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Craig_Heldreth comments on Slava! - Less Wrong
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I think the praise appetite in western civilization is now filled by people like Tom Brady and Lebron James and Lady Gaga. When you go to a National Football League stadium on a fall Sunday afternoon, you see a communal ritual of adoration and submerging of self into group. It is fundamentally not rational.
I do not think rationalists have anything in this dimension. The closest that comes to mind is from Cosmos and Carl Sagan is standing on his star-trek-style set gazing at images of galaxies and whatnot and he has this look on his face of sex- or drug- or rock-and-roll- induced glow. Carl Sagan was a great rationalist and that television series was one of the greatest, but I found and continue to find that image disgusting.
Kind of how I imagine a Philadelphia Eagles fan and dog lover feels about rooting for Michael Vick today.
Voted up, because I'm not sure I indicated well enough that praise has a dark side (and that some people might not find it appealing at all.) You defined it better than I did: "A communal ritual of adoration and submerging of self into group."
This is both compelling to many and repugnant to many. There are whole identities constructed around avoiding rituals of adoration, and instead valuing level-headedness and critical thinking. When democracies were founded, they deliberately avoided these kinds of monarchical displays of praise. I have seen fantasy novels, religion, celebrity culture, and contemporary politics criticized precisely because of the element of praise: some find that kind of worship "disgusting" and slavish.
Personally, I find praise intellectually troubling but emotionally compelling.
Perhaps I'm just being dense, but I don't really get what Carl Sagan's look has to do with praise, or why you should find it disgusting.
I am not describing Carl Sagan's default facial expression when on camera during his series, which I would describe as more of wonder and curiosity and "hey look at this cool thing I found out!"; this I enjoy and empathize with completely.
I am talking about those specific scenes which are patterned after the Star Trek television show on the set of the bridge of the starship Enterprise where the big video display has the stars whooshing by. In those scenes in Cosmos they have astronomical features--images of galaxies and nebula and planets and asteroids--on his "spaceship" monitor and they have closeups of Carl Sagan's orgasm look. The look the guys have in porno when they tell her "oh baby it's never been like this before".
Not that I have any provable idea what Sagan looked like when he had an orgasm. But I believe I do have a pretty good idea what Sagan's O face looked like after watching those scenes in Cosmos. I find that disgusting.
That is the risk with an appeal to emotion. If it is ineffective you can turn your audience off. Disgust them. The Enterprise bridge staging may have worked great in a cartoon Cosmos with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. In the real series it did not work for me at all.