Jandila comments on Let Your Workers Gather Food - Less Wrong

22 Post author: D_Malik 24 October 2011 07:51PM

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

Comments (48)

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

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2011 05:24:45PM 3 points [-]

In my teens, I had a brush-in with organized religion (it didn't last). I converted for social reasons, not intellectual ones, but I still felt pretty excited when I believed that the religion's claims were possible. Excitement-at-belief can mark an affective death spiral, and can seriously impair critical thinking about your belief and its referents. It's not an expected byproduct -- for any person who becomes convinced of, say, human-fooming, and becomes giddy-excited, it should be trivially possible to imagine someone who is also convinced of human-fooming and not giddy-excited, and we should generally expect such a person to be able to make a much better case for the idea, if such a case can in fact be made.

In short, either you're right and you'll be much more persuasive once you find your way out of the glee, or you're wrong and you'll realize that when you calm down.