Konkvistador comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong

15 Post author: WrongBot 13 July 2010 04:44AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (311)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 July 2010 02:16:20PM 14 points [-]

A thousand times no. Really, this is a bad idea.

Yeah, some people don't value truth at any cost. And there's some sense to that. When you take a little bit of knowledge and it makes you a bad person, or an unhappy person, I can understand the argument that you'd have been better off without that knowledge.

But most of the time, I believe, if you keep thinking and learning, you'll come round right. (I.e.: when a teenager reads Ayn Rand and thinks that gives him license to be an asshole, his problem is not that he reads too much philosophy.)

You seem to be particularly worried about accidentally becoming a bigot. (I don't think most of us are in any danger of accidentally becoming supreme dictators.) I think you are safe. Think of it this way: you don't want to be a bigot. You don't want your future self to be a bigot either. So don't behave like one. No matter what you read. Commit your future self to not being an asshole.

I think fear of brainwashing is generally silly.* You will not become a Mormon from reading the Book of Mormon. You will not become a Nazi from reading Mein Kampf, or a Communist from reading Das Kapital. You will not become a racist from reading Steve Sailer. I don't think we are such fragile creatures. Just keep an even keel and behave like a decent person, and you're free to read whatever you like.

*Actual brainwashing -- overriding your own sanity and reason -- is possible, but I think it requires a total environment, like a cult compound or an interrogation room. It's not something that reading a book can do to you.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 April 2011 10:42:14PM *  7 points [-]

You will not become a Mormon from reading the Book of Mormon. You will not become a Nazi from reading Mein Kampf, or a Communist from reading Das Kapital. You will not become a racist from reading Steve Sailer.

I don't know if this is a fair characterization of Steve Sailer. I'm quite sure some of his commenters are racist but then again many of the commenters on any major news site are as well. I would call him racialist, or perhaps just a HBDer.

Perhaps I'm somewhat biased in my view of him, but generally for example this interesting video seems typical Steve Sailer style. This is as representative of racism as Das Kapital is of Communism or Mein Kampf of Nazism?

Does racism just have a bad PR guy?

Whatever one calls this it clearly dosen't deserve the few thousand negative karma points racism has in my mind. Perhaps he is putting forward his best face here, but listening to a few parts of this discussion I half expected he would start reciting the litany of Tarski, going into a Hansonian analysis of status or telling everyone that beliefs should pay rent. He certainly touches on these topics in a slightly different vocabulary! Reword a sentence or two and it sounds something a commenter could write on Lesswrong and get upvoted for.

Comment author: GLaDOS 11 August 2012 07:44:47AM 1 point [-]

Original link is broken. This seems to be the same video.