Vladimir_M comments on Rationality and Relationships September 2011 - Less Wrong

1 [deleted] 01 September 2011 03:05PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 September 2011 04:19:54AM 0 points [-]

Interesting. I've seen some such discussions get quite bad but I've seen others where apparently calm rational discussion took place. It seems that sex and gender issues quickly move towards mind-killing territory but sits a bit further away than most issues normally thought of as mind-killing. So far the discussions in this thread seem well done and informative. I haven't seen any strong evidence of any serious problems arising yet.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 03 September 2011 07:11:34AM *  28 points [-]

Trouble is, when evident mind-killing and breakdown of polite discourse occurs, it is the less bad failure mode. In that case, it is at least clear that something went wrong. The really bad failure mode is when the discussion resembles a rational discourse, but is actually a horrible happy death spiral. In such situations, the conclusions may seem rational and informative, but are in fact awfully remote from reality, or at best right in a stopped-clock sort of way -- and the lack of discourse breakdown is interpreted as a successful exercise in rationality, whereas in fact it's merely because nobody stepped in to spoil the fun by trying to draw it closer to reality. (The latter, of course, is likely to cause mind-killing and discourse breakdown, thus making the messenger look like the guilty party.)

Hence the crystal healing analogy I made in another comment, which may sound extreme but is in fact, in my opinion, quite pertinent. In both cases, a volatile mix of biases, preconceptions, wishful thinking, etc. produces entirely spurious conclusions about how the world works and how to deal with it, which are then happily accepted in a self-congratulatory way, even though the process by which they were arrived at couldn't stand up to any intellectual scrutiny.