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Cameron_Taylor comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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In which case, the rational thing would be to get rid of whatever emotional belief causes them to make you unhappy. Why be unhappy about a mere fact?
How does "religious people make me unhappy" motivate anything useful? And to whom is it sending this "honest signal"? What mode of thinking is being changed?
In other words, how is being unhappy about the mere existence of religious people actually useful to the specific person who stated that?
At the moment, what you've said could equally apply to death being a good thing, because it motivates us to not waste time, and because it kills off the less intelligent. In other words, it sounds like a way to justify continued belief in the usefulness of your own unhappiness.
But it was the question I asked, in context. The "mere fact" referred to in my question was the existence of religious people -- it was not an abstract question to be applied to any random "mere fact".
Right -- because that's exactly what happens when you take a point out of context, treat it as an abstraction, and then reapply it to some other specific fact than the one it was relevant to.
Detrimental to whom, relative to what purpose? Evolution doesn't have our personal goals or fulfillment in mind -- just reproductive success. It's merely a happy accident that some of the characteristics useful for one, are also useful for the other.