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Konkvistador comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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Suppose a society was consistently getting richer for a long time because of better technology. Would positional signalling of your status via your opinions and beliefs instead of say with material goods (purple cloak, rare feathers, enough food to grow fat) be more or less valuable? What would memetic evolution look like in such an environment? How would this effect the fitness of memes that are basically true beliefs that pay rent (in material gain or happiness), but happen to make you look bad?
We are living in dreamtime.
And I'd honestly rather see heretics burned at a stake or whatever than allow some well-meaning subversives to crash that dreamtime. I'm not waking up, my friends & family are not waking up, anyone whom I sympathize with is not waking up - the most I'd be okay with is an AI or augmented human dedicated to observing the "waking" reality!
You want to know why, don't you? You consider that a hysterical overreaction? Well, know this (but you already do, of course): there are essentially two types of brains - some rather unusual and aberrant ones are nourished by absorbing truth, but to most it's pure, unspeakable torture that shouldn't be acknowledged, yet alone rationally contemptated. Even if the stakes are enormous. Sure, we have hypocrisy as our saving grace, and we might get an AI to do the contemptating for us eventually. but generally there's a vast divide between people like you who want the Truth, and most folks. And I'm very, very unsure that I shouldn't just support the majority here.
This is a most excellent point, that I need to consider more. Honestly I have no desire to force people to "Truth", but I do want the liberty to seek it and act on it. If this means my segregation or secession from the vast majority of humanity and posthumanity, since they can't be protected in any other way, so be it.
It just occurred to me that this is basically the state of humanity in Brave New World.