest of it is also wrong and badly argued.

It's written in the same vein as "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" [1]. (Read it. Then read the Wikipedia article.) [1] https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...

I appreciate the recommendation to actually read it; it would have been a mistake to look up the article instead of just reading it. It wasn't long and I got a lot from it that I would have skipped over if not for actually reading it.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#364

Post by throwawayhaxor »

evandwight wrote: post #245
throwawayhaxor wrote: post #191

You know that your vote doesn't matter in large-scale elections. Being a busy person, you don't go out of your way to vote. When discussing an election with a friend, you mention you didn't vote. Your friend and others in the group socially ostracize you. You don't understand why, but after a few times you just say that you voted. In all future elections, you leave work early and indicate to your friends that you vot…

Does your vote not matter? I agree in most cases your vote won't change the result. But, it does act as a signal. Also, not voting puts you in the group of people politicians don't need to care about.

Who says I don't vote? I do vote ;)

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#365

Post by vmception »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #242

This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of…

Which is why its useful to form a cult of worshippers

There is almost no utility of having objective thinkers as clientele

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#366

Post by d23 »

salt-thrower wrote: post #230
mherdeg wrote: post #54

Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot. Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group…

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug? Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

> Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

I can't tell if this is tongue in cheek, but it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#367

Post by beepbooptheory »

akiselev wrote: post #328
llbeansandrice wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm being too US-centric but I feel like you at-best mean conservatism with a lower-case 'c'. Even then the very definition of conservatism explicitly avoids any change: > commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

Even in the US that's a very uncharitable interpretation of conservatism that sounds like something I'd say in the heat of a Thanksgiving dinner argument. The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's socia…

I feel like this is very true, and why I am glad there are other options than: conservative, liberal, or generically "progressive".

These gradients feel more armchair philosophical than things that speak to the actual problems and patterns of the world as I, at least, know it. I can't imagine getting so hung up on some naturalistic sociological question of consensus, with the idea that would actually change our general trajectory. It all very much reeks to me of a history walking on its head.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#368

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

underwater wrote: post #346
akiselev wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the US that's a very uncharitable interpretation of conservatism that sounds like something I'd say in the heat of a Thanksgiving dinner argument. The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's socia…

The differentiator between conservatism and progressivism is whether you seek societal change. If you believe that change should happens incrementally then you're a progressive. The examples you've given just sound like branding.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today.

Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough to be the main source of resistence to Progressive political movements.

After all, isn't the whole goal of Progressivism to create a society so good that one wants to Conserve it?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#369

Post by evandwight »

throwawayhaxor wrote: post #364
evandwight wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your vote not matter? I agree in most cases your vote won't change the result. But, it does act as a signal. Also, not voting puts you in the group of people politicians don't need to care about.

Who says I don't vote? I do vote ;)

I didn't say you didn't. I was trying to show what would happen if you didn't vote and therefore why your vote matters.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#370

Post by rootusrootus »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #368
underwater wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differentiator between conservatism and progressivism is whether you seek societal change. If you believe that change should happens incrementally then you're a progressive. The examples you've given just sound like branding.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today. Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough t…

> I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully.

This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).

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