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Rational_Brony comments on "The Book Of Mormon" or Belief In Belief, The Musical - Less Wrong
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You know, after reading this and more, I'm starting to believe that, once we're powerful enough, sending missionaries on educational/evangelical missions to third-world countries would have a very interesting impact on existential risk, on the long term. Third-worlders outnumber the rest, and, if we believe that, at some point, they will catch up to us in power and might, and given that, intellectually, they are still malleable, I'd say it's in fact pretty urgent to take the opportunity, as soon as possible, to spread our message into the Third World, before they too become a Bible and Qran Belt.
In Africa especially, the old religions are being furiously and frantically abandoned by the young in favour of Islam and Christianism partly because of how much more cool and modern (and providing of a mental and legal frameqork dequate to complex modern society) they are.
Imagine how enthusiastic they'd be about a "religion" (and by that, I mean affiliation) that's even more modern and cool, and that can accomodate their own previously-existing systems easily and improve from there, rather than replace them wholesale, thanks to the flexibility of metaethical thinking as opposed to revealed-morality thinking.
And you know what would really sell the deal? An education system. Especially one that gives them a chance to join a cheap-yet-prestigious university overseas and get the chance to come back to their countries more formidable than ever. The chance for an actual future. People in the Thrid World can go very far indeed in their efforts to educate themselves if you guarrantee them a social elevator, but if you offer a chance for migration... oooh boy...
Okay, at this stage of Lesswrong development, it's kind of a pipe dream, but one around which can give us something to really look forward to, right?
Are you familiar with the concept of "white man's burden"?
By asking this question you are probably trying to say something, but I would prefer if you said it explicitly. Then it would be easier to discuss it rationally.
I'm familiar of the concept of "With Great Power Comes Great Responsiblity". Race is entirely incidental (in fact I am not a White Man, nor am I Rich, or anything like that: my power is my Knowledge, my Virtues and my Skills, and I want to share them).
Okay. The outside view predicts that programs of the form "let's convince third worlders that our good ideas are good" are at high risk of extremely racist results. There is a large probability that Rational_Brony did not take that into account, as opposed to thinking of it but deciding that in that particular case (maybe in the general case of programs started by people who explicitly think racism is bad) the risk would small relative to the benefits of doing it right.
I'm not aware of that particular risk, though it should have been obvious in retrospect. But let me put it this way: this very instant, there are many interest groups from all regions of ideaspace (authoritarians, libertarians, progressives, reactionary, egalitarians, hierarchists, and there are probably more dimensions I'm forgetting) that are not shy about preaching their ideologies, wholesale and unadapted, unto this very naïve yet extremely cynical Third World. There is an authentic race that's going on right now.
And while allowing ourselves to be rushed would be stupid and we should do this on our own terms, the fact is that, while we wait for those places to get internet connections and the resources to maintain them, the time to browse, the level of literacy in English to, say, stumble on this site... Well, by that time, our candidates will probably have already become new and zealous Evangelical Christians or Hardline Islamist zealots.
How much would it cost to set up parallel Less Wrong sites for the top five languages, relying entirely on Google Translate to start with, perhaps providing only the Sequences at first, and improving the translations gradually through wiki editing?
It would definitely take a lot of time and effort. To quote Rational Wiki:
Lets not forget that the sequences are set up specifically to appeal to a western audience with presumably western ideals. Major alterations would probably need to be made to compensate for the dissonance between cultures. The typical mind fallacy strikes among people with fairly similar upbringing. How much more destructive would it be in the transfer of ideas between a person whose heritage diverged from that of another man 3,000 years ago?
I think you overestimate the diiferences between humans. Here are the human universals. Some of which we need to get rid of, chiefly superstition.
yes, but bias twists the way different people interpret a message. A Buddhist would be unlikely to counter and argument against religion the way a Christian would. Less Wrong is designed to free people of bias in its Western form. The sequences counter memes that are widespread in America but might not be so in Egypt. Im not saying that the ideas cant be spread, i just think you might have to do more than just translating the language if you're going to appeal to an entirely different audience with different ways of thinking.