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Strange7 comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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It is.
If I were to make a top-level post on how to rephrase truthful things to sound like mysticism or poetry, how many times do you think it would be downvoted?
People seemed to like Twelve Virtues of Rationality and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Yes, but those are polished outputs, and (no offense) have your halo-effect to back them up. I'm talking about sketching in a more generalized algorithm which accepts highly technical explanations as input, and produces output which a member of the general public would intuitively recognize as 'wise,' while retaining the input's truth-value.
There are algorithms for that? My brain just does it automatically on request.
(Also, I presented HPMOR to a new audience with my name stripped off just to check if people still liked what I wrote without the halo effect.)
Of course there are algorithms. The question is whether they have been adequately documented yet.
It's not the poetry that's the problem, it's the mysticism. Your quote sounds like the former, not the latter.
Or maybe "ancient wisdom" is the right term to describe what your version sounds like -- but the point is, it tells people why to think some way, and if they endorse it, they endorse a good truth-seeking procedure for the right reason, which is the important part.
By the way, I had googled "wisdom is like a tree" before asking you, and it didn't seem to turn up any existing quotations. It surprised me that no one had famously compared wisdom to a tree -- not in a positive sense, anyway.
It's a good analogy, and -- if you're into that kind of thing -- you can extend it even further: trees (can) yield fruit, the seed stays dormant if it's not in an environment that lets it grow, all the seeds take a similar path when expanding ...
That's only a negative sense if you're working with the assumption that the biblical God is a good guy, an assumption which (given the sheer volume of genocide He committed personally, though His direct subordinates, or demanded of His human followers) simply does not hold up to scrutiny for any widely-accepted modern standard of 'good.' I mean, look at Genesis 3:22 if nothing else.
I say do it. Literary style is a huge obstacle to the dissemination of skepticism.
-13. (Well, actually I estimate 18 upvotes and 5 downvotes leaving effectively -13 downvotes).